Somewhere between Stockholm and Copenhagen

Hello everybody! 

I’m now on the train somewhere in southern Sweden, between Stockholm and Copenhagen. Stockholm was a beautiful city to visit! It is a lot different from Oslo in that it is bigger and feels more European. They call it “The Venice of the North” because you can navigate it by water-it is made up of 14 islands and is part of an archipelago of 24,000+ islands!

After struggling to find my way from the train station to my hostel and lugging my suitcase in the wrong direction a few times, I made it to my hostel and collapsed into my bed. The next morning, I sat with a random group of people at breakfast-two German women and one man from Saudi Arabia-and they ended up inviting me to go with them on a boat tour of the city! We sailed around Stockholm all day, hopping on and off the boat to explore the different islands that make up Stockholm.

Me and my new friends in Stockholm, with Tivoli in the background

The hostel I stayed in was really, really nice. They provided pasta for us to eat-all we had to do was supply the sauce. Dinner time was always fun because lots of people were gathered in the kitchen, all making pasta, and all eating together. About half the people there were traveling alone, and it was really nice to sit and have dinner with them. There were a lot of German people in the hostel, randomly, so sometimes I couldn’t join in the conversation because everyone was speaking in German! After dinner one night I sat with a bunch of people from Brazil who would switch between English and Portuguese, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence! I am definitely ashamed that I am only fluent in one language-that definitely puts me in the minority around here (and everywhere besides the US, it seems).

Art (?) in the center of Stockholm

The next day I decided to go off on my own to explore Gamla Stan, the main tourist island, and Sodermalm, the more up-and-coming young area. I went to the Nobel Museum because I had enjoyed the one in Oslo so much. I liked the Stockholm Nobel Museum too-it had interesting movies about the different laureates and some about “inspiring places”, places such as Paris and Oxford that turn out an unusual number of prize winners. I’ve noticed on this trip that I get a lot more out of museums when I pay for them myself. Whenever I’ve gone to museums with my family or as part of a school visit, I’ve always been sort of bored by them and have moved through them quickly. Now that I’m paying for museums myself, I’m taking a lot of time in each one, visiting all the exhibits and reading all the material and making sure to take advantage of the free tours. Today I went to the Vasa museum, which houses a ship that sank in the early 17^th C. It sank on its maiden voyage, after having been afloat for only about 20 minutes. The ship was removed from the bottom of the ocean more than 300 years later and restored for many years. It’s really huge-looks just like the ships from the Pirates of the Caribbean! Because the Baltic sea is not very salty, the ship was really well preserved under the water- it is considered to be the best preserved 17^th C ship in the world. One of the most interesting exhibits in that museum was about how they are able to guess at what some of the passengers looked like based on their skeletons alone. They can even tell what kind of food they ate and what jobs they probably had, just based on their nearly 400 year old bones!

Christmas in August?

Now I’m all done with Stockholm and moving on to Copenhagen! Planning on visiting Christiania tomorrow, which should be fun! (Thanks for the suggestion, Jordan!) Then it will be time for Iceland, then home to CO at long, long last.

Cobblestone cross walk. Cool.

Bye for now!

Maria