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!

Insert big wiener/tight buns joke here

Full Stockholm update coming very very soon!

London: not just in Ontario anymore

Finally able to post again! Hip hip! Cheerio! Bloke!

I am two weeks behind in blog posts, which is like ancient history given current circumstances. I kind of forget where I live sometimes because the last few weeks have been so full of travel and seedy hotels and fancy apartments and OH MY GOODNESS so much food. And there's no en in sight: tomorrow I leave for Stockholm, and then Paris, and then Amsterdam, for possibly the best holiday ever.... but I'm trying to keep my enthusiasm under control, since too much enthusiasm makes me forget certain important details, like where I put my keys and whether or not I've eaten breakfast already.

I have to start somewhere, so I'll start IN LONDON! I was there for a weekend recently, and the weather was beautiful and the beer was cheap and I got to pretend I was in a novel for a little while.

So excited to ride on the "tube" that I got all blurry:

I arrived in London late Friday afternoon and had a couple of hours to kill before Sam, my friend & generous host for the weekend, was off from work. I wandered towards the river and suddenly found myself at the foot of this giant clock tower, thinking I was completely lost and hopeless and wondering if this what one of those situations where I should just stay in one place and wait to be found... then I realized! This was no run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen, small potatoes clock tower!!!

It seems so incredible to me that you can just walk up and touch something like Big Ben, something that you've heard about for ages and ages, something so culturally iconic and endlessly eulogized and photographed and recreated in miniature. You don't need a magic school bus or a VIP invitation or a secret password or a cousin's friend's sister-in-law who knows the guy in charge. It's just there, doing normal clocky things, not giving a damn about the writers and painters and filmmakers and millions of tourists. (I feel the same way about celebrities: it's amazing to imagine that Clive Owen is not a superhuman clone locked in a top-secret building, but is an ordinary dude who lives somewhere, who has a house and a grocery list and cavities and bellybutton fluff, and that if you go to the right place you could see him walking down the street, doing Clive Oweny things.)

Go to the right place and you can see double-decker buses and charming British stereotypes and all those historical places that you thought only existed in Woolf novels!

I spent all of Saturday wandering the city with my trusty tour guide Sam. See that Ferris Wheel in the distance?
We went on that!

The thing is so massive that you don't just sit in a dinky little carriage with your feet hanging down! No way! Londoners take their midway attractions seriously. You have to get into one of these futuristic glass pods, and it's a good thing too, because that thing goes VERY VERY RIDICULOUSLY HIGH.

It surprised me that everything I absolutely wanted to see in London was all clustered together in the same general area. It's almost as though they planned it so that all of us lazy North American tourists could see the city's top five attractions in an easy afternoon. Almost.

The abbey, which is two and a half steps away from Big Ben:

And St. James' Park, only a ten minutes' walk further:

Swan blanacing in the ice that still coated the river in St. James Park. I have no idea why this picture came out all pukey-coloured, but I actually kind of like it! It looks artistic. Or something.

View of a very gnarled old tree and, in the distance, Buckingham Palace:

Unfortunately the Queen wasn't at home so I couldn't give her a what's up from Canada. Didn't get William's number either. Unfulfilled quests are bad for the ego!!

Guard with a fuzzy hat!

Copper on a horse!


Next two pictures by special request for a certain ginger-coloured beast:


These helpful warnings on the pavement saved my life about a hundred times over the course of the weekend:

Camden Market, aka Punksville:


There are two things that slayed me while I was in London: hearing little tiny kids saying "mummy!" in little tiny British accents, and seeing how London bookstores categorized their particularly melodramatic fiction:

And finally, three Chileans and an Ecuadorian, with the best South American meal to ever fill this belly:

Interim Post

I've been meaning to post all week, but there always seems to be just one more email to answer, or one more dinner to attend, or one more sugar coma to sleep off.   I'm five seconds away from going to get the train for London, and will write more after I get back in a few days.  

The above shot is from Charleville.  We went, we swam and ate and talked a lot of French, and we left.  It was a great weekend and I'll post more pictures next week!