Scandinavia - Check!?

Last week, we had Thursday off work for Ascension and Melissa and I met her American pals (who live in Amsterdam) out in Stockholm. First, we spent a day and a half in Stockholm. Next, we took an overnight boat to Helsinki where we spent another day and a half.

Max went to Stockholm last year and loved it a ton. When we asked him what he loved about it, he was only able to cite the royal wedding. While it makes no sense to me why the wedding of Royals would be a reason, I trust Max and had high expectations for the city.

Sweden is the home of the Wasa cracker. I LOOVVEEE Wasa crackers, I celebrate their entire collection. A coworker told me about the Vasa museum which I was excited about but then it turns out it was for a big old ship and I had misunderstood his accent.

Framed picture of Royal Family in Supermarket

We arrived Thursday morning and spent a casual day around the city. Stockholm is clean and quiet. The only thing is everything has a tint of smoked fish smells. We stumbled on a festival with music and food and beverages and to my excited surprise they had Brooklyn Beer, 4 types! I went nuts. The other Americans we met thought I must really miss America but we all know it's not like I would have gotten excited about a Miller Light.

Thursday night, we were once again tricked by the bright bright sun. We went back to our hotel to get ready for dinner and realized that it was far too late to get served at the restaurant. Melissa and I ate M&M's in bed and called it a night.

Friday morning I went out for an awesome run while Melissa got caught up on work. I ran all over the city. There were good stairs to run up and down and everything had a view of the water. It was so perfect I wanted to stay out for hours! When I finally dragged myself back to our hotel I was ready for breakfast and luckily our hotel came with the best breakfast spread I've seen since Vail '06. After stuffing myself like a carry-on, we want back out for another stroll around Stockholm.  Before we knew it, it was time to catch the boat. We had walked so far that we practically had to sprint back to make it in time.

We rode the Viking Line from Stockholm to Helsinki. Even though it's only a one-night cruise, it's still a full sized ship. I pre-judged the boat based on how it was described to me and my perception of anything that just runs a shuttle back and forth. party boat.

Turns out it's more of a commuter boat than anything. We chatted with this Finnish dude that was moving home from Sweden. We sat with these other two guys at dinner who had bought a vintage BMW and were bringing it home to Finland. I kept asking my new Finnish friends which was the best country and they were passionately pushing theirs. But I begged them to elaborate and no one could! Folks, if you want to say you come from the best place be ready to back it up. And then I made friends with this Italian bachelor party staying in our hallway and they were hilarious.

The rest of the boat ride was like a typical night out but on water. There was a club with bad music and an arcade with Guitar Hero. Our room was similar sized to the palace that Ginia and I shared last year on the Carnival and along the same lines we were glad when we finally finally docked and we could get back onto land.

So there were all these ladies in these big sparkly get-up's. At first I thought they were opera singers but there were far too many of them for that. Also they were also both pushy and rude (this is a generalization, we didn't meet every single one so maybe some were polite). I asked our Finnish friend what the deal was and he explained they were gypsies. The gypsies in the Christina Aguilera video looked much prettier and weren't so rude in the elevator line.

So now let's pick up in Helsinki. Melissa and I checked in at our hotel which was a renovated prison. It operated with prisoners through 2002 but closed and was picked up by Best Western. The rooms were nice and each was made up of three former cells. The hallways maintained the prison feel and actually were a little creepy. but not as creepy as the restaurant that featured low ceilings and this unrenovated cell.

Next, we found a grocery store and ate a brick of brie on a park bench. 

Neither of us had done research (aside from my ship interrogations) so we didn't have an agenda in town.  We stopped by a farmer's market and picked up some cherries. We also saw these morel mushrooms with signs all over that said "don't eat! Poison!" We asked a lady and she told us if we touched them then put our fingers in our mouths three hours later we would die. 

We went to a different stand and asked a different guy who explained we would get sick but probably not die. I wanted him to tell us what kind of sick but I don't think he knew the words in english.

We took our cherries and sat on a dock and ate them for what seemed like hours. Next we went to a park nearby to continue our loitering. I met this great chicken and we took a picture together.

So the day pretty much consisted of us wandering from place to place having snacks and beverages. At one point we ended up in the public library! I wanted to hang out because I love libraries but Melissa pointed out we wouldn't be able to read the books so we moved on and sat outside somewhere else.

The next day, we had a few hours before our flight so we wanted to get outside and enjoy the beautiful weather. We did the same wandering and concluded that Helsinki was both a small and boring city.  It seemed tot to have the least in common with the other Scandinavian cities, for example there was so much litter on the ground even my favorite Gorlitzer park seemed well kept.

With this trip, I could check Scandinavia off my list. I'm ready yet for a couple reasons: I loved Stockholm and hope to go back, perhaps even this summer; I hear the fjords in Norway are where it's at and all we saw was the city; I haven't even posted about my Copenhagen trip yet!