Stockholm!

This weekend, Amanda and I went to Stockholm. It was a busy weekend (as you can imagine, trying to see ANY big city in 2 days is challenging!), but I think we got a pretty good cross section of the culture.

First sights of Stockholm!

We left school around 2pm and made it to the train station for 4pm. We bought our tickets and had a massive supper at the train station American-style pizza place, and then sat for about 4 hours on a high speed train (and I’m talkin’ HIGH SPEED here.: at times we were going over 200kph! It was all great until we went through tunnels and our ears popped like mad. It was such a crazy pain – so, so, so much worse than when it happens on a plane. I wonder if Swedish ears are immune to it…no one else seemed to be bothered at all. Anyway, we finally got to Stockholm centralstation, and found the right exit. From there to our hostel was quite an adventure. 

What we THOUGHT was our hostel...(it DID look cozy!)

It was a fair walk as it was, and on top of it being dark, us being tired, and having NO idea about how the city works and my horrible sense of direction…it isn’t surprising that we got pretty lost.  We were looking for our hostel, which was located on a boat (I know, right? Swedes are awesome), and may or may not have knocked on the wrong door. On the wrong boat.  More than once.
 

Our ACTUAL hostel

St. Patty’s day in Stockholm was so great!! Amanda and I woke up around 8:00 and got breakfast on the boat and were out the door by around 9. We found our way to The Old Town (on an island) and purchased our hop on, hop off tickets for the day. We went to 2 different museums: the Vasa museum and the Skansen.

View from our hostel room :)

T

Vasa Museum

The vasa is a super interesting/hilarious/sad story about a boat that went on a voyage and sank just 1.5 km from shore, after just 20 minutes. (With a history like that, thank the good lord our hostel was docked!) The boat was brought up to the surface 333 years later and restored in a museum.  It was really neat, but they had legit skeletons of some of the drowned passengers on display, which was a bit scary. 

Stockholm Streets

Sightseeing

The second museum we went to was the Skansa, which is an entirely outdoor museum, where they bring in different parts of Sweden throughout the ages. They literally brought in houses, buildings, structures, etc that are from different eras and areas from Sweden and made an entire little village within the city.

There was even a section of Nordic animals, which was pretty cool, except for the wolverine, which scared the poop out of me (thankfully, not literally…). Seriously, those things are scary shit. They’ve got fangs and claws and a stubby little tail….ugh, just typing about it is making me queasy. A horrible mixed bag of disgusted and scared. But we DID see some pretty cool things, like a lynx, some bison, some wolves, and a bear! And pigs, lots of pigs! 

Beautiful wolves at the Skansen 'Nordic Animal' section

 After that, we got a traditional Swedish meal – grilled/fried fish (which I’m pretty sure was caught fresh that day, it was SO GOOD). There was an open grill, and it was just so delicious! MMMMMmmm. As we were eating, we met our youngest Swede to date – a young girl, probably about 2 or 3 years old!  She was talking to us in her adorable little voice, but all I could make out was “Vad heter du?” which means “what’s your name?” I answered with “Jag heter Becky” and also tried to muff my way through what I’m pretty-sure-but-not-completely-sure means I don’t understand, and then added in that I’m Engleska, and “Kanada” …not that a 3 year old would know what Canada is…but HELL, if she can speak Swedish, she must be smart…Hahahaha but seriously, she made me feel dumb.

Fresh fish sandwish at the Skansen!

I would have walked away if she wasn’t so darn cute.  I was going to write “I would have stolen her away if her parents weren’t there…but then I just realized that they actually WEREN’T there…yeah. No idea who she was there with, but she talked to us for a good 5 or 10 minutes and there was no one around.  The culture is so different here. I noticed it first when I was at the waterpark. Kids just went down the slide when they wanted to go down. No lifeguard at the top or bottom of the slide with walkie-talkies or red and green signal lights. In fact, the only lifeguards on duty were all in one central area with so many blind spots that Ray Charles would have had a better chance of saving a drowning kid.  And now there’s people leaving little 3 year-olds alone in an outdoor museum, talking to foreigners.  Not that I’m complaining. What a cutie!

SPEAKING of cuties, our day only got better as it got later. As disappointing as it was that my Swedish friend from Stockholm (Nina) ended up with the flu that weekend, Amanda and I still headed out to the Irish bar we had planned to meet her at. In line, we met a really nice Norwegian girl, who actually lives north of the Arctic Circle! As we got inside, we met a cool couple of Irish guys, some other tourists, and ordered some green beer (my first, ever!). As we were enjoying them, a girl leaned across the table, said “what’s that you’re drinking?”, and before Amanda even got a chance to answer, reached across the table and took a sip. Meet Miranda.  A wonderfully smiling Swede, she was there with her friends, who were equally as charming. We spent the rest of the night with them, and they were all stunningly beautiful.*no pictures coming soon, I was too shy to ask a stranger to take a picture with them, and by the time the beer made me not-so-shy, I had completely forgotten about a camera. Use your imagination on this one ;) *

In the spirit of St. Patty’s day, I also learned a few new phrases:
to have the hiccups – ha hicka
very, very much – mycket

*our amazing Swedish friends also taught us some other phrases, but I’m not putting them up here because 1) my mom reads this, and 2) I honestly can’t remember the entire thing in Swedish anymore…darn green beer…

Sunday morning was inevitably a bit rough, but we wanted to get the most out of our Stockholm experience, so we made it another fairly early morning and headed out again to take some pictures in the Old Town. Then we went to the Royal Palace’s treasury, a couple churches, and did some shopping, before catching our train home in the late afternoon. 

Holla! Swedish meatballs at a pub in Stockholm!
(SO much better than we think they are in Canada...)

An exhausting trip, but worth every penny of cash and energy. 

Seriously, such a pretty city! This looks like a postcard!