Stockholm

Hooray! We're out of London!

We arrived in Stockholm mid afternoon to sunny skies and fields dotted with red barns/houses, ice-covered lakes and fir trees, all dusted in powdery white snow. After catching the gay pride bus (not really - it just had big rainbows on the sides) into Central, we demolished two kebab burgers (didn't quite manage to order proper kebabs with our complete lack of Swedish language) and then tried to figure out how to get out to our couchsurfing host's (Johanna) house. Lucky for us, she'd given us really good directions, so all we had to do was find the metro (subway) and get off at the right stop. Unfortunately we'd missed the last email from our host, so we went straight to the house while she waited at central station.. oops. While waiting we amused ourselves by sliding on the ice in the playground, and then tried to take blurry motion pictures of our feet (which didn't work).

As far as cities go, Stockholm is pretty nice. We did a lot of walking on our only full day - starting along a little local walk (tip from Johanna!) that had really great views over the old city, and then back through the bohemian district in search of crepes. We found the crepes shop, but it was closed until the afternoon :-( Then on to the old city, Gamla Stan, which is full of narrow cobbled streets, a lot of shops (being a major tourist drawcard a lot are overpriced and full of souvenirs) and plenty of nice things to look at. We followed this up with another trip to a kebab shop....this time we managed to order the right thing, and they were awesome....~40cm long!


Resisting the urge to lay down and go to sleep we decided to walk our way over to Djurgarden and go for our first walk through Sweden forest. It was really pretty although the trails were completely covered in ice, which meant hands out of pockets for balance and trying not to slide backwards down the hill!


For those who aren't aware...Stockholm is actually an archipelago city....all these places mentioned above are actually separate islands connected by bridges.

We bid farewell to our host Johanna after 2 nights and are now sitting in our new temporary home for the next 3 weeks or so, down south in Nybro...more to come in the next blog...