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Published: February 20th 2012
Last night, we arrived at Skavsta airport in Sweden around 11pm and checked into the airport hotel. But it certainly didn’t go as smoothly as that! It all started about a week ago, when Mike realized that he actually had an evening class on Thursday: the class was scheduled to end about two and a half hours before our flight was scheduled to leave. Luckily, the class ended a bit early… but that is where the luck ended. The tube was totally slammed, and the Gatwick “Express” train was extremely slow, because an earlier train had broken down.
Elysia had finished work a couple hours early, so she made it to Gatwick airport with heaps of time to spare. She got all checked in with Ryan Air and then got to stress while waiting for Mike. It actually got to the point where we thought Mike wasn’t going to make the plane, and that Elysia was going to have to enjoy the weekend in Stockholm herself!
When the Gatwick Express finally did arrive, Mike sprinted through the airport and made it to the gate just before it was scheduled to close. Elysia had talked to the gate agent and
they were ready to start calling out Mike’s name so that it would help him get through the airport faster (they were hoping to get their jollies by airing an embarrassing message about Mike). Of course, the gate closing time printed on the ticket turned out to be a total lie, and the gate didn’t close for another twenty minutes, so it was a bit of a hurry up and wait situation!
Now that we are getting into the routine of taking weekend trips, we are starting to take for granted all of the preparation and planning that goes into travel. For instance, when we arrived in Sweden, we realized that our UK plug-in adaptors wouldn’t work (obviously, this is Europe!). Good thing we brought two of them, so we could charge our phones and cameras… We also forgot to bring our Europe book, so when we landed in Sweden we didn’t actually know what we should see! (Thank you Google!) Finally, although we had booked hotels instead of hostels, we didn’t remember that the hotels had common washroom facilities, and we had forgotten our shower sandals and towel!
We stayed our first night in a hotel near
the airport, so this morning we caught the hour and a half bus ride through the snowy countryside into Stockholm. Based on the view from the bus, we would say that Sweden is a very beautiful country – especially in the winter. Field after field of untouched snow was lit up vibrantly with the gorgeous sunshine.
When we arrived in Stockholm, we decided, as usual, to take a bit of a walking tour of the city while finding our hotel. As it turns out, the hotel was much, much further from the bus station than we had expected. It took us about an hour or so to walk there.
On our walk, we noticed immediately that they don’t use salt on the sidewalk in Sweden. Instead they use dirt, and lots of it! We were extremely dirty by the end of the weekend. Also, the downspouts from the roofs drain directly onto the sidewalk, so you do have to watch where you are walking or risk end up taking a quick trip to the ground. The nice thing about the no salt policy is that the snow stays nice – it gets dirty, but doesn’t turn into disgusting
slush like it does elsewhere (eh hem Toronto).
After finding and checking into our very weird hotel, we walked further north to a park and frozen lake where all the locals were skating, walking and cross-country skiing across the ice. There was actually a track setup there, and there were even folks out running laps. We saw a few adventurous individuals riding their bikes too! In general, we observed that the Swedes are very active people, all out walking or skiing around.
I mentioned our weird hotel… it was, well, weird. It’s built in a large park that features a big hill in the middle – prime sledding country if you ask me. But, instead of using the real estate for sledding, somebody decided to build a large single level sprawling hotel. The building is long and slender, with the lobby in the middle and two wings of rooms running away from each other starting at the lobby. The hotel parallels and is built into the hillside, so the rooms on one side have a view of the city. The rooms on the other side (the hill side) have, well, no view at all. Actually, they don’t even
Talk About Luxury
Look at the amazing view!have a window! In Stockholm, it appears that you pay by the window: Rooms without any are the cheapest. Which, of course, means we jumped on the deal like a fat kid on a Smartie. And, just in case you get any ideas, ‘cheaper’ does not mean cheap. The room still cost £40 per night (keep in mind that you get to share the bathroom with about 100 of your closest strangers)!
Sorry for the digression. Back to the day in Stockholm. After the park, we walked to Gamla Stan (the Old Town), which was way back at the bus station. Freed from our backpacks, though, we turned on the speed and got there a bit quicker. We have to say that Stockholm is an absolutely stunning city. The approach to Gamla Stan, however, is absolutely breathtaking. Since Stockholm is built on a series of islands, everywhere you go you are walking over a bridge. And in the winter, the sea or river below is always at least partly frozen, and usually there are huge groups of ducks and swans making their way through the ice or sleeping on a mini ice berg.
The Old Town is the
home of the Swedish Parliament, the Royal Palace and a huge array of restaurants, coffee shops, boutique stores and souvenir shops (like old town Quebec City, but much bigger) . We wandered through the winding alleys and narrow cobblestone streets getting lost as often as possible. The Old Town is on a small island, so it you can never really get lost for long.
By this time, the sun was starting to set – after all, it was about quarter-past-four. We went back to the picturesque set of bridges at the north side of the Old Town and watched the sunset. It was vibrant and amazing shades of pink.
After enjoying the sunset, we walked back to the ‘mainland,’ past a cute outdoor skating rink and began looking for a famous market (Ostermalms Saluhall) that we had heard about. Just as we pulled out our map, a nice gentlemen asked us (in English) where we were looking to go, and then offered to walk us there! It took about 10 minutes to find the market (and since we were being led and chatting along the way, we probably couldn’t find our way back there again too easily), and
it was worth the trip. Lots of unique little shops selling everything from fresh baking to fresh meat to fresh cheese. There were some really posh little restaurant stalls too (way, WAY out of our league!), where everyone sat at the bar drinking wine and eating, and a lot of very nice fish shops.
After visiting the market, we headed for dinner (that was more in our league – a couple of microwave specials from the local grocery). Later we grabbed a hot chocolate (hot water + a packet of cocoa powder) from McDonald’s and used our internet (we didn’t want to pay in the hostel) to figure out what we’d do the next day.
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