Stockholm - Venice of the North

Visiting Stockholm was not only a great opportunity to explore a new city but also a nice chance to 

 meet new people.

We saw the old town, the wonderful harbour with its even more wonderful ships, the VASA dating back to the 17^th century etc. For all these things I (and I think I can claim this for my friends too) liked best that we met so many new people from all over the world. When we arrived in our hostel we first of all saw an Iraqi doing the vacuum cleaning and an elderly, nice Swedish woman waiting for us at the reception to hand us over the room key.

We spent the first afternoon in the park of a church nearby our hostel. We were just enjoying the fresh air of the harbour and listening to the numerous seagulls, when suddenly a man asked if he could take some photos of the three of us. He then explained that he was taking part in a photo competition and needed to show the difference of winter the upcoming summer. As we all fancy photography we were very pleased to serve as photo “models”. It was great fun first sitting there with our jackets, pretending to freeze and in the next moment sitting there without shoes, only wearing a t-shirt pretending to enjoy the hot sun (that in fact was not there, it had something around 15°C !).

This may sound lazy, but the best time of the day was always the evening. No, not because we went out so many times but because we always prepared tons of food in the kitchen of the hostel and were always having a delicious dinner. The later it was the more people started to meet in the kitchen (which was also kind of a living room) starting to talk about their home country, about their culture, their experiences in Stockholm... And so did we. We met people from Germany, France, Sweden, GB, Finland, Italy, Iraq, Egypt, Colombia, States .... While having a good time with all those people playing card games or something, we also had the chance to practice our language skills in Spanish, English, Italian and even Norwegian! We are still in touch with some of those people, which makes the whole journey even more valuable as we gained friends.

 

One especially interesting man was a 34 year-old Vietnamese. One morning I couldn’t sleep anymore and went to the kitchen. He was already sitting there, having noodles with beef as breakfast. We started to talk about our cultures and how different Asians and Europeans are. At some point, he told me about foodstuffs in Vietnam. And this was completely new, I would even say a little bit weird (not negatively) to me. For example, men in Vietnam don’t eat food containing mint, soymilk or cinnamon because otherwise it is believed that men would turn into rapists! On the other hand, women aren’t allowed to eat watermelons or chocolate as this would cause infertility. Quiet different to European culture, right?

One day we took part in a free guided city tour through the old town leaded by a Swedish girl. She told us a lot about Stockholm’s history and facts, but what I found especially interesting was when she told us that the Swedish are very patriotic. They would always pretend that Sweden is such a great country to live and that Sweden has lived in peace for over 200 years. But – and that is something none of us knew – the Swedish are one of the biggest arms dealer countries in the world. So, I ask myself – do they really live in peace?! They support wars just to get money, does that mean to be peaceful? It’s not only the tour guide who answer this question with no, but also me.

Our group of the Stockholm tour

Back to funnier stuff, we took part in the pub crawl. Some of you might have already done this in some city and I would really recommend to do this whenever you got the chance! Sweden is a very expensive country, particularly when it comes to going out. For the pub crawl we only had to pay €20 and got free entrance to 4 pubs and 1 club (the entrance fee for the club usually is something around €25!). But not only that it is cheap but also that we again met people from all over the world again. In the very first bar, we met 3 Swedish guys who actually didn’t take part in the pub crawl. But as we got along so well with each other, they bought a ticket and joined our group even though they live in Stockholm! Besides that, there was a men having his bachelors party and had to fulfil 20 exercises. Unfortunately, he was a bit shy and did I think only 5 them. The best one, however, was when he asked a female police officer to have a photo with him. Surprisingly, she said yes!

Pub craw!!;)

However, after six days of having one experience after the other and meeting one interesting person after the other, we were quiet happy to go home again. Still, I am already looking forward to our next trip. – Helene! -> Sarah and me are going to see you in Spain next year!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. I’ll do a post that focuses more on Stockholm itself, no worries ;)