Robyn and Sakura

I had a fantastic weekend and am hating the fact that my weekends seem to go by waaaay too fast these days. I guess that's what happens when you work full time but your roommate and house guests do not. I feel like I am missing out on all the fun during the week but do a good job of making up for it on the weekends.

If you were a teenage girl in the early 90's then you know who Robyn is. But did you know she's Swedish and that she's making a comeback? Even though I definitely rocked out to "Show Me Love" in 7th grade I never knew back then that she was Swedish and I haven't really followed much of her career since. On Friday night Klas and I went to see her show at the Grand Ballroom in Hell's Kitchen. Of course Klas just happens to know all the musicians in her band so we got on the guest list and got in for free. I didn't really know what to expect from the pop star that I had at one time idolized, but I figured that like me, she had probably grown up and changed quite a bit since 1997. And indeed she has. She has a new album out that she has released under her own label. She's way more pop/techno/synth now than in her early days, which is cool and she put on a pretty awesome live performance. We had a fun time during the show and were able to hang out with Klas' friends in the band afterwards while people awkwardly kept coming up to them and asking for their autographs.

Saturday was a fun day too. It was the annual Cherry Blossom Festival (Sakura Matsuri in Japanese) in Prospect Park. It's a huge festival they have in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. We are lucky to live close enough to Prospect Park to walk there and that's exactly what we did. They had Japanese dancers, Japanese food and music, a temporary tattoo booth where I got a sweet cherry blossom tattoo on my hand, and some interesting people dressed up as manga characters. I think I was bugging the heck out of Klas because I kept singing the song I learned in fifth grade called "Sakura", which means cherry blossom in Japanese. Good times.

Such beautiful flowers on ALL the trees. Klas enjoying some Japanese noodles.
yummmm...sushi.

After the festival we headed up to Williamsburg where a friend of a friend was having a backyard BBQ. There were a few Brooklyn indie bands playing as well as hot dogs with all the fixin's and of course a plethora of Swedish folks...'tis the story of my life :)