We found our way to the hostel in Gamla Stan (which means Old Town) and checked in. We learned that the hostel provided free pasta, coffee, and tea to everyone staying there. All you need to buy is your own sauce and meat to make a good hearty dinner! While we were checking in, a girl sitting at the computers near the front desk overheard our accents and asked where we from. Turns out there were four girls from St. Ben’s visiting Stockholm for the weekend. They were on an exchange program in England and knew my friend, neighbor and teammate Nate Louwagie! Small world! We rented a four person private room with our own bathroom and kitchenette. Our room was on the first floor and was inside a side door to the building. We needed a code to get in the door, but the first code they gave us didn’t work. Isaac had to go back upstairs and figure out what was up. Apparently they had recently changed the code, so we got the new code and settled in.
We then went out into town to buy some food and supplies for the weekend. The city is absolutely beautiful at night. There seemed to be an H & M on every single street corner! After we had bought our supplies, we decided to get some food, so we found a kebab shop. It was probably the best kebab I’ve had since I’ve been here. Kebab here in Europe is a little different than the kebab in the states. It’s like gyro meat shaved off of those big pieces of rotating meat with cucumber sauce instead of steak or chicken skewered with vegetables.
After we got back the hostel, we decided to play some games up in the shared kitchen. We met some German guys named Hauke and Phillip and had an interesting conversation with them. They asked if we wanted to go out to the pubs with them tonight. The one thing that sticks out in my mind is when we started talking about the girls in Sweden. Hauke simply said, “These Swedish girls, they are just so beautiful!” So we went to go out to the pubs but it being a Thursday night, nothing was really open that late, so we left the Germans and decided to go back to the hostel.
Friday morning, we decided to go check out the Royal Palace. It was only about four blocks away from our hostel. They do a changing of the guard there which is pretty cool. These baby-faced Swedish teenagers come out and march around for about five minutes with flags and guns. I hear it’s much more impressive in the spring when they start to involve horses and such so I guess I’ll have to head back then and check it out.
After that, we decided to head to the Armory. This was probably one of my favorite things on the trip. They had all sorts of shields, swords, daggers, weapons, coats of armor, muskets, pistols, axes, rifles, etc. in this place. It was very impressive. The US being such a young country, we don’t have those types of older weapons and it was absolutely fascinating to take a look at them.
After the Armory, we headed over to Tommy Borglund’s office building. Tommy is my Grandma JoJo’s cousin Sture’s son. I had emailed him earlier in the week letting him know I was visiting Stockholm with three buddies and he invited us to come check out the city from his building’s 9th floor terrace. Now, I know 9th floor doesn’t sound very impressive, but there honestly aren’t that many tall buildings in the city of Stockholm. I don’t think I saw a building over 15 stories in the whole city. Tommy works for a company called Hallverson & Halverson and does work with business to business consulting . . . or something like that. I’m still not exactly sure. We sat down and had a nice fika with him and he marked our map with a bunch of cool places to go check out in the city.
When we were walking back to our hostel for dinner, we decided to check out all the touristy shops in old town. I personally don’t like shops like that. Everything is overpriced and nothing is authentic. I didn’t buy anything this time around thinking that I’ll be back later in the spring, and honestly, anything I buy in Sweden that is yellow and blue and has the Swedish flag or the word “Sverige” on it I won’t wear until I’m back in the states. As we were walking back through the snowy cobblestone streets of Gamla Stan, we noticed a car having a little trouble driving up the steep alleyways. We decided to help out, so we ran up and pushed the car up the hill until they could get some traction. Anything to make the US look a little better! That night, we cooked up some pasta with meat sauce. Naturally, I had to act as human garbage disposal and eat all the leftovers, putting away probably twice as many noodles as my other travelling companions. After dinner, we played some games in the kitchen with our hostel mates. There were people from Germany, Spain, England, the US, and more. Hostels are really a great place to meet people. Our pal Dennis probably knew every single person staying in the hostel that weekend. After we were done with the games, we four guys went with the four St. Ben’s girls to a heavy metal bar a few blocks away called Medusa. It was kind of a novelty for all of us as none of us were really into heavy metal music. A couple of the girls were jokingly headbanging on the dance floor when a guy tried to walk through the middle of them. Unfortunately, one of the ladies was not paying very much attention, and banged her head right as he was passing through. What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion: her head came down on this guy’s glass, and it completely shattered. At first we thought the glass was just knocked out of his hand and broke, but her tooth had come down right on the lip of the glass and completely shattered it in this dude’s hand. The 3 other gals swooped her off to the bathroom to make sure she was ok. Amazingly, they bumped into a dentist in the bathroom. That’s right. A female dentist just happened to be in the heavy metal bar right as this girl shattered a glass with her tooth. This girl got all checked out and was completely fine. She had a little cut in her mouth and her tooth was pushed back a little bit, but it was not chipped at all. This event has now earned her the nickname “Sabertooth”.
Saturday morning was extremely windy and cold but we decided to make the trek to the Wasa (Vasa) Museum. This place is dedicated to the ship christened the Wasa that sank soon after its maiden launch. The building holds the entirety of the ship. Right now, the ship looks a pretty boring dark brown, but it originally was extremely vibrant, being ornately painted with over 20 colors. I took a lot of pictures of this place and thought it was pretty impressive they were able to bring this huge ship up from the depths and put it in this museum.
For lunch, we decided to go to one of the restaurants that Tommy and recommended to us. It was called Grodon which means frog in Swedish. I decided to split some beef Carpaccio with Isaac for a starter. Dennis started off with some pumpkin soup. For an entrée, I had some thinly sliced smoked salmon with boiled potatoes in cream sauce. Isaac had some beef liver with onions. Clay had a club sandwich (with all the vegetables taken off, of course) with fries, and Dennis ate some thinly sliced steak with onions and fries. All the food was pretty good, but it was a little on the pricey food. However, it was nice to find a place that serves some traditional Swedish food. It’s kind of hard to come by.
That night, we had planned on meeting up with the St. Ben’s girls and going ice skating at the rink in the middle of the park near our hostel. It was a beautiful evening and big, fat, fluffy snowflakes were falling. However, our idyllic evening was somewhat spoiled when we found that he skate rental shop was closed. Instead of skating, we just goofed around on the rink and around the park then went back to the hostel and cooked some more pasta for dinner. The gals had to get up early in the morning to catch their flight back to London, so we bid them goodnight and went out for a night on the town. We slept in late the next morning, but still managed to clean up and check out of our room in time. We had a very lazy morning and spent a lot of time on the hostel computers, skyping and facebooking friends. We then put our bags in the luggage room and went to meet Johanna for a fika. Johanna is the friend of a friend, Jessica, who lived in the same hallway as me at the U of M this fall semester. We went to one of her favorite cafes that her father would always bring her to when she was younger called Saturnis. They served gigantic cups of coffee and cinnamon rolls the size of your head. We had a great chat with her. We talked about her experience being an exchange student in the US in high school and our experiences so far being exchange students in Sweden. Hopefully I’ll be able to see her again before I leave Sweden.
The evening was also quite lazy. All we pretty much did was watch the Olympics and cook up all the food that we had leftover in the fridge at the hostel. We fried up some bacon, sliced turkey, and sliced potatoes to make some “hash”. Unfortunately, the only skillet available for us to use was a piece of junk and started to burn the ‘taters almost immediately so we had to abort and eat some undercooked spuds. But hey, it was better than nothing.After “dinner” we hoofed it over to the central bus station to catch our overnight bus back to the Uni. The bus station was extremely crowded and there was really no form of line in front of the door our bus was arriving at. People were cutting, splitting off, forming new lines, etc. Disregarding orderly and fair lines is one of my absolute pet peeves so I was getting a little hacked off. It also seemed like there were WAY too many people to fit onto one bus. I did not want to end up having to sit next to some rando again or get bumped onto another bus. So we genius travelers devised plan: Dennis and I would take all the bags to put under the bus while Clay and Isaac saved seats for us on the bus. It worked like a charm and we all sat next to each other for the bus ride to Jonköping.
We arrived that at about 3:30 AM, and lucky us, the bus station didn’t open until 6AM or so. I was a little flabbergasted that a bus company could drop off two dozen people off in the middle of the night in subzero temperatures without any form of shelter. We wandered around for a little bit trying to find some place to keep warm. We walked into a parking garage and tried to figure out what to do. We decided that if worse came to worst, we would break down some palettes and start a fire in this parking garage. Luckily, a cabby came by and told us there was a 24 hr McDonald’s nearby and that he would take the four of us there for only 100 SEK. We took him up on the offer and took shelter in the loving arms of the Golden Arches. I ate 18 chicken nuggets with cheddar cheese, apple curry, and mango salsa dipping sauces. Quite a change from the simple BBQ and sweet & sour sauce I’m used to. We slept on the plastic tables for a while and then our favorite cabby came back to take us to the bus station. We grabbed our bus back to the University and got home at about 9:00AM on Monday morning. When I made it back to my apartment, I promptly passed out until 4:00 PM. What a weekend.