Charm

Any fair or exhibition has tow faces. The one shown to the public, and the hidden one. Because the fair is made by humans, for humans, the public face is created to look nice and perfect. with colorful carpets, pretty girls, handsome boys and neat spaces. But nothing in the fair is meant to last and all the decoration and beauty are going to disappear in a few days. So, and because our human nature, the hidden part can look anyhow. You don't need it to be perfectly done, only to look perfectly done from the public area.

The hidden part of the fair is made of dirty hands, cardboard, plaster, cables, silicon and tape. Specially tape: masking tape, transparent tape, double sided tape, electric tape and duct tape, the mother of all tapes. After two days of taping, the exhibition area is almost ready, and it looks almost professional. Nobody would think it was made by students that decided to give away a week of work for free. Well, almost for free, we get breakfast, lunch, dinner, bananas and fika.

The word "fika" is enough to stop all the work and join us together. May be I should say join "them" together. As one of the very few non-Swedish speakers in the group my interaction is mainly limited to say "hej", smiling and trying to catch a few words of the conversation. Sometimes someone translates the key points of the announcements for me, but most of the time I'm just wondering what the #$%& is going on, and telling myself "I really need to learn Swedish."