Stockholm!!

Proud to say I just went for a run in Sweden. Which makes that my fourth country I've gone for a run in. Not all that impressive, but when you consider I've only ever been to four countries in my life (and you can probably guess which ones), it's not so bad.

Borrowed shoes and ski socks, good enough!

There's fairly cheap plane tickets here, so I took advantage and came to visit Pallavi, an exchange student from the US living just outside of Stockholm. For 180 swedish kroner (a little under $30) I got a train/bus/tram pass that works everywhere in Stockholm. They have a really good public transportation system, and the past four days have been a blur of popping down and up from the underground, running for trains, taking giant escalators and being glad I wasn't figuring out the system on my own. It's all still a bit amazing for me, having never even been on a train before I came to Norway. I'm sure this is nothing compared to bigger cities though.

Giant escalators (yet another thing that is probably normal to most people, but I got really excited about and had to take an extra trip up and down for the fun of it)

Here's a map by the way, showing where Stockholm is. Bergen is on the west coast of Norway, a bit further north than Oslo. I had no idea Stockholm was on the opposite side of Sweden before I booked my flight and bothered to look up where it was.

We came back to her host families house to drop off my backpack, before taking the train back into Stockholm. My first impression of the neighborhood where she lives was....IKEA!! And their bathroom has a shower with no walls or curtain (but inside a bathtub), so the water sprays all over the floor (which has a drain). Can't say I quite understand this. It's a beautiful neighborhood though!


We went back to Stockholm and wandered around stores, then bought mcflurries and went down to see the water. I tried to ask for a mcflurry and a cup of water in swedish (just saying "vatten" instead of "vann") but got answered in english.

Being around people speaking Swedish is like going back in time to, say, November. When I could understand, but it took full focus and concentration, I couldn't just listen passively. After an hour or so of dinner conversation my brain just wants to scream "ok, that's enough, can't I just relax for a bit?" and smash itself on the table. But head smashing isn't really a socially acceptable response. It's getting easier though, as I start to get used to the different sounds and words. For some words Swedish has this weird sound that's like "hcwoooo", which sounds more like skis on snow than part of a word. So it's mostly when that sound pops up that I get really confused. It's also really neat to be able to understand a new language, and to feel like Norwegian is easy to understand in comparison!

On Friday we woke up to go to Pallavi’s school, the main goal being to eat lunch there before going to Stockholm. Students in Swedish schools get a free warm lunch every day, and it was tacos, ground beef and salad, as good of a meal as you’d pay five or six dollars for in the cafeteria at home. 

At one point Pallavi went to get water or something, and I was standing alone in the canteen for a bit when a lunch lady came up, looked at me strangely, and said HEY! My first response was to walk away from her and hope to blend into the crowd, but she followed me, and I tried to play the dumb exchange student who doesn’t understand anything until I found Pallavi to explain to her who I was. Somehow she recognized me as being new out of 800 kids? Turns out I just needed a slip of paper saying I was allowed to be at school, they still let me eat lunch.

They got like half the letters in my name right? haha

We sat with two girls in her class who are going on exchange next year, one to Costa Rica, and one to Canada! She doesn’t know where in Canada she’ll be yet though. We went along to what I thought was going to be a Swedish class, but turned out to be in English. The school is laid out more like a summer camp than a school, with different buildings for each classroom, like cabins. So you have to go outside to go from class to class. It was a really nice layout, although maybe not so much in the middle of winter. 

They also don't use laptops in class like we do in Norway, so it felt more like a class at home. 

I got asked a few times in Sweden if I noticed any differences between Norway and Sweden. It's a hard question to answer for Norway and Canada, and I've spent a lot more time in them and seen a lot more of Canada and Norway than I have Sweden. One big difference between Stockholm and Bergen was the transportation, how they have way more trains and trams, along with the underground system. You also have to scan your card before you come into the train station, instead of the conductor walking along the train and checking everyone. I don't know if that's just a city to city difference though, and Stockholm's population is almost 4 times bigger than Bergen's. 

I also answered that things were more yellow and blue, and looked more Ikea. Which sounds stupid, but they  do! Like how the school is yellow, and in the picture above you can see that the garbage can is yellow too. And lots of the trains were yellow and blue too. The post boxes as well. And these signs:

We spent the rest of the day shopping, and ate "polar bread" with pesto and cheese for dinner on a park bench. It looked like this after a day squished in my bag, except a lot greener than it looks here:

And it tasted amazing! I'd missed pesto so much!

On Saturday we went to the royal palace:

 One of the guards - I said everything was yellow and blue!

 On the way to the palace

As close as I was allowed to get to the guard for a picture 

We walked a bit through the palace, which isn't where the royal family actually lives, but they come back and forth to do business, and the rooms are still used for special occasions. 

The only picture I got of inside; I just kept thinking it would be a really fun place to play hide and seek or tag. Don't think the other tourists or guides would have appreciated that though. 

Then we ate our pesto sandwiches outside on a bench, and happened to be in front of a wedding at a finnish church, which was just ending. So we got entertained by all the women trying to cross the cobblestone street in stilletos. Then a horde of japanese tourists came by dragging their suitcases, cameras around their necks, and not having much more luck with the cobblestones. I felt very un-tourist in comparison, which was nice.

We bought ice cream:

I may possibly have spent the equivalent of eight dollars on this double scoop of brownie and chocolate-orange ice cream... so worth it!

And then wandered some more around Gamla Stan and the other older touristy areas around it.

                                                                                                               

(Sorry for the giant gap that might be here, I can't seem to get rid of it)

Saturday night we visited Pallavi's first host family for dinner. This meant several hours of conversation with me speaking Norwegian and everyone else speaking Swedish. It got tiring, but it's crazy to think that we were speaking two different languages and (for the most part) understanding eachother! We watched the eurovision song contest, where the 25 countries remaining in the final round performed their songs (pretty much all in english), people voted, then they went one by one through how each of the 40 something countries voted. It took forever! People living in a country aren't allowed to vote for their own, and Pallavi's host parents were guessing how countries would vote based on alliances during the world wars and who was "friends" with who.  It was strange to see representatives from all the voting countries giving the results in English, I've never heard so many accents in such a short time! Azerbaijan won, of all countries, with Italy second and Sweden third. 

The big surprise on Sunday was.....that we could shop!! I've gotten fairly used to the idea in Norway that if you need something on a Sunday, you don't have much choice besides the gas station. Even if you just need some ice cream for dessert. We spent most of the day at the Nordiska museum, which has displays about Swedish life and history. 

It covered everything from a history of fashion, to food and dishes through the years, to the Sami (native people here). 

Map of where the Sami live/lived in Norway, Sweden and Finland

I'm not going to go into detail about everything we saw there, since this post is really long as it is, but it was really interesting! (And free if you're under 19). I think the reception lady was a bit confused when we spoke Norwegian and Swedish to her, and said we were from Canada and the US. Four countries going on at once!

Monday I came back "home" to Bergen, after taking the train and bus with Pallavi to the airport (she was nice enough to get up at 6 am and travel the hour and a half by train and bus to keep me company and make sure I didn't get off at the wrong place).

So that was my weekend in Stockholm. It was amazing!!

A few more pictures/random observations:

• You could text vending machines to order stuff from them!

• They have giant wheels of knekkebrød, as well as the normal squares we have here:

• And they had butt rests at the train station - too high to sit on, but just for leaning against - smart!

• Speed bumps = farthinder:

• With Swedish, it often happened that I wouldn't be able to read a word or phrase on a sign, but when Pallavi read it out loud I would understand. It seems like written Swedish is further from Norwegian than spoken Swedish. I don't know if "it often happened" was a weird way to phrase that or not - I tend to invent weird sentence structure now and not be able to tell if it's correct or not.
• On one random street they used flower boxes instead of speed bumps; you had to drive a little obstacle course of flower boxes!

I got home after about 6 hours of travelling, only one of which was on the plane. Train-bus-plane-bus-train-bus-home. Lots of switching and a fair bit of walking, but it's really nice to be able to travel for so cheap, and not be reliant on people driving me.

Today was Norway's national day, I'll write a post about that later. One last picture from Stockholm: