Blogs from Sweden, Europe - page 174

We took a bus to Stockholm today and we were led by of course my favorite professor in this entire world. The man is hilarious. My favorite quote today was "You'll read in the news tomorrow, Man dressed as Boat hit by Bus." You don't need to understand the context. I don't know this great man's name sadly but I do know that everything was going wrong for him and our tour today. First of all we got to the Vassa Ship Museum and it was packed and we were late so he gave us a speed tour of the museum which houses a 300 yr old ship that sunk on its maiden voyage after 30 min. It is pretty massive. We then went to watch a video on how it was raised from the depths ... read more

There is no shortage of clean streets, bike lanes, boats, musuems, fashion, history, music, beautiful blond men and women, bridges, delicious sweets, cute cafes or cultural idenity in Stockholm. That's for sure. A few weeks ago I visited Johanna in Sweden for five days. The flight from Munich was quite cheap and the room and board were of course taken care of; good thing - because Stockholm is (relative to the rest of the EU) quite expensive. I had a fabulous time riding bikes with Jojo from a birthday party, to the ship musuem, to lunch, to parks, and home again. The weather was lovely, and when it wasn't - there was always a tea shop close by to sneak into while the summer rain washed the air. If Sweden wasn't dark for half the ... read more

It rained today, a lot, and for the first time I didn't get where I was planning to go... it all went wrong near a wee town with the hilarious name of Angered. Got off the ferry ok, and found the bike signs for my distination (the also hilariously named Trollhattan), no worries, for the first 15km at least, then the road parallel to the multilane motorway disappeared, and the signs seemed to indicate one is meant to bike along the shoulder of the open speed motorway, which is obviously pretty bloody dangerous but also illegal in every coutnry I've been to so far ( and accoridng to the Swedes I spoke to, illegal here too), so I spent the next two hours in the rain biking up bloody great hills and going down agian looking ... read more

Hej from Sweden! Today's entry will be brief as we are off to bed a bit earlier so we can head off on the ferry to Denmark early in the morning. We spent most of the day shopping and searching around for fun little things. We started off in Kungälv to look for my favorite kitchen towels that remind me of Sweden every time I dry my hands after doing the dishwashing...what a wonderful way to end such a chore! We then headed off to Gothenburg for the afternoon. We begam at the train and bus station to secure our reservations for our journey southbound on Sunday. It is such a beautiful building and used by so many people. Next was the ferry terminal to confirm our ferry trip tomorrow, but this also gave us a ... read more

Hej, fran Sweden! Today we took a ferry to the local town of Marstrand, which is a small sailing community on an island not far from where we are staying. There we toured through one of the two old forts that guarded the area over 400 years ago. We had great fun climbing up into the tower and searching through the secret tunnel system under the fort. We saw areas where the prisoners were kept, the blacksmiths "cell", the kitchen, the church and many cannons. Afterwards we walked around the town and Nolan had his first Swedish ice cream..."glass"...there will be a lot of that on this trip! We took the ferry back, then headed to the nearby town of Kungalv, where my grandparents lived. There we had "korv och potatis", hot dog and mashed potatoes, ... read more