Long Trip part 3: Stockholm, Sweden

I originally thought that I arrived in Stockholm much later then I actually did, so I didn't book a hostel for the first night (I was planning to sleep in the airport). I arrived at 6pm, didn't want to stay at the airport for that long, and the airport was really small with no good areas to sleep. For this flight, I flew with Ryanair, and I must say, Easyjet is much better. Ryanair seems to fly to places nowhere near the actually city. The airport I went to was over an hour away by bus, shitty.

When I got to Stockholm, I immediately wandered around the city looking for a hostel to stay for the night eventually stumbling across one. Afterwards, I just walked around town taking some random pictures, not knowing what was what. I didn't go out for the first night since I was really tired from the travel and a little warn out from all the partying in Riga. So far Stockholm is a beautiful city, especially the old city. The weather has been nice as well.

The next day I wandered around the old town, Gamla Stan. Here I saw the Riksdag and Riksbank (parliament and big bank). This area was sitting on a platform that was suspended in the above the water by 15,000 wood logs. The problem was that sometimes the logs would not be total submerged underwater and could rot. To combat this problem, they were in the process of moving the lake or something to keep the logs underwater. I needed to get a ferry ticket to Helsinki, but the office opened later so I went to check out the Nobel museum first. It was pretty neat and explained why/how the Nobel prize was created and well as some interesting facts here and there. For example all the prizes but the peace prize are given out in Stockholm, with the peace prize given in Oslo, Norway. The reason for this is that Sweden and Denmark were in a union at the time. Since there are too many winners and the muesum was quite small, the focus was more on the creativity of the winners rather then the winners themselves. The central area had large video auditoriums that should little clips about all the winners. At the back was a Einstein exhibit with a cool video art thing called "Luna park" which was some weird representations of Einsteins theories. The ferry to helsinki was pretty cheap (ferry + nights sleep = 285 SEK). After that I went to see the New Royal Palace (the old one burned down) and stumbled across the changing of the guards, which was pretty neat. There was lots of music and horses and stuff. Around there was the Royal Cathedral (Storkyrkan) which has the famous sculpture St. George and the Dragon. There were a few other museums around like the Coin museum with an example of the largest coin in the world, and the Royal Armoury which talked about the various kings of Sweden as well as the Sweden/Norway union. After walking around the large park area (Djungården) it was time to go back the the hostel. The interesting thing about this hostel is that it's a boat (Everything time I see a boat, I can't wait till the cruise). It's not to big and doesn't rock so much, so it was nice. No one at the hostel wanted to go to a club and I didn't want to go alone, so that sucked.

I didn't have much time in Stockholm on my last day as I had to go to the ferry ín the afternoon. I decided to explore a different island of Stockholm (Stockholm = a bunch of island connected by bridges). On this island was Katarinaberget with is a like a pedestrian elevator that get people up ontop of a hill quickly. There were some other nice buildings such as the water tower (Mosebacke Vattertorn) and some churches (Katarina Kryka). Here is also the jazz bar that Felix told me to go to for sunday brunch, but since it was on monday that I found it, it was too late.

I'm off to Finland for a couple days now and looking forward to it. Overall, Stockholm as been a nice city but it would have been nice if others were here to check out the night life, o well, next time.