Last weekend, we decided to take advantage of the fact we only live about 40 minutes away from Stockholm and pay our respects to what was meant to be one of the more beautiful cities in Europe. Sure, I had already been once but it turned out that I had missed a rather crucial section of Stockholm which was the Old Town otherwise known as Gamla Stan. Just doing a quick google of it, this section is meant to be the original Stockholm dating back to the 1300. Sure, why not!
For this trip, we decided to invest in trying out a bus service rather than the all expensive train which is like 12 bucks a trip each way. The bus service was 5 bucks a trip. The only problem being that we were not sure where it was leaving from. We were scheduled to leave on a Saturday morning and that Friday night we had a fair late but super fun night out at Varmlands Nation as it was their club night. Great but not so great in the morning when we were set to catch a bus at 8:30am. This involved catching a bus into town at 7:30am. Which here in Sweden, is practically unheard of as a time to wake up! It is stupidly cold and dark and when your as tired as we were, it makes for some rather unhappy people at the bus stop - especially when you get there to find we had just missed a bus and would need to wait another 20 minutes.
Frantic, we began to try and call places and bus services in order to find out where on earth we were meant to be catching this bus from. However, like I said, 7:30am is not a time when Swedish people like to be awake and so all the businesses had no yet opened their phone lines. Great! As we hopped on the bus, YES WARMTH! - we asked the bus driver for help and he was able to give us some instructions. By now, we were running quite late and so as we got off the bus, we began to run to the bus stop. Hoping we were going the right way! Luckily we had asked the bus driver otherwise we would have for sure missed the bus...seeing as I had thought the bus stop was in a completely different direction. We made it just on time to see the bus pull off. High Fives all round!
As we got on the bus, panting from the run and the cold and like I said, stupidly exhausted from well, 3 consecutive late nights, we were greeted with a most fabulous site! Giant leather arm chair seats! Oh man! The bus had leather reclining seats with pop up foot rests. Dayam! For 5 bucks a trip - we were stoked and quickly settled down for a nap over the 1 hour bus ride. I woke up a few times to see the "sun rise" over the snowy plains and it all looked really quite beautiful.
Arriving in Stockholm, my first thought was, far out! It's even colder than last time - and last time it was really quite cold. We made our way to our hostel in Stockholm and asked to check in early even though it was 10am and check in was at 2pm. They let us, and a couple people went to have another well needed nap. It had been quite a long week. Manon and I, kept strong and decided to have a search for nice clubs to check out in Stockholm that night. Interesting fact about Stockholm: it is very expensive. Second fact about Stockholm: Night clubs have age limits that even I can't get into!
Check out this note on the wall which lists night clubs, their costs, their opening times and the age limit. In Uppsala, as we are all students, we get to the clubs at like 7pm or else the line is ridiculous and here, the nightclubs don't open until like midnight, the entrance fee is phenomenal and you need to be sometimes over 25. Who goes clubbing when they are 25 I ask you?
Another thing I wanted to talk about was the stupid computer system. I'm not sure if you guys remember from my last Stockholm trip but that hostel was awesome and had mac computers to use and everyone could use Skype and surf the net freely. Here, they had a restricted computer with a very stupid computer interfact which involved not using a browser but just searching for tourist attractions on their extremely limited and slow database. We finally found a way to get on the browser only to find that you could go on websites sure, but only one at a time and you could not go back from it. I don't know if you understand what that means. It means basically you can go on a website like google and you can continue clicking links but you can never go back and you can never change the webpage except from hyperlinks. This means that you very easily get stuck on a site and will NEVER LEAVE AGAIN!!!! argh!
Haha, well actually we eventually worked out the only way to go back was to wait for 5 minutes until the computer thought you had left and it was inactive and it would refresh back to the home screen. This made searching for nightclubs in Stockholm very frustrating like you have no idea and you can see Manon was not happy in this photo.
Also and I know I am sitting on the computer thing for ages but it was really kinda hilarious and deserves a mention. Keyboards here in Sweden are of course a bit different to Australia and confusing as crap. One of the big things is the @ symbol which I have never worked out how to do it just doesn't work! In the past I have resorted to opening a webpage and copy and pasting the @ symbol to check my email. This place also must have had a lot of tourists confusedly asking for help and there was this sign. Alt Gr is different to the normal Alt and is in a whole different spot. Also here is a picture of our bunk beds in the hostel - we were in a 10bed mixed dorm but had our bunks together in a corner which was quite nice.
At about lunch time, we felt well rested and decided to go out and get us some lunch and have an exploration of the city. It was quite cold and I remembered being recommended a Mexican place that was cheap for Stockholm standards so off we went! We passed by this Swedish Dala Horse and so we all got a picture on it!
At the mexican place, we found that it was like a taco/enchilada bar where you order as many as you want and each taco is like 4-5 bucks. They had a lot of interesting ones with bacon, and potato and different things mixed in and a chilli sauce and onion salad bar so you could spice it up. I got a taco and an enchilada - the most interesting ones I could find on the menu. The place was really cool cause it was hidden, and seemed like a really underground place. It got packed though - so it was definitely popular! Paying like 10 bucks for a meal in Stockholm is close to impossible so YE-YA!
The next goal for our trip was to find my friend Kelsey some boots as she had been surviving this drastic winter wearing TOMS. I don't know if you know what they are but they are definitely not winter shoes and she was slipping all the time on the black ice and having wet feet from the snow.
We went down Drottingatan which is the main shopping street and Mina wanted to get a photo under a prety arch thing
After achieving great success with finding my friend's first ever pair of boots, the sun was already starting to set so we went to look at the pretty Old Town - Gamla Uppsala!
MINA! - I totally didn't know she did that btw till I saw the photo
Walking down Gamla Uppsala, you see some pretty architecture
Shopping in Gamla Stan is pretty cool too!
This is a very thin alleyway!
And that's all for now folks! I have to go get ready for grocery shopping. It is a big trip that has been planned you see. But I will come back with Part 2 which is Stockholm Night Life soon! Hope you guys are having a happy Summer
1 comment:
Looks so cold!
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