Stockholm Part II

**I know it has been forever since I posted anything! This is actually the story of what I did on Sept 30. I wrote it quite a while back, but never added the photos until now!**


So I got off the ferry and into Stockholm at about 6 in the morning. My Swiss roommate and I walked to the metro and bought tickets. We got on the same train, and parted ways at the Central Station.

I bought myself some breakfast at a convenience store (traditional Swedish cinnamon bun - better than the cardamom bun), and then basically chilled on a bench in a mall waiting for my hostel to open.

I got to my hostel pretty much right at 8, and checked in and stored my luggage before taking some time to use their wireless Internet. I had already decided that I wanted to go to the Vasa museum that day, but it didn't open until 10, so even though it would be a pretty long walk there, I still had time to kill. I got to hear some pretty funny things while I was in the Internet lounge though, like how a bunch of people had gone out the night before and got the bike tour tour guide really drunk so that the bike tour was cancelled that day "due to illness".

I headed out to the Vasa museum, and stopped at the tourist centre on the way, contemplating whether or not to buy a Stockholm card. I decided against it because I was fairly tired that day, so I thought it might be good to just see where the day took me rather than feel like I needed to go to a lot of museums just because I had bought the pass.

I got to the Vasa museum and looked around a bit. The Vasa was a ship that had sunk in 1628, and was dug up from the bottom of the harbour in the 1960's. The ship itself was massive, and really neat. there was even a tour given that was part of the admission price, so I went on that. I hadn't been expecting much from the museum itself because I thought that it couldn't be much more than the big old ship itself, but there were tons of little exhibits explaining what life on the ship and life in Sweden would have been like at the time, as well as lots of other things like why exactly the ship sank.

The Vasa itself.

I had expected to only spend about 1 or 2 hours there, but when I started going through all the exhibits, it took a lot of time. I really enjoyed learning about how brightly painted the ship would have been when it set sail (now all the wood and the carvings are just dark brown), and I enjoyed seeing the display about some of the skeletons they had found aboard the ship and what those people may have been like when they were alive.

Skeleton found aboard the Vasa when the ship was recovered.

Model of the Vasa and how it may have been painted.

I was there for a total of about 4 hours before I headed out in hopes of going to the City Hall and getting a tour. I took a fair number of photos on the walk back, so I got to City Hall at about 4 pm. The tours had already ended for the day, so I just bought a couple postcards at the gift shop and walked around a little.

While walking around.

City Hall.

I felt like I really hadn't seen or accomplished much in Stockholm, so I went back to the tourist office on my way back to the hostel to see if I could find out about anything that would be running later that I could still do.I couldn't really find anything, so I just went to my hostel.

I got my sheets back (they had been put into holding when I went to Finland so that I wouldn't have to pay to rent them twice), and got into my new room. It was a funny little room. It was in the basement, and was sort of split into two rooms with 6 beds each. One side had just filled up with Italian girls, so I got one of the last beds. My side had 2 Australian guys, a Dutch girl, a guy from the US, and a German guy. What was the strange part about the room is that there was really only 1 light that wasn't particularly effective, so it kind of felt like a dungeon.

I hung out in my room, and chatted a bit with the other people in it. My side of the room decided that they were all going to go out, so I felt like I needed to go out too just to do something else in Stockholm. The German guy had this connection so he knew about some club that was letting students from some Business school in for free that night, so we went there first to see what was happening. German guy swindled his way into getting us in for free byconvincing them that we were from the business school but hadn't gotten our ID's yet, but since not much was happening there, we decided that we would come back later (after making sure that the bouncers would remember us).

We tried going to the Ice bar, but even though it was only 11, we had missed the last sitting (which was at 10:15), so we couldn't go in. We decided to go back to the student bar, and we spent the rest of the evening there. It was pretty fun!

At the bar!

After we left the bar, we stopped at a pizza place to get some food. I got a chicken curry pizza, and when I couldn't finish it all, they bagged it up for me and gave me a free can of Coke with it. While we were there, the Australian guy looked around and commented about how funny it was that we were all from different places (we had already lost Australian #2). I thought it was pretty cool, especially since between the 5 of us, we also represented 3 different continents.

We went back to the hostel, and I showered and packed up my things since I was going to be leaving in a couple hours. I seriously considered not sleeping since I didn't have an alarm and I didn't know how I was going to wake up to catch my 8:30 train, but I was so tired that I decided to just sleep and if I slept late, I would be able to take the train that left at 10:30 instead since a bunch of my roommates were checking out, so they would wake me up when they were packing up.

Luckily, I would up at about 10 to 8, which gave me just enough time to get everything in order, and get my butt to the train station to catch the train.

Next - getting back to Oslo.