Days 1-3

We're just wrapping up our third day in Sweden. There's probably too much ground cover here, so I'll try keep it quick. Also, you can catch some tidbits from the captions on the pictures that I'm uploading to our Flickr account (accessible through that picture thumbnails "badge" thing under the "all photos" caption, on the right-hand side of the page).

[ed. It appears that Flickr wants to index the pictures in reverse order of age. Sorry if that gets confusing, especially if you're using the "slide show" feature.]

Day 1
We landed some time after noon on Saturday at Arlanda Airport, northwest of Stockholm. Our main goal for that day was to just get to Stockholm, get oriented a bit, and stay up late enough that our jetlag was minimized (we actually had reverse jetlag, since we flew on a redeye flight and since we hadn't gotten much sleep for a few nights beforehand).

So we took the "Arlanda Express" ~high-speed train to the Central Train Station in Stockholm, and from there we took a cab (over-priced!) to the Södermalm district, to our hotel for the first night (our intended hotel didn't have a vacancy for that night).

To get oriented and stay awake (we were pretty much running on fumes), we took a short walk around part of Södermalm, including a stop at the Katarina kyrka, a little bit of store browsing, and a few scenic overlooks of the rest of the city.

We made it to about 5pm local time before we sacked out. And then we slept for something like fourteen hours.

Day 2
Step one after getting up and getting ready for the day was to go downstairs and partake of the hotel's breakfast buffet thing, which is basically like a bigger, better continental breakfast (hmm, now I know where that came from). As far as I know, all the hotels here serve this sort of breakfast, and then that's pretty much it as far as their food service offerings go.

Step two was to get to our main hotel, which is up in the city proper (or at least somewhere in between there and Vasastan). After getting there and dropping off our luggage, we walked back down to Gamla stan (literally "old town"), which is basically a small island where all of the buildings look like Mozart's birthplace, more or less. It was reasonably neat, although it's certainly touristy (lunch cost $50 at a restaurant where they re-used the butter).

We happened across a changing of the guard at the Royal Palace. I don't think it was the official, snazzy changing of the guard, though, because that was supposed to happen at noon (= one hour earlier) and because this particular ceremony was a little bit sloppy (although the marching band was very good). I think the official changing of the guard involves a bunch of horse-mounted dudes in shiny silver helmets, whereas these guys were basically national guardsmen or something.

We wandered around a bit more, almost accidentally walked to Riddarholmen (the nobles' section of the old town; "riddar" can mean "knight"), and then went to the Middle Ages Museum. Then we walked back to the hotel and got fully settled.

We then set out to find a restaurant for dinner, heading north and wandering around Vasastan a bit. We finally settled on "Tranan", which was billed as authentic Swedish stuff. Sarah had the deer, and it was okay.

Day 3
Since we're going to be coming back to Stockholm (for a day or two) after our excursion to Lund, our goal for this first part of the trip is to go see most of the big, obvious stuff, so that we'll have a better idea of what less-obvious stuff we might want to do on our return.

So day 3 was Djurgården day. Djurgården literally means "animal garden"; it used to be a royal hunting ground in the seventeenth century. The 1897 World Exhibition was held there, so the western end of the island is still in that sort of in that mode. We started out going to the Vasa Museum, which is all about a ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 and then was raised in the early 1960s and restored for about thirty years. It's pretty neat, and it doesn't smell like barbecue quite as much as one of our acquaintances led us to believe.

Then we went to Skansen, which reconstructs bits of Scandinavian life by transplanting actual buildings (and, in the summer season, there's presumably a bunch of folks walking around in period costumes or something). They have various animals from Scandinavia, too (including the majestic møøse).

After a quick snort of coffee, we walked back to our hotel by way Östermalm (it's like this whole other malm). We are doing a lot of walking (maybe about eight miles today).

On the way back home, we stopped in a Christian bookstore that happens to be right near our hotel. I wanted to pick up a book in Swedish so I could be working on using something interesting and worthwhile for future translation practice. I ended up buying this book which appears to be about how Sweden can face its current philosophical and political issues by turning to the Bible as a basis for Truth (with a capital T); I'm hoping that's what it's about, anyway, but either way it will be interesting to have to tease out where the author is coming from.

Sarah hit the hay early. I stepped out to a local coffee shop to get some caffeination by which to write all this, but the coffee shop was closing up at 8pm. I was amazed (what kind of coffee shop closes at 8?). So I went across the street to the local 7-Eleven (they're everywhere here).

Mañana
Tuesday will be our last full day in Stockholm for a while. We're not sure what we'll do yet. On Wednesday, we'll rent a car, load up, and drive down the east coast, probably spending the night in Kalmar. Then it's on to Lund and The Real Group splendor.