Stockholm Syndrome!

To My loyal blog readers (and those who casually happen upon it):

I know it's been forever since I last blogged, which is actually a very positive sign for my state of mind. It means instead of merely writing about Berlin I have been out truly enjoying it. I don't want to leave! And.......without further ado, here I continue my blog. Stockholm baby!

As most of you know, this weekend, I went to Stockholm with Evelyn, a girl from the program who is in my German class. Now, I wanted this weekend actually to go to Edinburgh, my interest in which was based on the fact that the two things I know that came from Scotland are awesome, 1) The band "The Fratellis" 2) Braveheart. Baam! Buuuut I couldn't find anyone who wanted to go to Scotland with me, and due to my lovely physical appearance, trusting nature, and ability to be easily tricked traveling by myself might be the worst idea ever. Still, I really wanted to get out of Berlin and take advantage of Europe being small (which it really isn't, all Americans think it's just like a bigger Epcot Center but actually it takes forever to get from place to place, like it's 7 hours or so by train to Munich, maybe longer) and travel. Stockholm has never really been my idea of a great time (or in my ideas that prominently at all for that matter) but I figured, what the hell, and asked Evelyn if I could tag along with her to Stockholm, a trip she had already planned. We left for the airport on Thursday Night at about 7, our flight took off at 9:30, and by about 10:45 we had landed in Stockholm. YAY! Just kidding. My first overwhelming feeling was kind of panic. I have been some place where I didn't speak A WORD of the language. A WORD. Even if I went to Japan I know how to say "hi" and "thank you" and things like that. But not a single Swedish word. Oh and there currency is insane. Typical price for a meal 89 SEK. What is that?! I literally was afraid when we landed and I bought my bus ticket for 180 SEK that I had agreed to spend like $800 or something. Yeah and I had to buy a bus ticket because the Stockholm airport to which Ryan Air flies into (the no frills airline) is ONE AND A HALF hours from the city itself. ONE AND A HALF. So Evelyn and I pile on to the bus, and we see there is a movie playing, and the movie is "Saturday Night Fever", always, in my experience, a bad omen. Finally we reach the central station. We go to Central Terminal, already having decided instead of taking a cab to our hostel like chickens, we are just going to go balls out and take the train. I have a terrible sense of direction, as you all know, but I am EXCELLENT at navigating subways. I don't know why it's ever hard for people, but it's super easy to me. I looked at a map, saw we were going on the red line to someplace starting with an S, and bought a 72 pass card and descended with Evelyn to the platform. Um. Track 1: heading to Skaaaardsnald, Track 2: Slussel Track 3: Soobgenfug. No colors. Damn. So we ask someone, and he's like oh you want the T-Station, that's not here. Cool, where is it? Down the bridge on the left. We walk outside, there are 3 bridges. Again, Damn. When we finally find the T-Station like 20 minutes later I was so excited we did a picture of me in front of it making a T with my arms.



When we finally got to the hostel, it was probably 12:45, and it was a door on the side of a drugstore with ACCO HOSTEL written on it in black lettering, like the kind I used in high school for my cheerleading garage door sign. It did NOT look legit. And, there was no check-in. They sent you an e-mail prior to departing with the door codes to get into the hostel, into your room and then they gave us a bed number each. No front desk of any kind. So we get inside, enter our codes to our room, and the room already has people sleeping in it, and is pitch black. There are 5 Ikea bunk beds with white sheets. THAT'S IT. Weirder, when I first open the door the first thing we see is a skinny, hair guy, with black curly hair, laying on the bed face down, with gray tighty-whiteys and his ass (crack and all) in the air. Evelyn and I threw down our stuff and just decided to find a good bar on the hostel street to go to. We changed and got ready to go, and on our way out we bumped into this group of Italians hanging out by the bathroom, and we talked to them and asked them where was good to go get a drink. That's the great thing about Hostels, everyone is super friendly and from everywhere and willing to chat. They gave us some tips and we set off. We walk down and the street to where they told us to go, and unfortunately it closed at 1:00 and it's like 1:05 now. So I'm like, shit, okay, what now? So this group of guys pass by and I just asked them and they're like "we're going to this cocktail bar here, wanna come?" so we went there and hung out, and to a club afterward and then crashed back at the hostel.



I woke up Friday morning to the sound of heavily male voices in heavily-accented English. This is always a good sign in my experience. I am programed to be attracted like a moth to the flame to any sort of UK accent. So I walked over to the other side of the room and introduced myself, and starting chatting with them. It was a group of like 7 of them from Edinburgh, and I'm like, great, Edinburgh came to us! So while Evelyn went to take her lovely lovely communal shower, I was talking with the guys, and asking them if they would recommend visiting Edinburgh. And they were so funny. The combination of the accents, plus sarcasm, plus them being attractive guys was pretty potent. Like they told me they had tried to convince this American girl they met the other day in a club that Scotland was really ass backwards, so they told her they only just like 10 years ago got telephones and electricity and that their currency, "the Scottish Pound" was a pound of rocks with numbers painted on them. And then we were chatting about the hostel, which had this strict 50 SEK (like 5 Euros, SEK is 10x the Euro, and then 5 Euros is about 7.5$) for sleeping in the wrong numbered bed and also said, "no drinking, no smoking, no parties" on the door, so in heavily accented Scottish one of the guys did an impression of a Polish (because he does a good Polish accent not because anyone was in fact Polish) accent saying, "You want have fun, 100 SEK fine! You open window, 200 SEK! First day of breath is free and then you must pay 1 SEK per breath!" And then the originally curly haired guy that was the first person I saw with his crack in the air, was like, "yeah last night we went to McDonalds and ordered 100 cheeseburgers. And the guy was like, 'what do you really want' and I was like, 'I'm sorry I'm being a dick. I want 100 cheeseburgers." And the night before apparently one of the other guys, Sean, was doing Mitch Headberg impressions, really badly, and it was just so much fun. My ribs hurt from laughing. And they were just like that, loud, funny, and dirty.

So, Evelyn and I went to go get breakfast and go to museums and we told the guys we'd meet up with them later and go out together. And we went to the Vasa Museum which is this great 17th century ship that sunk in Stockholm harbor and was excavated 333 years later and since the water was brackish it was preserved really well and so now the whole ship is displayed at this museum and it's really really cool and Evelyn and I took about a million pictures. It also had the skeletal remains of some of the passengers aboard that died when it sunk and they reconstructed their faces using wax. It was so amazing. Oh, but the best part was the Sweden: 1628 exhibit which was supposed to show what life in Sweden at the time the ship sunk was like. And it had little vignettes staged with phrases like, "Olaf negotiates with Sven over the barrel of herring. Exquisite delicious herring are on the top but rotten, smaller herring are at the bottom." I was STRONGLY reminded of Rose from St. Olaf on the Golden Girls. Then we went to the Nordic Museum, which was ridiculous. It had traditional folk art, toys, houses, Swedish traditions, and then, randomly this exhibit about washing machines featuring notes in Swedish that said, "please clean out the lint trap my panties don't need dog hair in them!" with English translations beside them. And it's like, wait, what?!

So after going to the museums in the FREEZING cold (Stockholm was about -15 degrees Celsius compared to Berlin's 3 or 4 degrees) we had some coffee and met up with the Scottish boys again and went to this weird techno club. And Sean and Chris thought it was hilarious to keep creeping up behind me and sniffing my hair to freak me out, and Lewis and I chatted about his sheep farm on the Isle of Lewis (Bain told me "Lewis's mum had no imagination hence his name") and Bain kept singing Gold Digger and then complaining that "Swedish girls are dead beautiful but their fuckin' stuck up, mate. Like Scottish girls are game for a laugh, this is shit I want to go home. I'm a lad's lad I can't be bothered with this poufer music." And Evelyn and I danced and it was awesome awesome.

Saturday, Evelyn and I woke up and decided to wonder round Gamla Stan, which is the old town and has beautiful architecture and winding streets and is atop this hill. It was SO cold, so we kept walking ducking into shops and we took pictures of the weird mittens and kitch viking souvenir stuff that was on sale. It was a really relaxed fun day, culminating in us chilling back at the hostel with the Scots again, going to a bar, then another bar, then Evelyn and I catching the bus back at 3:45 to get to the airport at 5, to board our plane which left at 6:55. We were tired and crabby by the time we got home (about 9:30 for me) and I dived into bed, woke up, and here I am now. It was an amazing weekend but I'm really glad to be back in balmy Berlin, where at least I can speak/read the language.

I have midterms tomorrow, which obviously I'm not stoked about but it should be a nice week because we have like one class a day and then next week--Paris. Which I hope is OK, because this trip has taught me I don't always do well with French people... nurrm :-/