Saturday, June 5

Stockholm

After my sister-in-law dropped us at the airport and drove our crew back to her house, Ryan and I began our next adventure. What would I do without her?!!

We had uneventful flights and luckily the flight wasn't full so I got to pick a window seat on an empty row as we descended into Stockholm. As we got closer, the land below began to look like muddy, dark puffy clouds while the water was a dark night sky. I've never seen anything like it before and it made me nervous for all the boats I could barely see. Stockholm itself is a city located on 14 islands and I've just never been an islander before other than Venice and I guess you could even say the visit to London since Great Britain is a big island? Oh I don't know!

Anyhow, we're having a grand ol' time here! Sweden makes me think of vikings and tall, thin, blonde, naturally beautiful and intelligent women. When I interned for a summer at the UN, the delegate from Sweden fit that description so I guess you could say she is my standard. So many bleach blondes here! Ryan simply thought it'd be a cold place and he was cold today when we took a boat to a castle. He forgot a jacket and I forgot to remind him. We've had fabulous weather, sunny mid-60s but back to the beginnings.

We're staying at the Hotel Hellsten that blends "modern and traditional," and this picture of our room fits that to a tee. It smells of wonderful cedar because there's a sauna in our bathroom. I'm not a sauna gal but Ryan loves them.


After checking in, we were sufficiently starving and headed down to the food festival. First we came across these sweets made, no doubt, for Swedish National Day on June 6.

I think festival prices were reasonable, 15-50 kronas per item which works out to be about $2-7. We tried quite a few things like these from a Garlic and Shots stand. Notice, there's no shots here just a chicken curry taco, fries with aoili (a delicious garlic sauce, yummy with fries), and some real bland garlic bread.


I had a nice sweet chicken curry kebab from the Waan Thai stand while Ryan enjoyed his BBQ chicken and fries. The chicken pad thai was a flop but we moved on.


It seems fries come with everything in Europe and they're so much better than your McDonalds or, dare I say Wendy's?! I do. I do dare and say it with gusto! I find fries are one of the easier things for me to not order but Ryan insists on ordering them and then I can't bear to not try one . . . or twenty. Grrrr. Here's a look at what the crowds looked like, lots of beer and wine flowin'!


See that beautiful blue sky?! Oh how I've missed you! Germany's had a LOT of rain since April.

And then we happened on these little beauties. A coconut chocolate coffee mousse-like concoction, nice and rich. We tried a couple others, but none compared.


We realized our eyes were hungrier than our stomachs and quit while we were ahead. Since we hadn't done enough homework before our trip and many sights close between 4 and 6pm, we didn't know what to do with our evening. We stumbled upon a movie theater across from this familiar sight! One on every block! Haven't seen one since leaving Virginia!


Since we realized we hardly ever go to the movies anymore, we leapt at the chance! American movies are shown here with Swedish subtitles and we were just in time for a showing of Iron Man 2. Fun diversion, such a guy shoot'em up flick.

A full day to prepare for on the morrow, we hit the hay - then and now. Hopefully I'll get Saturday's adventures on here soon!