This past weekend I went on the first of what is hopefully many trips to Sweden. My main reason for going was for the cruise from Stockholm to Turku and back.
Lucky for me there is a bus that goes straight from my apartment to the Helsinki-Vantaa airport. I really like this airport. There are only 2 terminals and when I arrived there on Thursday morning it was nearly empty. Blue1 had switched my flight around, so I had to talk to a person at the desk. It took less than 5 minutes to get a new boarding pass, which was a nice change from my previous flight experiences this year.
Sweden is 1 hour behind Finland, so I left Helsinki at 12:30 and arrived in Stockholm at 12:30! I thought that was kind of cool. A friend whom I had met this summer at a music festival and who looks like a viking picked me up (we shall call him Henrik), and we went to the old part of Stockholm to do some sightseeing before the boat left. I saw the outside of the palace and some museums, but we were too late to take a tour of any of the buildings. I did get to see the center square of the old town (the Stortorget) where in 1520 the Danish king executed most of the Swedish nobility. Nearby there was this
cool statute, symbolizing the Swedes defeating someone (I think).
It was drizzling and cloudy the whole day, so we went to "the medieval pub." Sweden uses the Swedish crown instead of the euro, so a beer was only $6 as opposed to $8 (yay). One of Henrik's friends showed up, and a couple of hours later we left for the cruise ship. It was the Silja line, and had a huge picture of two giraffes on the side. Not very metal.
We ate a quick dinner and then rushed down to “duty-free.” They sell pretty much every kind of alcohol possible here, along with candy and perfume, at about 50% of the price it would cost on land. After hanging out in another person's cabin for a couple hours, we went to the Dio tribute, which was even more hilarious than I'd thought it would be. Messiah Marcolin, among several other singers, was walking around doing the
Doom Dance while singing
Heaven and Hell. Pretty ridiculous.
Then we drank some more and ended up going to bed at around 4 am. In the US I'm used to going to sleep on the weekends at latest 3. However, here everyone is staying up past 6 am routinely. They seem very rested all the time too, I don't know how they do it. Some of the afterparties for Erasmus (the European exchange organization) parties go from 7 am until 12 pm. Seriously ridiculous.
Then, the next day I went back to Henrik's apartment and watched Sweden's Biggest Loser. So much for everyone in Sweden being a model :P
It was a good trip, and nice that it's so close to Helsinki. I'm doing it again on Dec. 2nd!!
