Sum up of Sweden

My last two days in Stockholm were filled with more walking, a few museums, and lots of fika breaks. I went to the Nordic museum, which was a bit of a let down, but also the Modern art museum which was fantastic! They had an impressive collection and I recognized many of the artists from either classes or working at R.S. Johnson, so that was enjoyable to see. The weather continued to be beautiful, minus a stormy few hours on Wednesday. Below are some more pictures of beautiful Stockholm in the last two days I was there.


This is a picture of the most posh street in Stockholm



Stormy clouds making for a dramatic effect


My Italian friend, Fabrizio, happened to be visiting Stockholm as well and overlapped my time there for a few hours!

Ok, so a few thoughts on Sweden at the end of my two weeks:
-Language: The Swedish language is a very difficult one to understand. It stems from German, so visually it is somewhat familiar, but how they pronounce it is just crazy. It is very difficult to understand. However, the Swedes realize this and therefore everyone conveniently speaks English.
-Style: I really enjoy the Swedish style. For better or worse, everyone is quite conscious of how they look and dress. However, the Swedes are almost a little bit too trendy in my opinion (think H&M). Sweden is very expensive, so people seem to buy a few expensive items, but also a lot from H&M type of stores, making for a very experimental/trendy type of dress, but also meaning though that they do not necessarily keep their clothes for more than one season (again, think H&M- not the best quality and longest lasting of clothing). So basically I really like the Swedish style and it is great to see how everyone is dressed, but it is extremely trendy and therefore somewhat uniform, even in their "experimental" style.
-Everyone in Sweden is extremely nice, but it seems like they maintain a lot of insider/outsider notions. Since I am friends with some Swedes, going out at night and such I was able to comfortably meet people who were my friends' friends and such, but if one does not have some type of "in" it seems like it is difficult to meet people.
-By and by, it seems like a somewhat conservative society (in European contexts). Swedes are extremely law abiding, but also quite unrelaxed.

Overall, I think Sweden is a great country. Other than in Stockholm there isn't very much diversity, but the small town life has a great community and college feel, in Linkoping at least. Stockholm is a city that I think I could see myself living in, which is my new measure of distinguishing places that I visit (there are very few places that I don't like, but also few that I could really see myself living in).

Stockholm!

I've been in Stockholm for the past two days. I thought the city was beautiful when I visited a couple years ago, but it is so much better in the summertime! I would definitely say that Sweden is a place that one must see during the summer months. Yesterday I took a walk around Galma Stan, or the Old town, met Greta (friend that I met at the crayfish party) for fika, walked around the city center and did some shopping damage in some trendy Swedish stores, and then met Linnea (one of the Swedes I met from my friend Connor's "Atlantis" study abroad program) for the rest of the afternoon and evening. It was a day of walking around, which I really enjoy doing the first day of visiting a city in order to get your baring and "get to know" the town a bit before moving to museums and such.

I already said so, but let me just say again, Stockholm is beautiful! The weather has also been fantastic the past two days, making the gorgeous old yellow and orange buildings luminous against the bright blue sky.


View of the Galma Stan


View from the cafe where Greta and I took a fika


Cute bicycle in Galma Stan


Market in the city center. The yellow mushrooms, or kanterelles mushrooms, are everywhere in Sweden during the late summer/early fall months.

Today was another beautiful day in Stockholm that included a lot of walking around. Johan and I went to the Nordic Museum which turned out to be a bit of a let down, minus the exhibit about interior design in Sweden through the past few centuries. As for now, time for dinner!

Archipelago

This weekend we went to my friends’ summer homes on the archipelagos outside of Stockholm. The archipelago is very interesting; there’s a bunch of zoning laws so it is still quite ‘wild’ and there are just a handful of homes on each of the (many) archipelagos. The homes range from extremely luxurious and modern homes to very old cabins that don’t have running water.





The first night we went to Alex’s house and had a great night. We had dinner with his family and then us young ones went to the sauna. It’s a true Finnish (wood-burning) sauna. You spend about 3-4 hours “doing the sauna” wherein you go between the 90 degree Celsius sauna and jumping into the chilly Baltic Sea. They even do this in the winter, when the Baltic Sea is quite icy. They also like to have a few drinks while in the sauna, which ends up having quite the effect since you are sweating so much while in there but also consuming alcohol.

Saturday night we went to Johanna’s house. It is only accessible by a 20 minute boat ride, so we parked the car and then took her speed boat out to the small island (about 10 homes) where her place is. Her place is quite different from Alex’s, which was very modern; hers has been in her family for generations and it is much more of a ‘cabin’ feel, but it was great. Her house is in fact the only one on the island that has running water (toilet, etc), if that is any indicator of the age of these homes. Her place consists of the main cabin, a smaller side cabin, a garage type of thing with ping pong and whatnot in between the cabin and the water, and a sauna right near the water. This is all dispersed over a good amount of land, so it was very outdoors-y, which was great. While walking out to the sauna in the middle of the night I looked up into the sky and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars in my life, it was beautiful!

At Johanna’s we had a crayfish party, a traditional summertime activity in Sweden. You eat crayfish and take breaks every now-and-then to sing a traditional Swedish song and then take a shot of schnapps. Due to crayfish being actually quite little food but a struggle to get at that little bit, you get quite tipsy by the end of this 2-3 hour long dinner of crayfish and schnapps. We had a group of 10 people at the crayfish party, making for a very fun and festive night followed by some intense games of ping pong and then relaxing in the sauna.

The weekend at the archipelago was great. Their two places were very different moods, which was cool to experience. I really enjoyed the sauna and would love to maybe have one someday in my home. I got to meet yet another very warm and welcoming Swedish family at Alex’s and then some very fun Swedish peers at Johanna’s, which was great! The weather ended up not being perfect (first day too choppy to water ski, second day rainy in the morning and then too chilly later to get some sun) but other than that, it was a great time seeing how the Swedes spend their summer.

5 days in Linköping

This week I've been in Linköping, a small college town in central Sweden. Although this is not exactly the tourist center of Sweden, it's been a lot of fun. I've met up with Swedish friends who were in Chicago last year, gone for a couple of runs along canals and through the woods, and basically just got to know the city and relaxed for a few days.


Me, Johanna, Heidi, Per, Sanna, Christofer, and Camilo (friends from Chicago!)

The highlight of the week was a two hour bike ride to the nearby town of Berg to a famous canal and system of locks. The ride was beautiful and I spent a lovely couple of hours there at the beach along the lake, indulging in some blueberry and strawberry ice cream, reading, and taking in the scenery.


Lock system


Me at the lake


Scenery along the bike ride



The weather this week has been perfect: around 72 degrees and fantastically sunny! This had made my opinion of Sweden (which was already pretty good) even better than when it was based off of my mid-February visit 2 years ago. There are flowers everywhere and many berry bushes throughout the woods, streets, and city. This, along with the beautiful Swedish homes, makes for very charming scenery.




Classes began this week at my friends' university. The Swedes are very festive with school spirit and song, which is great. I spent some time on campus one day to check it out, and it was quite entertaining. For the first two weeks of school there are about three upperclassmen for each program who dress in silly costume (Star Wars, Dinosaurs, Ancient Egyptians, etc.) and do not ever smile and walk in military style- single file and marching. They do this to intimidate the freshman in their programs, and are seen as the program leaders. Note the picture below of Scotsmen. Quite silly indeed. The first two weeks are also the biggest party weeks of the year, making the atmosphere in this small college town very fun.

Way Out West

Johanna and me the first day of the festival

The weekend in Goteborg and the Way Out West festival was great! A little exhausting, but very very fun. It was my first multi-day music festival and it was very interesting; it's a bit overwhelming to see a large number of one's favorite bands all at the same time. Along with overwhelming, it's also quite exhausting to be standing basically all day, all weekend, minus a few drink breaks which does not exactly help with the exhausted feeling. But, hey, I'm young and in freaking Sweden -- the exhaustion can go by the wayside.


Goteborg


We arrived in Goteborg on Thursday evening and took a walk and got some food before going to our Hostel, which was located pretty conveniently between the city center and the park of the festival- about a 15 minute walk from the latter. A cool thing about the Way Out West festival in particular is that during the day you have pass to the concert itself, and during the night you can get into clubs where some of the less-known bands are playing into the wee hours of the morning. The not as cool thing about that though is that while the festival had thousands of people, the clubs can only fit a few hundred, making for lots of queues.

the crowd during one of the performances

Now on to the music itself; I'll summarize my favorites in show.
-Beirut is my favorite band, so of course I enjoyed seeing them. In all honestly, they weren't as good as I was expecting, however at this performance there were only 5 band members, and in videos I've seen of them usually there's more, so that probably makes a difference. They were definitely still good, but I think it would be better to see them in a smaller, more intimate venue, not a festival.
-Swedish pop sensation Robyn was fantastic! A lot of her songs I recognized from the US, so that was good. She's a lot of fun and her stage presence is both very Swedish and very impressive, making for a great performance.
-Anthony and the Johnsons was incredibly beautiful. He sang with the Goteborg symphony orchestra, making for a very emotional performance.
-Patrick Wolf also had a really good stage presence. I have some of his music and have always thought it was okay but never listened to it too much, but the music was even better live (a sign of a good musician!). I think I'll enjoy his music much more now after seeing him live.
-Vampire Weekend was a surprisingly good show; I love their music but have heard that lately they haven't been that great live, so my expectations were low. I think that they were actually my favorite of the festival; they were great fun and I would definitely like to see them again in concert.
-I had never heard of Amadou & Mariam before, but we went to their show and it was reggae music, which I really like if it is good, and they were fantastic!
-Asher Roth, what some call the new Eminem (aka not particularly my taste of music- rap) was actually a great show and he put on an impressive performance.
-Lily Allen was also a great performance. Similar to Patrick Wolf, I knew of her but didn't feel much about her music, but I thought she was great live and think I will enjoy her music much more now.

Johanna, Alex and me having a break from the music

All in all, the weekend was great. I think that I prefer concerts to festivals, mostly due to the intimacy of the venues where the bands that I like usually play, but the festival was great fun and I met a lot of really cool people. The larger group of people we were with consisted of about 12 or so people, making for a very fun atmosphere for the weekend!

Arrival in Sweeeeden

I'm exhausted, but my goal was to stay up until 9 pm Sweden time, and I am forty minutes from that, so soon I will get some rest. I am sipping on some chamomile tea, planning the weekend in Goteborg with Johanna. Her dad cooked us dinner and it was fantastic! First we had asparagus with some freshly grated cheese on it and salmon that is not "smoked" but very similar- not cooked, smokey tasting, but her father said it wasn't exactly smoked, so I'm not sure what to call it but you get the idea. It was very delicious. Main course was a salad with tomato, mushrooms, artichoke, and yellow peppers, with rice and very thinly sliced beef, two pieces together with cheese and Italian ham in between. For dessert I think we are having ice cream.
Tonight was a very lovely welcome to Sweden and I am ready to get a good night of sleep and take off to Goteborg tomorrow morning.

Björked

Wed Aug 12, 6:25 AM in Iceland
I’m now in Reykjavik, awaiting my flight to Stockholm. The flight from Boston was ok; I didn’t get much sleep on it, and there was a woman behind my who forgot that touch screens are in fact attached to someone else’s chair and therefore should be lightly touched, not repeatedly punched, and also my movies weren’t working, but I got some reading done and it went by reasonably fast. The flight from Boston to Iceland was only about 5 hours long, which is not bad at all.
The flight landed in Reykjavik at 11:40 PM their time. It is now 6:30 AM. Needless to say, I’m kinda sleepy. However, a large part of my eight hour long layover was spent sleeping, so I can’t complain. The airport here is beautiful but reasonably small and when I took a brief walk at about 4 AM time here, there were only 5 other passengers in the terminal awaiting morning flights like me, it was a bit eery. However, to add a little pizzaz to that, the security here patrols the airport on foot-powered scooters, which made my smile each time one went whooshing past.


My dinner consisted of an Icelandic Viking beer and their famous skyr.is yogurt, which is incredibly delicious and even has this clever little fold-up plastic spoon attached to it. How practical!

My breakfast is now consisting of another skyr.is yogurt and an apple. Most people know that Iceland is much cheaper than it used to be due to the severe collapse of their banking system and therefore economy, but I got my dinner- one beer, one yogurt, and one water, for $5! Not bad at all, even better than I was expecting.
The sun came out here at around 5 am and the landscape is barren from the view here, but very intriguing. I am very much looking forward to my return to Iceland.



Also, as you can see in this entry I uploaded my first picture to my blog. I will definitely be adding more photos with future entries!