I'm going to try and not completely bombard you with pictures on this, but there will likely still be quite a few. More complete albums of pictures are being uploaded to facebook and of course, Mom and Dad, you can see the complete albums of pictures when I get home, but I'll put some of the best up on here to help illustrate my stories. :)
So to begin, I'm going to talk about Stockholm, Sweden!
We arrived at the Skavsta airport around 8 or so PM on the 30th of March. The Skavsta airport (which flies budget airlines and mostly just ryanair) we learned was about 1 and 1/2 hours away from the city center, which was a little less than ideal, but there was a bus, so it was alright. We got to our hostel, which was on a boat! The boat hostel was pretty nice. There were two boats that were part of the hostel. We stayed in the one called Ran. We were in a room of 10, but there there never more than 5 (including us) staying there, so it was pretty delightful. :)
That's the boat we lived on. It was pretty nifty.
This was the inner decor. It was quite delightful. :)
So on the 31st, we got up and decided to go to the Royal Palace. The Royal Palace is composed of three parts that are open to the public: the royal apartments, the treasury, and Gustav III's Museum of Antiquities. We just decided to go and get tickets to the royal apartments because each had to be separately paid for. We did snag a nice 50% student discount though, which was pretty awesome.
The rooms in the royal apartments were pretty ridiculously ornate. To the point of being gaudy at times, but in general they weren't too bad. Interesting to see them. :)
That's a picture of the outside of the palace. :)
After the palace, we walked around Gamla Stan, which is the old town.
Gamla Stan was full of cute little quaint streets and lots of little touristy shops. It was really enjoyable just to walk around and look at everything. It was a very nice area to walk around in.
We later learned how well people know English when we went to a grocery store to pick up some dinner. The cashier said something to me in Swedish and I must have looked confused because he then said "Oh, I'm sorry. You must not speak any Swedish. It's very hard to tell sometimes who can speak it and who can't."
We chilled the rest of the evening in the lobby of the hostel, trying to decipher the available Swedish and German magazines. There was one in English and it was the strangest magazine I've seen, with articles about breast milk cupcakes, penis mushrooms, and body farms. Very strange.
The next day, on April 1st, we headed out to see the Vasa Museum, which houses a 17th c. Swedish warship that sank after a grand 20 minutes of sailing. It was top heavy, two narrow, and had ineffective round ballast stones in the bottom.
That's the Vasa. It was incredibly well preserved because the salt worms, that would ordinarily eat wood of other sunken ships, don't live in the Baltic Sea due to a low salt content. The Vasa is absolutely gigantic and the museum had a lot of exhibits and information that related to it as well as the ship in the middle. I really enjoyed the exhibit that analyzed the skeletal remains of some of the people who died on board, which then constructed wax figures based on how they thought they'd look. It was really neat.
This is the diving bell which they had in the museum. You would stand on it and enough air would stay inside the top of it after being submerged that you could stay underwater for about 15 to 30 minutes (depending on time of year and water temperature since you had no protection) to investigate the ocean depths.
We spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around Stockholm.
We spent a few hours the next day (the second) walking around Gamla Stan again, getting souvenirs, before flying off to Berlin that night.
We went into one shop only to learn from the shop keeper that Bill Clinton had been there the day before. Darn!
Here are a couple pretty pictures of Stockholm.
We thought their phone booths were really neat looking. :)
That's about it for Stockholm. I will write about Berlin next time. :)
That's the boat we lived on. It was pretty nifty.
This was the inner decor. It was quite delightful. :)So on the 31st, we got up and decided to go to the Royal Palace. The Royal Palace is composed of three parts that are open to the public: the royal apartments, the treasury, and Gustav III's Museum of Antiquities. We just decided to go and get tickets to the royal apartments because each had to be separately paid for. We did snag a nice 50% student discount though, which was pretty awesome.
The rooms in the royal apartments were pretty ridiculously ornate. To the point of being gaudy at times, but in general they weren't too bad. Interesting to see them. :)
That's a picture of the outside of the palace. :)After the palace, we walked around Gamla Stan, which is the old town.
Gamla Stan was full of cute little quaint streets and lots of little touristy shops. It was really enjoyable just to walk around and look at everything. It was a very nice area to walk around in.We later learned how well people know English when we went to a grocery store to pick up some dinner. The cashier said something to me in Swedish and I must have looked confused because he then said "Oh, I'm sorry. You must not speak any Swedish. It's very hard to tell sometimes who can speak it and who can't."
We chilled the rest of the evening in the lobby of the hostel, trying to decipher the available Swedish and German magazines. There was one in English and it was the strangest magazine I've seen, with articles about breast milk cupcakes, penis mushrooms, and body farms. Very strange.
The next day, on April 1st, we headed out to see the Vasa Museum, which houses a 17th c. Swedish warship that sank after a grand 20 minutes of sailing. It was top heavy, two narrow, and had ineffective round ballast stones in the bottom.
That's the Vasa. It was incredibly well preserved because the salt worms, that would ordinarily eat wood of other sunken ships, don't live in the Baltic Sea due to a low salt content. The Vasa is absolutely gigantic and the museum had a lot of exhibits and information that related to it as well as the ship in the middle. I really enjoyed the exhibit that analyzed the skeletal remains of some of the people who died on board, which then constructed wax figures based on how they thought they'd look. It was really neat.
This is the diving bell which they had in the museum. You would stand on it and enough air would stay inside the top of it after being submerged that you could stay underwater for about 15 to 30 minutes (depending on time of year and water temperature since you had no protection) to investigate the ocean depths.We spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around Stockholm.
We spent a few hours the next day (the second) walking around Gamla Stan again, getting souvenirs, before flying off to Berlin that night.
We went into one shop only to learn from the shop keeper that Bill Clinton had been there the day before. Darn!
Here are a couple pretty pictures of Stockholm.
We thought their phone booths were really neat looking. :)That's about it for Stockholm. I will write about Berlin next time. :)
That's great that you can "hop" over to Sweden for vacation... and stay on a boat! How snazy! All the pictures look really pretty :)
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