An ice experience impossible to forget!

I don't know what I was thinking when I packed for Sweden, but it was somewhere along the lines of, "hmmm, this is Scandinavia we're talking about, and it is February after all.... oh whatever, I'll just take this light jacket and hope for the best." Of the many Stockholm/Canada similarities, snow is the coldest, and the easiest to underestimate. But it has its good sides! Living in a French city perpetually overhung by Eyeore-like rainclouds made me forget the pleasures of walking through a snowy city, full of tiny snowmen and kids on toboggans....


After the first few enchanting hours, though, the reality of snow begain to creep in the seams of my Pumas: SNOW IS COLD. And despite popular belief, being Canadian doesn't make me impervious to freezing temperatures! Result = several dozen hot chocolates, creative scarf arrangements, and all of us huddling in the bathroom when we got home, thawing out on the only heated floor in the apartment.

Rough translation: BEWARE! OUTRAGEOUSLY CUTE PUPPIES AT LARGE!!

Unexpected food fact about Swedes: they like their nutrients packaged in toothpaste tubes, be it bacon, cheese, or.... fish eggs.


I tried to be brave. I did! I ate stuff I have never eaten before! But despite the sexy Tilda Swinton scene in Benjamin Button, I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the fish-eggs-from-a-tube (unlike Mattias, my enthuasiastic host and friend, who generously offered to eat my share).


I did, though, eat raw herring, which is served everywhere in Sweden (along with potatoes - oh my goodness, the Swedes LOVE their potatoes). And not only did I eat the raw herring, but I actually kinda sorta didn't mind it, which is a big step for me, a girl who has resisted the sushi trend and every other seafood movement her whole life.

Very typical Swedish lunch, with herring, potatoes, a creamy fish sauce, and green onion:


I hadn't seen anything, though, until I went to Sweden's national culture museum, and saw examples of Swedish meals from past centuries. Amidst the million variations of herring, there was a roasted swan! With head and wings still in tact!!! And a diamond danginling from its beak, as though in some kind of grotesque gesture of forgiveness for all the butchery and roasting...


I guess I don't have to tell you that this isn't MY plate:

Traveling to another country can be as much of a gastronomical adventure as a sightseeing one, and sometimes, after several such "adventures," there's nothing better in the entire world than to eat something familiar and comforting and full of delicious calories that have nothing to do with seafood. Which is why the blueberry pancakes I had on Sunday morning were the best pancakes I have ever had in my life!


Let's just pause here for a minute in memory of the perfectness of those pancakes.....




Sigh.





Back to the sightseeing part of this adventure: since Stockholm is a city built on several islands, there is water everywhere, and wherever there is water there are boats, waiting for tourists to come and take their pictures.

In the distance of this picture is Nordiska, the Swedish cultural museum, mentioned above:

Another view of Stockholm:

Two things that I need to handle better when preparing for winter conditions: (1) find out some way of taming my hair, which buckles and frizzes like an old wool mitten the second snow is near and makes me all self-conscious, and (2) stop wearing jeans that are so long they drag in the snow and soak water up to knee height and freeze my legs, which is, you know, mildly unpleasant.

But I hope none of that sounds like complaining, because I LOVE being in this city and indulging in my very favourite part of travel: getting entirely lost in an unfamiliar city (but always only a phone call away from being found again). This is Stockholm's City Hall, where the annual banquet for Nobel Prize winners is held every year (mysteriously named "the Blue Room") (Also where my friend Mattias formally received his MA degree):

A view of City Hall from the other side of the river:

Of the bazilion other touristy/museumy things worth seeing in Stockholm, my second favourite was the Vasa Museum. That place is a dream come true for those who, like me, once went through a very intense obsession with Lego pirate ships and their tiny canons.

The story, as far as I could gather, is that halfway through the 17th century the King of Sweden ordered that the biggest possible ship be built to intimidate Poland. It turned into one of those "bigger, faster, stronger" stories, where what mattered most was a country's ego, at the expense of everything else.

In the end the ship was so enormous and wobbly that it immediately sank five seconds after it was launched, before it had even cleared the harbour. Imagine how embarrassing that would be!! The kicker is that the shipbuilders suspected that their ship wasn't seaworthy, so once they got it floating they had several dozen sailors sprint from one side of the deck to the other to test it out. They had to cancel the test after only a few sprints, because the ship was keeling so steeply that it might have turned right over. But of course the king ignored the results of this experiment and told them to hurry the heck up and launch the thing.

(Listen to me! "Keeling"! Like I know anything about ships!!!)

333 years later, in 1961, the ship was finally hauled up from the bottom of the Stockholm harbour, and evenutally the Swedes built a musuem around it.

Isn't that cool?? A 300-year old ship! And you can go and see it!! And touch it! And they even fished up the skeletons of all the people who didn't make it off the ship before it sank, and you can visit those too, which inspires a delicious mixture of creepiness and insatiable curiosity.

It was impossible for me to take a decent picture of the ship, which was truly massive, so instead I just stole this one from Wikipedia:

On the right you can see part of the ship, and on the left, a little model of it with its original colours, which I did manage to snap:

I wish I could be ten years old again, with this model to play with. I could feel that part of myself, the ten-years-old part, leaping with excitement.

ABRUPT CHANGE OF SUJECT:

On an entirely different outing, I joined some friends for the most unusual cocktail I've ever had. Actually, the cocktail itself was pretty standard Megan fare (raspberry vodka), but the location was entirely unusual!!

Actually, that could be the slogan for my entire holiday in Stockholm, not just the part where I got tipsy in a giant igloo...

Cocktail glasses made out of ice! Bar made out of ice! Walls made out of ice!

I sort of wanted to leave with one of those furry coats, but the staff had obviously anticipated that possibility and were super-diligent about making sure you de-robed before checking out. Regardless, the twenty minutes spent there represent the most fun I've ever had while sitting on an ice cube.

My totally favourite place to visit in Stockholm, though, turned out to be one of the last things I did, with our entire gang: we went to Skansen, which is a big "outdoor musuem" on one of the islands, meant to recreate old Scandinavian farms and stores and lifestyle. It had kind of a pioneer village-y feel, with guides dressed in period clothing, old toys and sports equipment to try out, and dozens of tiny, beautiful roads to wander....

And it also had animals! Like this very fat, very self-satisfied hog.

A pack of wolves and their noon meal:


Tycho's distant cousin:

Santa's reindeer in the off-season:

(side note: Swedish people have no idea who Rudolph is! And Sweden in the reindeer capital of the world!! Shocking.)

Mooses:

Pauline tries an old pair of skiis:

Hippie sheep:

The entire week was pretty amazing, and to give it a movie finish we left Skansen and walked bravely out onto the frozen Baltic Sea and wrote our names in the snow (and some of us did strange turtle dances):





That's it from Stockholm. In the morning I'm flying to Paris for a second, and entirely different, chapter of this holiday adventure, which will involve a VIP visitor from Canada, some shenanigans in Amsterdam, and probably a lot of champagne. I will splash it all across this blog (the pictures, not the champagne) once I get back to Lille and life goes back to some kind of normal rhythm, somewhere in the very distant future (ie. in two weeks).

Au revoir for now!