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Published: August 27th 2007
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I LOVE STOCKHOLM!!!
Yep, it´s awesome! I ended up staying here for almost a week because it´s so great! My second day here, I moved hostels and then met up with some people from the boat hostel and walked around the island I´m now staying on. I was on a mission in the afternoon to do actual touristy stuff but I ended up watching a German film crew in the park and watching some people dive into the water and wave their arms around to get rescued for a lifeboat demonstration!
Next day I went to Uppsala, about a 45 min train ride away to meet up with band for one night of tour! I watched their concert in the afternoon and then Chris the conductor had an interesting encounter with a transvestite who wanted to get on the coach with us and do a concert with the band that evening. Or something along those lines. We went out for an all-you-can eat Chinese and then I went out with some people...the ones who were off curfew! Sweden is indeed very expensive and I noticed it even more that night :S but it was great anyway! The club we went to
cost almost 8 pounds to get in!!! So we were kind of obliged to stay til it closed having spent that much! Rachel and I got chatted up by some very strange Swedish guys. I take no responsibility for the events that followed, I blame the crazy drunk people I was with. Sitting out in the corridor of the hotel eating cookies was just the beginning of a whole adventure...due to her extreme laziness, Rachel insisted on taking the stairs that were slightly closer to our end of the corridor. Looking back, I guess the big red sign on the door might have meant "No Entry". The doors didn´t open from the inside. On any of the floors. We must have ended up underground because we went down a lot more stairs than we came up! Eventually we managed to find a door that actually opened and ended up walking round the block at 4am looking for the hotel entrance! And no, I was NOT going to pay for a HOTEL room, I slept on the floor in someone´s room!
Next morning I decided to spend the morning in Uppsala while they all went to Stockholm. Well, not all, exactly.
Beer and cookies were apparently too much for Paul and the coach left without him, so we did a little early morning sightseeing at the pink castle and got the train to Stockholm, where we randomly met everyone completely by accident on the way to my hostel! They had a gig in front of the castle so I watched that and then we went on a hot-dog-searching rampage through the city and got caught in the rain!
Today, I finally went to a MUSEUM! Or, to be more precise, TWO museums! I ventured onto the island that is only metres away from my hostel across the water, but takes about half an hour to walk to! There is an open-air museum there, with buildings from all over Sweden. It was very interesting- there are people there dressed up in traditional clothes doing stuff like glass blowing and making furniture! The guy in the little furniture factory said it was from southern Sweden, and was very similar to how Ikea started. I came across a man making fishing nets too, and he said each one takes him 3 months to make, although it should take "only" 2 weeks! It was very
interesting, because it rained a bit so they werent very busy, so all the people in the old shops were telling me about them. Afterwards, I went to the Vasa museum which is about a boat! The Vasa was a boat that the king had built in the 1600s and it capsized on it´s maiden voyage. A few people recommended it to me, and it was actually really interesting. I´m very proud, I think that makes a grand total of 3 museums on the whole trip now!
I already mentioned that Sweden is expensive, and the other stereotype that is true is that it´s full of tall, blonde, tanned, beautiful people! Totally true! And the others are all tourists!
Tomorrow, I will spend the day here again and hopefully get a night train to Umea, which is further north. I won´t have time to go to Finland, having spent more time than planned here and in Austria, so I´m going up to the north of Sweden and down through Norway.
Bye for now! (I would say bye in Swedish but everyone here speaks better English than me, as well as being tall, blonde and beautiful, so I haven´t picked up
any Swedish at all except thank you, which is tak but i don´t even know if that´s spelt right...)
Oh, and if you´re wondering about the title, I´ve eaten a lot of ice cream here!
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