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In December 1996, I spent a month visiting Sweden and had an absolute blast. Here I've written
a travelogue and linked to the pictures I took on the trip.
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Jonas met me at
Stockholm-Arlanda airport on the 19th of December. I was dead tired having not been able to sleep
at all while on the plane. After the drive back to Örebro, I was pretty much out of commission
for the rest of the day (and night).
Here I am putting on my
socks and getting ready to go out the next day. We had reservations for a Swedish Christmas
smörgåsbord lunch at Örebro
Slott, the castle
in downtown Örebro. The weather was terribly cold, but we braved it and stood still for a few moments
while posing for a photo in
front of and right outside the
large castle door before going in. The meal, my first taste of Swedish food, was fun although
I was a bit wary of all of the fish and other seafood selections.
The following day, the 20th, we drove up to Västerås to visit with
Dannoc (Cristian), a fellow mudder from NannyMUD. We all popped into a local pizza place for
dinner, where I got to try a Swedish pizza. Having previously had only American-style pizzas,
eating one entirely with a knife and fork was a strange but nonetheless delicious experience.
While waiting for the pizzas to arrive, we took a few
silly pictures. After the meal we went back to Dannoc's apartment and
hung out chatting, playing cards, drinking "Christmas Rootbeer" (julmust) and eating gingerbread
cookies. After a while, Jonas
fell asleep in his chair and we called it a night.
The next morning was nice and sunny so we were
standing out on the balcony. Dannoc was eating some sort of miniature oranges, called "clementiner"
and fed me one, too. After
breakfast and getting ready we said goodbye to Dannoc and headed to Stockholm for a few days.
In Stockholm Jonas had arranged to borrow a
student apartment from a friend of a friend. It wasn't too far from downtown, so it was nice
and convenient. While in Stockholm I insisted that we visit the Museum of Natural History, as
natural history is one of my passions. We took the
subway there and also took a photo of the
"up" view while riding the escalator. The
museum was fantastic, though I'm certain I enjoyed it quite a bit more than Jonas did.
We spent the next day, the 23rd, doing some
sightseeing in Stockholm. After spending some time
walking around in the area of the
central square, we headed toward
Gamla Stan ("The Old City"). As its name suggests, this is the older part of the city, where the
streets are much narrower and the
buildings have a much older
design. There are a lot of nice little shops around there and we stopped into quite a few of them. We had
some sandwiches for lunch at a small panini place. Unfortunately, most of my pictures taken in this area
are dark or heavily shadowed due to the lack of sunlight falling in between the tall buildings combined
with the diminished sunlight in general during winter days.
After walking around for a while, we approached the
Royal Palace and it became apparent that something was going on there. There was a large crowd of
people standing around waiting, so we decided to wait too and see what wouldd happen. It turned out that
the ceremony for the changing of the
palace guards was about to occur, so we watched all of the
pomp and circumstance and it felt a bit grand, too. We remarked on how coincidental it was that we
just happened to walk by at that time. After that, we boarded a ferry (and I posed for a
grumpy face) to take us to
another part of town where the Vasa Museum is located. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the museum, we
discovered that it was closed for the holidays.
We spent the rest of the day walking around town and sightseeing until it was
pretty dark and also visited The
Swedish Institute, which housed a bookstore as well as pamphlets on just about every aspect of Sweden
you could imagine. While walking around, we kept seeing people selling huge, poster-sized crossword
puzzles out of shopping carts, and after a while Jonas told me to
pose by one. Finally, we decided to go see a movie and decided on Fargo, though we had to wait
outside the theater a while,
having arrived early. I spent the rest of the evening mumbling that Minnesotans do NOT really talk like
that.
The following day was Christmas Eve, which in Sweden is a much bigger celebration than Christmas Day.
One amusing Swedish tradition for Christmas Eve is that at 3:00 p.m. everyone turns on the TV and watches
Disney cartoons. I have yet to figure out how this became such a strong tradition, but you can be pretty
sure that in households across the country, pretty much everyone's watching Donald Duck. I
received several gifts from Jonas'
family for Christmas, which was a very pleasant surprise having just met them.
Jonas' mother Majbritt and me,
Jonas' father Christer and his sister Anna, and
Jonas' sister Karin, his cousin David and his grandfather Ragnar.
Later on in the evening Jonas and I decided to go to Midnight Mass at a church in downtown Hallsberg.
I'd never attended a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass before nor did I at the time understand much Swedish at
all, but it was quite fun, particularly the ambiance --
candles in the aisles and along the walls provided the only light, giving everyone a
warm, happy feeling. The church,
however, had one odd feature: it was
painted pink on the outside.
On the 26th of December we left Hallsberg in Jonas' car and headed west to Göteborg to start our
European roadtrip. Upon arriving we got a room at a hotel called Aveny, which had a lovely,
old-fashioned elevator. The
hotel was interesting in that it
was not a typical hotel with lots of identical rooms but rather rooms in a woman's home, which made it
kind of unique and fun. That
evening we also made arrangements to
meet Dewyn, a fellow mudder. As it was the middle of winter it wasn't so fun to stand around outside,
so the three of us went inside McDonald's and sat around chatting with a couple of milkshakes before
Jonas and I headed back to the hotel for the night.
The next day we did some sightseeing around Göteborg. First, we went to the natural history museum
which was really fun, though again I imagine I found it a bit more fun than Jonas did. When we passed a
hedgehog that had been stuffed,
Jonas told me to pose next to it, and here I am examining an
ichthyosaur. After the museum, we walked around downtown a while, and took a picture of one of the
streetcars. That evening we were
scheduled to board a ferry to Denmark, but first we stopped by a Statoil gas station so that Jonas could
change the windshield wipers on
the car.
The ferry ride lasted about three hours and we arrived in Fredrikshamn, Denmark, where we got a
hotel room with a
nice view. That evening
Jonas became sick with a fever and the next day we asked if we could possibly stay another night for a
cheaper rate as he still felt like crap, but they said no. After we got packed up, we started to drive
south through the Danish countryside. It was, for the most part, uneventful and kind of boring -- a long
stretch of flat farmland. Eventually, we reached northern Germany and headed towards Hamburg, where we
ate the obligatory hamburger.
We spent some time walking around
the chilly downtown but were disappointed to find that just about all the stores were closed.
After leaving Hamburg we headed west to
The Netherlands. We stopped for the night in a town called Joure, where we had a fantastic meal
at a Chinese/Indian restaurant
before getting a hotel room. The restaurant was giving out beautiful wall calendars so we took two. Late
that night Jonas got the munchies so we drove to the local McDonald's to get him a snack, and while driving
through the Drive-Thru, we
decided to take a picture of the Dutch menu. Here is a
close-up of not terribly high quality.
The next day, the 30th, we left Joure and headed around and down the
west coast of The Netherlands, stopping to take pictures here and there of the
dikes used to keep the sea out.
When we arrived in Amsterdam we parked downtown
and walked around and did some shopping. I managed to find foreign editions of the book Winnie the Pooh
in German, Catalan, Frisian and Polish, but not a single one in Dutch. Go figure. There was an enormous number
of rather tame pigeons milling
around and looking for handouts in the central square downtown. We left Amsterdam and decided to get a hotel in
nearby Rotterdam for the night.
The following day was New Year's Eve, and we decided to stay and celebrate the new year in Rotterdam with
Klingie, a fellow mudder. We got
a somewhat fancy hotel room quite
cheap as it was the holiday season, and took the opportunity to change the film while snapping
shots of the room. Then something
unfortunate happened: I allowed Jonas to change the film in my camera, though he'd never done it before. To make
a long story short, the new film was loaded incorrectly and all of the subsequent pictures we (thought we) took
on that roll were actually never taken. Those parts will just have to be described with text only.
New Year's Eve with Klingie and his friends and family was a fantastic time. I was especially impressed with
the city-wide fireworks that were lit off at midnight. It felt very happy and festive and we were delighted to
be welcomed so warmly to celebrate with people we barely knew. The next day we left Rotterdam and headed south
through Belgium, stopping in Brussels to see the famous statue. We initially couldn't find it, so Jonas stuck
his head out the car window and asked passersby, "Can you tell me the way to the peeing guy?" Leaving Belgium,
we drove a small distance through Luxembourg and then entered northern France. After some communication problems
with the owner, who didn't speak English and we didn't speak French, we got a hotel room fairly late in the town
of Metz.
We left France the next day and drove through the southern part of Germany and headed into Switzerland. Upon
entering Switzerland, we were forced to buy a permit to let us drive around inside the country. It was about $60
and I paid in American cash. It seemed a pretty silly fee since we were only driving through in what would take
just a few hours, but I guess that's Switzerland for you. Around this time we began to notice that the brakes on
the car were really bad and making a lot of noise. We considered staying the night in Zurich and having the car
serviced the next day, but we ultimately decided to let it go for now and press on into Austria. In Austria we
stayed that night in Innsbruck, which was right in the middle of the Alps. The next morning we had a gorgeous
view of the snowy Alps in the sunlight from our hotel room window. I took some pictures, but, well, you know.
It was nice that we woke up with a lovely view, because the rest of the day was to prove to be disastrous.
First, I seemed to have come down with a cold so we spent some time finding some cold medicine. We then asked
around, trying to locate a place that would service our car and its brake problem. We were directed to several
places which would each then redirect us to another. On the way to one of them we were behind a woman in a small
red car. As we approached a traffic light, it changed to yellow. We assumed that the woman would coast on
through it, as we were so near to it, but she stopped instead. Jonas tried to swerve to avoid her, but we ended
up hitting her rear left corner with our front right. We had no injuries, thanks probably to the somewhat slower
speeds on that particular road, although neither of us had been wearing a seatbelt. I did bump my forehead on
the sun visor, though. Well, eventually the police came to check everything out, and Jonas and I got a ride in
a police car to the station where they had to find an English-speaking officer to take our story and fill out
paperwork. After they were finished with us, they dropped us back off at our now-even-sorrier car. In addition
to the brakes, now, part of the right front steel around the tire would scrape against the tire when it was
turned. We managed to get the car to the station to which we had originally been heading, only to have them tell
us it would likely cost us more then the actual value of the car to make it driveable again. We declined. We
looked around town for some kind of wrecking yard, or any place that would take it off our hands, but they all
seemed to be closed for holidays. Ultimately, we just left it sitting in a parking garage downtown and bought
two train tickets back to Sweden.
The train ride back was somewhat uneventful, and at that point we were both rather disenchanted with the trip
and just wanted to get back home. Back in Hallsberg, we spent a couple of days relaxing again. We went to
Marieberg, a local shopping mall outside Örebro, where Jonas had me pose next to the
"Liten" part of a "Stor &
Liten" ("Big & Small") display. On the 11th of January we had reservations for a
ferry cruise to Helsinki,
Finland. I was surprised at how cheap a
nice room was, but apparently the rooms are fairly inexpensive because most people do quite a bit of
drinking while on the ship and they easily make their money that way. The cruise was fun, especially
playing slots, but arriving in
Helsinki on a winter Sunday was,
well, boring to say the least. Everything was closed. We did meet a woman walking by with
beer on her head, though.
The day we got back from the cruise we also had plans to go see
Dwinbar (Mattias), a friend of ours who lived in Linköping, a city not to far away and also the home of
NannyMUD. That first night we arrived rather late by train, so we spent some time visiting with Dwinbar and then
just went to bed. Brom, one of
the admins of Nanny, invited us to the building where the machine it runs on is located and
showed us around the place,
pointing out machines and
documents relevant to Nanny's
past. I was also allowed to logon
to Nanny, using the machine itself, which was kind of neat.
After visiting the computer building, Brom suggested that we pop in to
Titleist's office and say hello. We spent some time chit-chatting there before our little troupe
made its way to Brom's wife Banshee's
office, where she was fixing things up to move to a different office. Upon leaving the building, we couldn't
help but notice some truly fantastic and
mind-bogglingly profound art on the wall.
After saying goodbye to Brom and Banshee, we made our way to a local pub, where we were to meet some other
mud folks, Leowon and Taren.
They had already been there a while and so were just finishing up their meal, but stayed and
had some beers with us as we all
chatted for a while about life, the universe and MUD. Dwinbar, Jonas and I were all pretty tipsy by the time we
got back to Dwinbar's apartment. The next day we just hung around being silly. Jonas showed off his
excellent fashion sense while
Dwinbar played some music.
Eventually, we got ready to leave
and took the train back to Hallsberg.
Back in Hallsberg, Jonas and I spent the last few days together just hanging out and relaxing. One day he
took me in to see the classroom
where he taught. Another night we met Dwinbar at the train station and went to the local university computer lab
and had a hilarious evening in which we became the first threesome marriage ever on Nanny. The next day was
my last day in Sweden and
somewhat heartbreaking as Jonas
took me to the airport to catch my flight back to the US. Overall, however, I had a wonderful time!
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