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Published: April 21st 2009
Stockholm at dusk
this is a view of the bay near our hostel (our hostel is the boat at the far right of the picture).Dates of travel: March 25-28th, 2009
My buddy Vincent and I found roundtrip tickets to Stockholm, Sweden for around 34 euros (or 45 USD). This was a no brainer and we didn't need much time to think about it. When we saw the tickets online about 4 weeks ago, we booked the flight almost immediately. We didn't really know anything about the city at the time of booking. In fact - the title of this blog entry does a good job of summing up our collective knowledge of the entire country prior to this trip.
Wed. March 25th We took off from Milan Malpensa Airport at 2:50pm and the 3-hour flight got us to the Stockholm Arlanda Airport at around 6:00pm. Swedish efficiency, Exhibit A: we hopped onto the Arlanda Express train that brought us from the airport to Central Station in Stockholm in only 20 minutes. This is the fastest transfer from airport to city I have experienced thus far in my travels. I will be extremely impressed if this can be beat. We could have walked from the station, but instead decided to take the Metro because it was -1 Celsius outside. Eventually we made it to our
Rock n' Bowl
cheap pints of Swedish beer and bowling - what a great combination. hostel which was on a boat that was permanently docked. At around 7:30pm we left the boat and headed out to try and find a place to eat dinner. We ended up eating at a bar that had big burgers and cheap pints of Abro (one of Sweden's most famous beers). After dinner we walked around the streets for a bit and came across a bowling alley called 'Rock n' Bowl' that we had passed earlier that was still open. We didn't have anything else to do and it was frigid outside, so we decided to bowl a few games. The alley was tiny and we were the only ones in there, but the music was good and the pints were even cheaper than at dinner. Vincent kicked my butt the first game, but then I came back strong and out-bowled him the 2nd and 3rd games. After bowling we ran into a rowdy group of exchange students from Prague who were trying to find some nightlife activity in Stockholm so we tagged along with them for a while. We ended up meeting an oddball Swedish guy who looked to be about 25 years old and - like the Spartans
in the movie "300"- he proclaimed
"THIS. IS. SWEEEEEEEDEEEENNNNN. And I will show it to you. I will show you the underground life of Stockholm." He then proceeded to backpeddle into the road and nearly got runover by a bus until I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of the way. Needless to say, we didn't stick with that group very long and decided to walk back to the boat hostel and call it a night.
Thursday, March 26th We woke up the next morning at around 9am and headed to the local grocery store and grabbed some breakfast food to take eat back at the hostel. After getting ready and trying to decide for a while what we wanted to do for the day....we decided that we didn't know what we wanted to do. The plane tickets were bought sponteneously, so why not continue the trend? We walked around the Old Town (Gamlastan) for a while and went inside a crazy Nepalese store called 'Zapata' that had all sorts of clothing that is made in Nepal. Vincent and I both bought 5 euro beanies because our head and ears were freezing cold after walking
around outside for a while. We eventually made it out of Gamlastan and walked to a different area of Stockholm, but it took us a while to do that because the streets have such long, complicated names that they might as well not be named. As soon as I put my map back in my pocket - I had to take it out again because I forgot what I was supposed to be looking for. At around 1pm we were trying to find a nice, cheap place to eat lunch but weren't having any luck. At one point, I stopped and Vincent kept walking ahead of me. I saw some double doors that were set back from the road quite a bit that had a lot of commotion going on behind them. We walked in and our mouths immediately started salivating. We had found a hidden gem in the city of Stockholm. It was an indoor market with about 50 different stands and it reminded me a lot of Arthur Avenue in The Bronx, New York. There was every type of food imagineable, and as I type this I have just realized that I never even took a picture of
it! I ended up getting a Bombay wrap that had spicy chicken, curry, mango chutney, and other assorted Indian type foods in it and a fresh made apple/grape smoothie to drink. After lunch, we walked all the way to the eastern side of Stockholm to get to the large radio and TV broadcast tower so that we would be able to go the top and get a view of the entire city. The weather was gorgeous all day on Thursday and we had a very nice view of the entire city and the surrounding towns from atop the tower. After going back down the tower and walking back to our hostel we were both pretty tired and after relaxing for a bit, we got a small dinner and had a few drinks at a pub and then called it a night.
Friday, March 27th We woke up at around 10pm and headed back to Gamlastan to visit the Nobel Museum. We had tried to go the previous day but it was very crowded and looked like a school had taken a field trip there for the day. It was a very neat musuem that talked about the history of
aerial view of Stockholm
view from atop the radio and television tower in Stockholm. the Nobel Prize, the man whom the prize was named after (Alfred Nobel), and information about all past Nobel Prize laureates. I could have stayed in the museum longer because there was so much to read, but I had my heavy backpack with me and we still had to check-in to our other hostel that was on the other side of the bay, across from Gamlastan. We decided to stay in a different hostel for our last night in Stockholm so that we could experience a different part of the city and also to save a little bit of money because it was less expensive at the second hostel. At the hostel we met a guy who just finished studying in Padova, Italy for 5 months and is now studying in Prague, Czech Republic. After talking for a while we all decided to grab some dinner and then head to the Absolut Ice Bar later in the evening. Before dinner, we went to the store and attempted to pick up some beer and liquor but Vincent and I got turned down at the liquor store that we had just been to the day before. In Sweden, you have to be
18 to drink in a restaurant and 20 to buy at a store. When the girl at the counter asked him how old he was, he said
"I'm 19 years old. Wait - No, I'm 20." He really is 20, but the woman just shook her head and told us that we had to leave. At that point, she didn't even want to look at his ID. So, we settled for beer from a grocery store. There, we realized that Sweden has another strange rule about selling alcohol because at grocery stores the highest alcohol percentage is 2.5%! (MISSING)After bringing everything back to the hostel and hanging out for a bit with all the other travelers, we decided to head to dinner. It had started to snow very lightly earlier in the evening and I was assured by Vincent that when we left for dinner it would no longer be snowing. Wrong! It was snowing fairly hard and had accumulated about 2-3 inches already. None of us had boots on or decent sneakers, so by the time we got the restaurant our feet were soaked. When we arrived, none of that mattered anymore because we had found the most amazing
restaurant in Stockholm called Mongolian Barbeque. It had unlimited chinese food, sushi, and a place where you could pick out your own raw meat and uncooked vegetable and give it to the chef to cook in a wok. We probably could have had unlimited deep-fried banansa and ice cream for dessert, but we only ate one because we were all in pain from having eaten so much food. It was an excellent meal for only 135 Swedish Kronor, but I no longer have any desire to eat chinese food for the next 4 months. After dinner, we walked over to the Ice Bar which was right around the corner from the Mongolian restaurant. We made a reservation earlier in the evening after the liquor store incident, so we paid our 180 SEK, put on the massive blue jackets and were let right in. The Ice Bar is exactly what it sounds like -
everything is made out of ice. The tables, the chairs, the drink glasses, the walls and the bar itself. It was very cool, no pun intended, but the novelty of being in a room full of ice, sitting on ice, and drinking out of ice wore off
fairly quickly. It was a fun time though, and it is something that is very popular for tourists visiting Stockholm to do. After the Ice Bar we headed back to the hostel, finished up a couple drinks that we had left and spent some time organizing the next day's activities befored heading to bed.
Saturday, March 28th The next day, we woke up at about 10:15am and had to rush to shower and pack up our backpacks because check-out was at 10:30, and Swedes are VERY prompt people. Vincent was ready on time, and I was still getting ready at 10:33am when the girl at the front desk came to my room to see if I was ready to check-out. After paying and handing over our room keys, we wandered around the downtown part of the city for a while because we weren't very successful at planning our day out the night before. We found a nice outdoor market and a street performer that was doing tricks with a soccer ball. He was very talented and looked like he had just stepped out of a Nike or Adidas commercial. For lunch, we went to an excellend kebab shop and
I had a huge plate of kebab, french fries and salad. When I finished, I realized that I didn't even take a picture of my meal. It wasn't quite as good as the barbeque the night before, but it was a close second. While eating at the counter inside the restaurant, we were sitting in front of the window that looked right out into a main street. We killed some time by 'people-watching' for a while, or perhaps a more accurate description is that we were counting the number of beautiful, blonde-haired Swedish women who walked by. In 25 minutes, I'd estimate that the count was around 20 or 30. After lunch went to a large bar/restaurant called The Bishops Arms that was right near the train to take us to Arlanda Airport. The bar had 250 types of whiskey and 100+ types of beer, and both Vincent and myself took a while decided what we wanted to get. And, out of all the internationally brewed beers that I could have picked from, I settled on a Brooklyn Lager which is brewed in Brooklyn, New York. We then headed to the Arlanda Express station that took us to the airport
Brooklyn Lager
Brooklyn, New York meets Stockholm, Sweden and we headed back to Milano.
It was a great trip and I would love to go back to Stockholm when it is warmer to visit the Stockholm Archipelago to go kayaking for the day and visit some of the 25,000 islands, of which very few are inhabited by people.
Ciao for now. I promise that my future travel blogs will be written in a more timely fashion!
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Stratton
non-member comment
"cheap pints of Swedish beer and bowling - what a great combination." I strongly concur