Stockholm - 90% Fun!

First off, I have to say - this trip was a definite learning experience. We had our issues but we solved them like real live adults! I would sum up Stockholm like this: forget about the first day, focus on the last two. Here's why:

We arrived in the city at night, and so started walking down a main street with just an address in our hands and absolutely no Swedish between us. We asked a couple of people how to get to our hostel, the Wasa Park Hotel, and ended up having to take the metro. (We found out later that this was unecessary, and thus began the "Swedish people lie to us" theme that pervaded the weekend). I personally have a great fear of metros and their ability to swallow you alive and spit you out on the wrong side of the city. However, the Swedish metro proved very easy to use, and turned out to actually be a huge help throughout our visit. So we took the metro, came up on another street and asked some more people, and then finally wandered into the hostel very cold and tired but glad to be there. It is here that I have to admit something that will make my parents cringe - my friends and I committed a cardinal sin of travel and didn't call ahead of time to confirm the reservations we had made online. We showed up at the hostel only to find that there was no record of us at all. Anywhere. When we explained that we had booked online, the woman told us that the one guy who could use the computer for bookings had been in a car crash, and so our information was never retrieved. The best she could do was call a cab for us and send us to a sister hotel, the Haga Kristineberg. 

...Looks nice, right? Except that it's waaaaaaay outside the city next to a bunch of corporate centers. This is our wonderful view of Stockholm's E40 highway!

Needless to say, our first night in Stockholm was basically shot because it would have cost a lot of money to get back into the city. The four of us ate cookies for dinner and watched Swedish MTV until we fell asleep. 

But don't worry! From here on out it gets better. The next morning, the woman at the hotel told us that we could go back to Wasa Park Hotel because we got a room there after all. The only bad part is that we still had to pay for the rooms at both places, so we weren't in the best mood overall. But then the Wasa Park was amazing!

Our room was tiny; it was a double room with two beds and two cots in it. We preferred to call it "cozy" though, so the above picture is of my girls demonstrating the marshmallow-like quality of our beds. After being settled in in the morning, we were a lot more excited for the day - Wasa Park is in the middle of the city, and we had made ourselves a plan of what to do, and everything was finally starting to get better. 

We headed to the Gamla Stan, which is the island-like thing in the center of the city where the Royal Palace and all the old streets and squares are. It was absolutely beautiful there! Here are some shots of the Royal Palace and the square and side streets of the Gamla Stan:

After our tour of the Royal Palace (which was AMAZING) we ate lunch at the kind of cafe that everyone comes to Europe to eat lunch in:

That night we went to the Absolut Ice Bar, which was pretty intense and awesome and COLD! But the drinks were good and it was really crazy-looking and we were all so stylish in our special capes!

Our next stop was the Irish pub! Yes, yes, I know...Americans in an Irish pub in Sweden. Perhaps this makes me a true international traveler? We got a delicious dinner and some great drinks, and then we danced the night away!

On our last day in the morning, we walked around the Soldermalm, which is on a hill next to the water:

When we got back to the castle and had a pizza party in our room so that we could hear about everybody else's weekends. I love hearing about where my friends went, but the only problem is that then I want to go there too! I'm sure I can make it to Switzerland, Brussles, Copenhagen, Alghiero, and Budapest before the end of the semester, right??

Next week: hanging out in London with the queen. I'm practicing my scone-eating and tea-drinking as we speak. 

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PS - This is for my darling Margaret: