My First Adventure to a Different Country

Hi!

So if you've read my last post you know that I was on my way to Stockholm, Sweden when I last updated this. I went with my aunts Amy and Beth, and I had a blast on the trip. It started out a little rocky, however.

We took the train there, which in itself was awesome. I've never been on a high speed train before, and it was a really cool first experience. I've been interested in the implementation of high speed rail systems in America for a while now, so its really cool for me to be able to come over here and see how they work, how full the trains are, how many people take them, and all that jazz. We also were in first class on the way there, which was very, very nice. Free internet and coffee, which I took advantage of!

But it wasn't all wonder and amazement. It also involved a lot of sitting. Not that I would have cared, I knew the trip was going to be 5 hours long and was ready to deal with that. What I wasn't expecting, however, was getting stuck at a station somewhere in Sweden for 3 hours because some sort of cable had fallen on the train or on the tracks or something like that. What was supposed to a 5 hour trip turned into an 8 hour trip, and we ended up not getting to Stockholm until 2:30 in the morning.

It wasn't too bad though. Like I said we were in first class with a lot of room to spread out, so it was a comfortable ride. When we got to Stockholm we took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, and went to sleep.

We stayed at the Queens Hotel, which was a very interesting place. By looking at the front entrance you would think the place is tiny

It was actually really big though, having like 60-70 rooms. I know that may not seem like many, but would you think a place having this as the front entrance would have that many rooms? I sure didn't. My favorite thing about the hotel was the elevator! Well that and the free breakfast.

I've never actually seen an elevator like this. It was one where you had to manually open and close both doors for the elevator to work, it was awesome. The room itself was decent too. It had features including huge windows that we could actually open and the smallest shower I've ever seen/used.

It was cool though, good location, comfortable beds, and free internet. Pretty solid.

The first day we were there we did a hop on/hop off bus tour, which was really cool. I had never done one of those either, but it was a great way to see the main sights of the city and learn some cool stuff about the city.

Earlier in the day though we had walked around the city a little bit to go buy passes to the city and our tickets back to Copenhagen. It was during this when we saw this protest

I'm not sure what this was about, but I think it had something to do with getting the United States out of Iraq. Most of the protesters appeared to be middle eastern, and the signs they were holding were written in what I can only guess was some kind of arabic language. It was really interesting to see, and if it was in fact a protest against the war in Iraq, then its the first time I've seen any of the hostility I was told existed towards the United States. Although it was a peaceful protest in the middle of the city, I still felt slightly on edge, and kept my distance in case one of the protesters heard us talking and decided to become hostel. I don't think this actually would have happened, and I was probably just being paranoid, but it was a thought that crossed my mind.

Okay, back to the main part of the day, the hop on/hop off tour

Like I said, this was really cool and we saw a lot of cool stuff.

A lot of cool buildings in Stockholm, reminds me of Copenhagen in that way

There is a restaurant up there, would have been really cool to go to

The ice crushing part of the ship. The harbors free over in spots, so these big ships that actually go places in the winter have these huge contraptions on the front to plow through the ice

This is inside the casino in Stockholm. It was kind of small, but still cool. It was really nice, also. One cool thing about this casino is that it's run by the government, so any winnings the casino gets goes to the government.

The tallest building in Stockholm. I can't remember what its called, but its a radio and television tower (for the most part). There is also a restaurant at the top. Had we been there for more than a couple of days I would have been willing to drop the money to eat there, because I think it would have been awesome and supplied some amazing sights of the city

 

 

Some building with an awesome roof. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of it closer up

Those are some of the highlights of what we saw on the tour. Another cool thing about Stockholm is that right outside the city there are huge open fields used for running, hiking, and the such. It amazed me that this big city had seemingly relatively untouched natural beauty right outside the city limits. And when I say right outside I'm not kidding, it was like, two minutes driving to get from this:

back into the center of the city. It was pretty remarkable.

That night we went to the Ice Bar, which was also very, very cool. This bar was made completely of ice (as the name implies). The actual bar, the glasses, the walls. All of it was ice, it was very cool.

Me and the aunties!

The only colorful bit of ice in the place, it was very cool. Its actually the background on my computer right now

 

The full outfit

 

The Ice Bar was one of, if not my favorite part of the trip. It was so cool and unlike anything I've seen before. After this we went back to the hotel, hung out for a while, and then went to bed to rest up for the next day.

Our second day in Stockholm consisted of more concentrated sight-seeing. At the start of the day we went to the Royal Palace to watch the Changing of the Guards.

People waiting for the event to start

 

This was cool, the guard on the left was replacing the guard on the right. The one on the right took off his walkie talkie, gave it to the new guard, then fell into line where the new guard had been and walked away with all the other guards.

 

After the Changing of the Guard we took the tram to Skansen. Skansen is the first open air museum in Sweden, and I thought it was the first in Europe, but Wiki didn't state that so I'm not sure. Its a tribute to how life used to lived in Sweden, and consists of about 150 houses which are hundreds of years old. It was really cool to get a sense of how life was lived in olden times. We didn't have much time here, so we only got to explore about a third of the museum, but it was still very cool none-the-less.

A model of Skansen

The glass making building

Complete with glass blowing demonstrations. For some reason none of my pictures turned out in this part of the building. I wonder if it had something to do with the intense heat from the ovens? I don't know enough about how cameras work to know for sure...so if you have any thoughts on the issue, let me know!

Chairs that are still made in Skansen today

The resident furniture maker

The Shoemakers House. Apparently the family of the original owners of the house still come to Skansen and make shoes

The Shoemakers work bench

This guy isn't actually a shoemaker, but he's training to become one. He said that he is going to take over for the family of shoemakers who have worked in the house since it was built.

A view of the history museum (I can't remember the actual name). It's a very impressive building. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go inside and learn about the history of Sweden. I wasn't too torn up about it though because I've already been to the history museum in Copenhagen and I didn't really have much interest in learning about the general history of Sweden. Plus, the museum we went to instead was sweet (I'll talk about that soon)

A Rune Stone. There a bunch of these throughout Skansen

A little playground

Skansen is supposedly a very popular area in Stockholm. One of my friends told me that every Tuesday during the summer people get together in Skansen and sing together, it sounds very cool!

After Skansen we went to the Vasa Museum.

The Vasa

The Vasa was a warship built for the Swedish military in the 1600s. At the time of its completion it was the most powerful ship in the world. However, it had some very large faults in the design. It sank...only 1300 meters (20 minutes) into its Maiden Voyage. It didn't even make it out of the harbor. The tour guide gave us a couple of potential reasons for this, the main one being that the ship was probably too narrow at the bottom (a ship identical to the Vasa functioned for 20 years for the Swedish Navy before it was sank in battle, the big difference was the the good ship was 1 meter wider at the bottom). This design flaw probably wasn't noticed, as back then they didn't use any kind of diagrams or anything when building their ships. Much, much different from how we operate today.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a good picture of the whole ship because it was so dark in the museum. Here are some of the highlights though:

This as good as a view of what the back of the ship originally looked like as I could get. There were A LOT of carved figures on the ship. I want to say 500 of them, or something like that. The figures actually cost more to make than the rest of the ship. Each one was individually colored, and it must have been beautiful when it was new. One of the most amazing things about the full size figurines is that when the ship sank, all of them fell off. Also, there was no picture of the Vasa for the restorers to look at, so to reattach the figures to the actual ship they analyzed the screw holes in the figures and the ship to see where each one went. Must have been a very long and difficult task.

Of the 200-some people on the maiden voyage, they think only 25 died. This is impressive because, even though the ship was close to shore when it sank, people back then typically didn't know how to swim (it was considered bad luck if the sailors knew how to swim). In the museum they have the remains of these 25 people, as well as an analysis of who they were based on the bone structure and what other objects were found around the bones when they were found. It was really cool to see the kind of indepth work they did on figuring out all aspects of the Vasa's demise.

 

View from the top floor of the museum

So that pretty much concluded the touristy part of the day. After the Vasa we went back to the hotel. At that point I went off on my own to explore the city a little more. My main reason for going was to find the Hard Rock Cafe and get a shot glass for my aunt Susie's collection (I succeeded in that regard). But I also wanted to wander around and get a feel for the city and see stuff they didn't show us on the hop on/hop off tour. The coolest thing I saw was this tower:

Its made of thousands (millions?) of pieces of glass. At night it was illuminated from the inside, and was quite a sight to see. Here are some of the other cool things I saw that night:

Artwork everywhere...this was the underside of a bridge

The bridge here is what the above picture was taken under

This was really, really cool. The bright light in the middle is a tunnel that goes under the street you can see at the top of the picture. Not really sure whats in it because I didn't go down it, but it was still really interesting to see

Pay a dollar and you can use this watercloset! Haha this was in the middle of the city...kinda random. Convenient though

 

Stockholm was electric that night. There were a lot of people out, which surprised me. The first night we were there it seemed like there weren't many people out, but that definitely wasn't the case the second night. I've been told since then that Copenhagen is kind of considered the crazy party city of Scandinavia, so I guess my view on a typical European city (if there is such a thing, I doubt there is) might have been skewed from that fact.

The last thing I did that night was try out some local Swedish cuisine, which turned out to be Swedish fast food. Haha it was delicious though, better than McDonald's in my opinion (or at least the European version of McDonalds). It was called Max

Taking this picture was probably the most "touristy" thing I did in Stockholm...I got some weird looks from passerby's

That's about $1.75 for a refill...after the value meal I got cost $10.

That pretty much concluded the trip. After Max I went back to the hotel and spent the rest of the night there. We (Amy, Beth and I) Skyped my parents that night which was cool. It was Beth's first time using Skype so she was especially excited about it We went back on the train the next day (without any three hour delays this time) and made it back to Copenhagen safe and sound. I had a hell of a week after though. Too much stress and sleep deprivation, but its done for now so its all good. My next planned trip is to Amsterdam in two weeks, which I can't wait for. I'm looking forward to having some crazy adventures there!

Questions? Comments? Want to see the rest of my pictures?

Email me :)

Peace

Matt