Today was the Big Day. My first day ever at the Pride festival. My first day ever at Europride. My first day ever as a volunteer at the Pride parade. All at once!
The day started early for me. Veeeery early… I had nightmares all morning that I would be late to the meeting point, and when it was finally 7:30 am I got out of bed. I arrived to the church where all volunteers were going to meet, in good time… And I got two new friends, yay! The three of us and A got into the group that would take care of and seal off Sergels square.
The weather was perfect before noon. But after we had lunch and finally got our blocking ropes and would start working – it started pouring down rain. I was really happy that we had gotten windproof jackets, otherwise we would be even more soaked than we were. Our area also became bigger than we had counted on, because we were asked to take care of the street leading towards Kungsträdgården as well. We just managed to finish before the parade reached us at 1:30 pm.
The parade was… interesting to watch. Luckily it had almost stopped raining when it started. More than 150 groups participated, I have no idea how many people that was in total. But I’m guessing a couple thousands of participants. Many had incredible costumes, others had almost nothing on… There were several horses in the parade. I was impressed that they were so well-trained to not care about all the noise – cars, people, loud music, and so on. Only once I felt vulnerable – one horse started stepping anxiously in front of me, ended up with its rear end towards me and started walking backwards. I didn’t really have anywhere to go, standing in front of the barriers. I just walked a few meters to the one side and held my breath until they could keep going forwards, away from me…
The parade itself was quite calm. The audience was also quite calm. We just had to keep an eye on some small children who almost got in front of some cars, several times, and a few times we had too much pressure against the barriers. But otherwise everything was allright.
Now I’ve just changed out of my dress (which was soaking wet almost up to my waist) into a pair of dry jeans for the evening. So I’m going to jump on the underground and go to Slussen, where I will join the parade and follow it to Tantolunden where they’ve place Pride Park. There will be a party there tonight! Many bands will play, and best of all: BWO will be there!!!
I will post photos from the parade later.