Pannkakor, Fjäderholmarna, and Vasa

Continuing right from where I left off... in the afternoon, on our last day in London, we met up with Mom and Dad, Auntie Maria, Lauren and Uncle Mario in the airport. London City Airport is so small and easy to deal with! If this is an option for you flying in or out of London - definitely do it. Heathrow is big like O'Hare... it's nice to not have to walk 2 miles to your gate every once and a while. The flight to stockholm is close to 2.5 hours and we were due to arrive at 10:30PM. After landing, we hopped in a taxi to Auntie Gloria's and Uncle Raj's apartment in a north east Stockholm neighborhood called Lidingö. We had a delicious, Malaysian style chicken and rice dinner and stayed up drinking wine and chatting (and watching soccer) until past 1AM! Finally, exhausted, Andy and I take a cab to Gamla Stan, which is the "Old Town" neighborhod of Stockholm. Our hostel is on such a small road that the taxi can't get us all the way there! Thank goodness the streets are well lit and we're up north close to land with a midnight sun, and outside was just "dusky" and not pitch black - because when we got out of that cab, we weren't exactly sure of where we were.

 Super narrow streets!

The entrance to our hostel: Old Town Lodge. I really recommend this place - it was extremely cheap for Stockholm, the facilities were clean and the staff was super friendly 

By the way, in case you're wondering, I'm currently on a boat heading from Balestrand, back to Bergen. It's a four hour boat ride, so I have plenty of time to yap about Stockholm ;) I'll post about Norway later! 

In the morning, we asked the lady who runs our hostel if she knows of any good places to get Swedish pancakes... and she DIDN'T. Can you believe that? I mean, who doesn't scope out somewhere to get Swedish pancakes the very minute they're in Stockholm? Anyway, all attempts at googling were inconclusive, so we just set out in search for some. It took a while.... in fact... we almost gave up and had some meatballs for lunch (it was past noon)... then Andy found it! Cafe Kladdkaken (I learned later, that Kladdkaken means some kind of chocolate cake that they also had at the cafe) had a sign for pancakes (actually the sign said "pannkakor"... good thing our Swedish is so well tuned that we knew what that meant... right...)

This is legitimately one of my happiest moments on this trip. Just... so... happy...

I could literally eat these every morning for the rest of my life and be the happiest person ever. They come with whipped cream (not too sweet... it's more buttery than sweet... SO GOOD) and Lingonberry jam (also not too sweet, but sweeter than the cream). Those two mixed together on those pancakes is literally heaven in a breakfast. (Fun fact, you can get these in Rockford, IL at the Stockholm Inn... the Lingonberry jam is not nearly as good, and they come with butter and not whipped cream... but otherwise, they're quite good for it being Rockford and all.) If it hadn't been for Alec and Amanda taking us to Stockholm Inn, we probably would not have sought out these pancakes as aggressively as we did. SO WORTH IT. Anyway, Grandpa says I talk about food too much in this blog... so I'll get on with it now. Food is arguably the best part about travelling though...

After breakfast, we covered a lot of Stockholm on foot! We saw the Royal Palace and tried to go to the National Museum, but it was closed for renovations :( Gamla Stan is so small that it's hard to believe that that used to be all of Stockholm back in the day. Stockholm is an island city consisting of over 30,000 islands if you include the Archipelago. As you can imagine, the vast majority of these islands are not inhabited by humans... but the city is growing by about 20,000 people every year... pretty soon they'll have to start shuffling the new movers to the more remote islands. The taxes are extremely high in Sweden (and in all of Scandinavia), and there is a large wealth gap between the richest and the poorest (sounds familiar).

After lot of exploring and poking in random shops (yes, Andy found the Games Workshop), we had dinner in the square by the Nobel Museum at Restarang Stortorgskallaren. Looks like I'm back on food already... well... it was really good! I had the meatballs with mashed potatoes :D We ate outside and there was a guy playing the clarinet in the square... so it was quite nice.

We were staying at a hostel called Old Town Lodge and it was 20 times nicer than the one in London! The bathrooms were clean, we had a room to ourselves, it was quiet... no pub attached though. No matter... we can't afford to drink in Scandinavia anyway. Actually, now that I'm on that topic, let's talk money for a second here. Sweden is not within the Euro Zone and uses the Swedish Krona. The ratio from krona to USD is 6.8:1... which is hard to get used to at first! Don't be fooled by this, everything is ridiculously expensive here. My meatballs at dinner were 178 kr ($26) and my glass of wine was 105 kr ($15.44). We booked the budget room in the hostel with no window! It was a little box - thank goodness it had good ventilation and wasn't hot at all. We were very comfortable! If you have a lot of money, Europe can offer you every luxury you could want... but if you're trying to stretch your money, you have to be really careful while booking! Read LOTS of reviews, look carefully at the negative comments and decide if those are dealbreakers for you. 

The following morning, we were up bright and early to meet my parents and my Auntie Gloria at the harbor for the "Good Morning Stockholm" boat tour! The Swedes like to start their morning with coffee and a special pastry that is very similar to a cinnamon bun. So while you're walking through the city, you can smell the delicious buns being baked (am I already talking about food again?). Okay, so, we board the boat - it's a pretty small tour... I guess not a lot of people opt for the 8:30AM tour group! The boat takes us through the city as the guide points out a few building of interest along the away... like the Vasa museum (we'll go to that later) and a theme park right on the water with carnival-like roller coasters. The destination for this tour is Fjäderholmarna (Fee-eh-der-hole-mar-na) or "Feather Island", which is an island in the Archipelago that is now set up for visitors to come and enjoy the nature, shop at small shops, and eat at a few cafes. There is also a whiskey distillery on the island! 

The size here makes it hard to read, but the sign says the island's name: Fjäderholmarna

Pike heads hung up like trophies!

We're all in a circle listening to our tour guide... and this duck... just waddles up and into our circle and starts quacking at us. 

After our tour, Mom and Dad got to experience some Swedish pannkakor on the island while we got to know our tour guide, Frida, a little. She taught us how to pronounce some Swedish words and politely giggled at our miserable attempts at her language. Somehow we got on the topic of how when you visit a city, you tend to only see the nice parts of it... and that not everyone in Stockholm is rolling in dough. In fact, she was the one who told us about the wealth gap, and how the mega-high taxes really wipe out those who have very little. This kind of perspective is always interesting, because sometimes you put places on such a high pedestal and you just assume that everyone who lives there is living a perfectly comfortable life because their country is so well run... but there is good and bad to all situations. High taxes mean great health care benefits, access to higher education for all (without thousands in student loans), excellent care for the sick and the old... These are all topics that Americans argue about all the time, but I bet you that if Americans were told to fork out the percentages of taxes that the Swedes and the Norwegians do... they'd be singing a different tune, grabbing their guns and calling for impeachment (oh wait... they're doing that anyway). 

We hit up Skansen, the cultural village, after Feather Island, but the weather wasn't cooperating and we didn't last long. Naturally, we managed to find the bakery and stuff ourselves on previously mentioned cinnamon buns and Swedish versions of "elephant ears". We also saw some glass blowers and an old school machine shop. After paying a visit to some very chatty cows (moooo), we left to go to the Vasa Museum.

This is Stockholm's second most famous museum (second to the Abba museum of course... LOL totally kidding. Vasa is the number one most famous... there really is an Abba museum though... Mom begged me to go... embarrassing. We didn't have time ;) ) The Vasa is a huge vessel commissioned by the King of Sweden at the time (Gustavus) and designed to strike fear into the enemy. However, the ship was too tall and too narrow... and she sank after firing celebratory cannons on the beginning of her first voyage. She lay at the bottom of the Baltic for 300 years, until they brought her up in the 1950's. The concentrations of salt water and fresh water that mix together to form the Baltic Sea, was just the right conditions to keep the Vasa extremely well preserved. In fact, this Brackish water (as it's called) create the perfect conditions to view many well preserved ship wrecks off the coast of Sweden. If you're a diver, you can actually take tours that'll take you scuba-ing around ship wrecks! 

The Vasa was then brought back to life and the museum was built. She is still 98% original! This was definitely one of the coolest things we did in Stockholm. I highly recommend it if you visit! Dad didn't want to go because he claimed it was glorifying an engineering failure... hehe. This may be true, but the museum itself, showcases engineering mastery just in bringing the ship out of the water and restoring it so well!

This about sums up our two days in Stockholm! After the Vasa Museum, we took the train back to Auntie Gloria's and had delicious, homemade chicken satay! Who knew we'd have so much great Malaysian food in Sweden! After another late night nomming and drinking (also the night the US lost to Belguim... boooo), Andy and I sleepily rode back to hostel to spend our last night before heading to Norway in the morning.