It’s not every day you see a blond, blue-eyed Swede, dressed up as an Easter witch (’Påskkärring’), sitting on NTU campus teaching visitors to draw Easter cards. Most likely it would not have happened if it weren’t for Sweden Day!

The main purpose of Sweden Day is to strengthen the exchange between Sweden and Singapore – on all levels. To really achieve this goal, it isn’t enough to just give out materials from Swedish universities, or verbally explain what it’s like to live in Sweden. It takes more than that to attract the busy Singaporean students! Offering a bit of food and sweets never seems to hurt, especially when it’s meatballs, potatoes, lingonberry jam and brown sauce from the Swedish halaal restaurant in Kampong Glam! We also offer cookies, hard bread (‘knäckebröd’) and candy from Sweden.

This year we took it one step further and wanted to really activate our visitors. The event took place the Monday before the Easter holiday and so it seemed natural to have an Easter theme, with activities like the card drawing. And who could have guessed at the incredible reserve of talent hiding amidst these engineering and business students? It turned into an incredible collection of beautiful and unusual Easter cards, some with a thought-provoking cultural mix of styles! Each artist got a bag of Swedish candy as a thank you.

There were also other activities. At the egg painting table the most artistic or creative eggs won prizes from IKEA. There were some amazing creations there as well!

We also had our popular Lucky Draw with prizes from our sponsors. To participate you had to answer some questions about how Swedes celebrate Easter.

The event venue was decorated with Easter twigs (‘Påskris’) with colorful feathers, little chickens and Easter eggs. Together we created a very cozy atmosphere with visitors sitting down and drawing cards or painting eggs with Swedish music in the background, or talking to the volunteers in blue shirts. Everyone who took part in making this event possible should be very proud of the results! And we hope that all our visitors were happy with the experience. Let’s see what next semester will bring!