Heading back to Oslo

**2nd half is heavy on the writing, sorry I have no photos for it.**


I got on my 8:30 train, and got a seat no problem. The train took us to Karlstad, where we had to get off and switch to buses due to construction of some sort.

I got on the bus that was headed to Charlottenberg, and it took about another hour to get there. When I got there, I walked around a bit, down what I think was the main street, and over by the library. I found an absolutely MASSIVE candy store on the main street. Half of the store was essentially bulk bins with candy, while the other half was mostly pop, but a bunch more candy as well. It made my teeth hurt just being there.

Massive candy store.

Random statue.

I was really tired, and carrying around my big backpack was hard, so I decided that I had explored as much as I wanted to (it was a small place, and the only reason I wanted to go there was because it had my name), so I just headed back to the train station. There was a pancake house right beside the station, so I went in there and had a "banana surprise" pancake which was essentially a crepe filled with whipped cream, some chunks of banana, and chocolate sprinkles(!), and drizzled with chocolate syrup.

I stayed in the restaurant for quite a while, relaxing and looking at the couple big (and a little outdated) maps they had on the wall. Then I basically just waited in and around the train station until the train came.

I got back to Oslo, and back to the apartment without any problems, and had a relaxing evening, mostly just surfing the web. When L got back home, I told her about what my plans were for the next day, and we worked out that it would be best if she drove me to the train station and I could take the express train to the airport from there. I stayed up late just for the sake of it, and made sure everything was ready to travel.

I got up early the next morning with everything packed and ready to go and had my last breakfast with L. She was kind enough to cook me some eggs and a sausage, and it was delicious! We headed out a few minutes later than planned, but I got my ticket and hopped on the train without any troubles.

I got to the airport, and headed into line to get my boarding pass. I got all the way through the long line and then the woman at the ticket counter looked at my paper and said, "You're at the wrong airport. That one is about 2 hours away from here." Since there was less than 1.5 hours until my flight left, I knew I couldn't do it, so I headed over to the ticket line to buy a ticket to Manchester.

The next available option they had was a business class ticket and I would have gotten into Manchester at 10 pm which was long after the shuttle to the university stopped running, and since it was so expensive, it wasn't really an option. I got a ticket that would leave at 11 am the next day, and the only good part was that it was a direct flight (my original one transferred in Copenhagen). I phoned L to let her know what happened, and she said she could pick me up at the train station, so I got another ticket for the express train and hopped on.

Because of some kind of construction that was happening, the train was about 15 minutes late getting to the station. L found me, and we decided to leave my bags there in a luggage locker overnight because I was probably going to have to get myself to the train station the next day.

We hurried back to her car because she didn't have much time left, and when we got there, there was a man who was writing her a ticket, even though she was only about a minute late. He had only started writing it, but he said that he couldn't undo it, and she got a huge fine even though she was standing right there! It was equivalent to about $120 CAD, and I felt really bad that it had happened because of me, so I told her that I would pay for it.

We got home, and I sent some emails to let my university know that I would be coming late, and then I went and had a four hour nap because I had gotten so little sleep the night before. After I woke up, L came home and helped me with some food for dinner, and then went out again.

I wanted to find some way to get the money to pay her fine, but there were no bank machines nearby, so I started freaking out a bit and decided I needed to phone home. Unfortunately I didn't have a phone, so I just went on Facebook and waited until I could get a hold of one of Keith's friends to text him to go on Skype. Then I decided that texting probably wasn't fast enough, so I made the guy phone my house and tell my parents to go on Skype. Haha, I owe him. I think he took pity on me when I said "I'm accidentally in Norway." Lucky thing my brother has nice friends.

After a fairly long chat with my family (the first time I had talked to them!), I went almost straight to bed, so I could get up really early the next morning.

Next - leaving Oslo.

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.

Stockholm Part 1

It was 6 in the morning, and I decided to go find my hostel. It was about a 10 minute walk from the train station, and really easy to find. Unfortunately, it didn't open until 8 am, so I sat down on a park bench nearby for a while until I decided it would be better to stay at the train station where it was actually warm.

I sat down on a bench at the train station, and faded in and out of consciousness until shortly before 8 when I decided I would head back to the hostel. As I was leaving the building, I passed by one of the convenience stores and decided that some food would be good. I went in and saw the rows of candy, and remembering Kaycie's candy and grossly lacking impulse control while that sleep deprived, I grabbed a bag and started shovelling all kinds of different candies into it. Then I got a Coke and a chocolate bar. That was my breakfast.

I got to the hostel, and checked in, but I couldn't get into my room until 2 pm, so I put my backpack into the luggage storage, and then hung around the hostel for a while and went on the Internet and tried to figure out what I wanted to do for the day.

I eventually decided that I would head to the dance museum that I had found a pamphlet for. It didn't open until 11 though, so I still had some time to kill. I started walking anyway though, and found the tourist information office to grab a city guide.

I ended up finding the main shopping street, and going around there for a while. There was one intersection that I found that had an H&M on 3/4 of the corners. And I found some good candy shops.

It may be a little hard to see, but there are actually 3 H&M's in this photo!

I headed to the dance museum, and I enjoyed it, but most of it was not quite what I was expecting. I was hoping there would be more of the collection dedicated to modern dance styles, but a lot of it was about traditional dances from around the world. That was interesting, but a lot of the styles didn't have (good) videos, so it was mostly just costumes to look at. Then I found that they had a decent loop of videos playing in their modern dance section, so I watched clips of everything from ballet to Broadway, from the early 1900's, to clips from just a few years ago.

Antique dance shoes.

Pretty costumes!

They had a lot of displays like this and although I found them interesting, I preferred the ballet stuff.

Then I also realized that they were showing a film about a competition at the Bolshoi Ballet in the 1960's (I think) which seemed pretty interesting, so I watched that. There were some really neat clips of Mikhail Baryshnikov in it, and just a lot of good dancing.

After the museum, I made my way back to the hostel to check in, shopping a little along the way. I put my stuff into my room and then decided to try out the little café that was in the reception area of my hostel. I tried to pay with a credit card, but for some reason the machine wasn't working. I grabbed a bill out of my wallet, but it was an old issue from a trip my grandma went on about 10 years ago, so it's no longer valid. Which meant I actually had a lot less money than I thought I did. However, it also meant I got a discount on my food because the woman working was feeling bad that it was their fault I couldn't pay with a credit card, so I just gave her all the money I had.

The food was good, but I went out right afterwards to get more money because I didn't have any. Then I walked around a little, and shopped a bit in the old town before I came back to my room and crashed for a nap.

I had a late supper (at Max again) after I woke up from my nap, and then went back to my hostel. I didn't feel like trying to meet random people in the common area, so I just went to my room, and ended up going to sleep pretty early. My room had 12 beds, but I quite liked it, although I think I shared the room with 8 guys that night.

View from my bunk - nice room.

I got up early and had to get myself checked out of my hostel by 10. At 10, I went on a bike tour that I had signed up for given by one of the women who works at the hostel.

It was pretty good, although I'm really in no shape to ride a bike, and I couldn't find my camera in my bag, so I didn't take any photos (maybe just as well to focus on my biking). We saw a bust of Astrid Lindgren in a park nearby our hostel (she used to live in the neighbourhood, so a lot of her stories take place there). We saw a plaque where the Swedish Prime Minister was assassinated in 1986, and a monument to a war hero that died after being taken prisoner in Russia. We got to hear a bit of the story of the Vasa, and then we had a little picnic on a dock. They had said in the description that it would be coffee and traditional Swedish cinnamon buns, but the buns were actually cardamom buns, which just aren't as good as cinnamon ones.

After we came back from the picnic, I tried to get my things ready to head to Finland. I did some laundry and went on the Internet and ate at the hostel café for lunch while I was waiting. Then I went on a bit of a shopping walkabout before I came back to get all my things packed up and head off to the ferry.

I got to the terminal by taking the metro, and went to buy a ticket. I asked for the cheapest one they had, and the woman told me that would be a shared cabin, so I said "Okay," and paid the 90 SEK reservation fee (the rest was discounted by my Eurail pass). I got a drinkable yoghurt and tiny chocolate bar as I waited to get on the ferry.

While waiting to board the ferry.

Next up - the ferry to Finland.

Farewell Denmark, Hello Sweden!

I managed to wake myself up at about 6:30 am Sunday, and got myself up by about 6:50. I checked out, and was hoping to take the bus to the train station rather than make the 30 minute walk with my big bag, but it turned out I had just missed the 7:30 bus, so it would be at least as fast if I just walked.

I hopped on the train that was headed to Malmo, and I got there at about 9. I headed out almost straight away to find the Turning Torso (Scandinavia's tallest building). I walked and walked, and I could see the building in the distance, but it felt like a mirage that was never getting any closer! Finally I turned a corner, and I could see the whole thing, and I eventually made it all the way there. It was a really cool building. After that, I headed back to the train station to grab some food and reserve a ticket for the night train to Stockholm.

Turning Torso.

I explored the area around the train station a little, and then I called Kaycie to warn her that I was going to be on a train heading to Ystad very shortly. Kaycie is 4 years younger than me, but I know her from high school, and she's on an exchange in a little town called Ystad, so I decided it would be neat to go visit her and see the town! Before I left Malmo, I bought myself a sandwich that I'm pretty sure was made with the liver spread stuff that's popular in this part of the world.

I got to Ystad and had a lovely little visit with Kaycie as she gave me a tour around the town. It was nice to have a tour guide, and the town was adorable! She's a lucky girl to get to be there! We saw the old churches, the theatre, the park, the harbour, the school, and lots of adorable little houses. She introduced me to Swedish candy (there were a couple stores there with a FANTASTIC selection of candy), and we had fika (a fika? Kaycie says it best translates to coffee date, but can have a wide variety of meanings) at a little coffee shop.

Inside one of the churches.

Kaycie's school.

Train and bus station.

View from the dock.

When she had to go home for dinner, I explored a little more and grabbed a Peanut Butter Cookie Dough ice cream bar as I was waiting for the train. We had been talking about peanut butter and ice cream, so it sounded especially good right about then. I was really glad I stopped for that little visit! Ystad was such a cute little town, and I would never have seen it if I didn't know someone who was there!

In Ystad.

Random, cute house.

I headed back to Malmo, and started looking for a restaurant. Kaycie had said that Max had good food (especially fries), so when I saw one, I decided to go in. I got a falafel burger with fries and it was delicious! Then I found out that they have free wireless internet here, so I stuck around to take advantage of it. All of this so far has been written at the Max.

After I left the Max, I just went to the train station and got my backpack out of a locker then hung around until my train was ready to leave.

I was in a sleeper cabin because that's apparently all that the train had. It was a 6 bed room with a bunch of strangers, but I slept better than I would have in a chair. We got into Stockholm at 6 am, and I'll continue the story next post.

Google Translate says that this sign says that you ARE allowed to flush the toilet while the train is standing in the station. But it still makes me think of that song.