Day 1: Stockholm, Sverige (Sweden)
30 April 2008
by David Ho
This journey begins pretty much in the same way as all our journeys begin… “Hurry up! We’re late! We were supposed to leave half an hour ago!”
“What time’s the flight again?” “So do we have to check in 40 or 45 minutes before the flight?” (Those 5 minutes are often very crucial to us.)
So let’s see, the metro takes half an hour to get to the airport, we take 15 minutes to walk from our apartment to the metro… Which is the same as a 7 minute run/jog… We’re not gonna make it, we’re not gonna make it… It’s like that all the way to the metro. On the metro, we talk about the same things too…
Rather breathlessly- “I’m never going to do that again. I’m going to be early next time.”
“Ok, so the plan is, once the metro doors open, we have to run ok? All the way to Terminal 2, which is a kilometer away.”
“Ok!”
This time, like all the others, we made our flight. Thank God for that! We were bound for Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, where we’d embark on our 10 day trip from Denmark to Moscow, the heart of Russia, to St. Petersberg, and then a pit-stop in Riga, Latvia, before heading back to Copenhagen.
We landed in Stockholm after a 2 hour flight. As usual, we both knocked out on the plane, and missed out on the only time the airlines served food. The only reason we knew this was because Debbie told us, and also because I ate half her sandwich. In Stockholm the first thing we realized was that we wasted 600DKr each because of the stupid visa thing. The second thing we did was collect our bags and bump into Ansen. Ansen is the meek looking Taiwanese guy with glasses. He may be soft spoken, but he does have his opinions about stuff, and most of the time I found him really entertaining. Either I was struggling to speak to him in mandarin, or he’d be telling me what he thought of this and that, which, more often than not, would be pretty funny.
So the five of us made our way down to the city, where we split up. Ansen came with Carol and me to the Vasa Museum, which is built around a great big mother warship. Now now, don’t go calling it a Viking ship, the Swedes insist it’s a warship. Yep, a great big mother warship that sank quite soon after it set sail on its maiden voyage, sounds quite familiar doesn’t it? The only difference is that in those days, they didn’t have Celine Dion to sing about it. We spent the better half of the day there because the ship was just wicked cool, so much so that when I grow up I wanna be a pirate, or a king. Yeah, a king would be better, because then people would build me great big ships like the Vasa, carve my family coat of arms on the back, and then have the ship sink 2km after setting sail.
Now here’s where it all becomes a little fuzzy, we met Yock Song somewhere in the middle of the old town, also known as Gamla Stan. We then had lunch on the grass of some little park in front of the parliament building, and walked around taking photos of things like the palace, and the opera house and some other churches up North from Gamla Stan. We had left our bags with Debbie and Jiamin who were lazing about on the grass. Bums… Heh heh. After gathering the crew, the 6 of us headed wandered around the palace and “Storkyrkan”, which is the oldest church in Stockholm. Oh, this was not before Carol got shooed off by a guard on the palace grounds. She was taking a picture of him and he was gesturing for her to stay away, but she just thought he was doing some kind of drill, and decided to stand right where she was to observe. Haha! The church is located just behind the palace, which made it pretty convenient for the king to go to church. There’s the other reason to be king. Kings were crowned there as well. Ah, to be the King of Sweden. Meatballs, superfluous ships, what’s not to love? Then again, the Swedes were always getting into fights with everyone else in the region because that’s what people do. They are, in my opinion, in one of the worst geographical places. They had to contend with the Danish in west, and the Russians in the east. Somehow during the Great Northern War of the 1700’s they managed to find themselves at odds with both these parties, as well as with the rest of the ominous sounding “Northern Alliance”, and they got their’s handed to them. Maybe Europe just wasn’t ready for Ikea’s cozy furnishings yet. I digress.
Storkyrkan is a pretty cool church because it houses the famous wooden carving of St. George and the Dragon. Now this guy, George, was the real deal back in the day. You know the story of the guy who killed the princess and saved the dragon? No? Good, because the story is the opposite of that. St. George is everyone’s patron saint. He comes up all over Europe. I know what you must be thinking- They canonized this guy for killing a mythical creature? Not exactly, the real story was that in the 3rd Century or so, George was a Roman soldier under Diocletian, who had made Christianity illegal. George was tortured and executed for the faith, but not before converting others through his steadfastness. There are only 2 reasons a man would be willing to be tortured and executed. Either he’s on to something, or on something. However, since this wasn’t set in Amsterdam, I’m pretty sure it was the former case. The dragon bit came quite sometime later.
After the church we wandered around the old town heading south towards where our cruise ship would be. We made our way down to the ferry point (which was half an hour away) and after meeting up with the rest of the 30 odd tour group (which took like another hour), boarded the ship which would cross the Baltic, sail into the jaws of the gulf of Finland and dock at our next destination, Helsinki! If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, we also had a buffet dinner that night! It was really the main highlight of the cruise. It was my first time on a cruise though, so everything was pretty exciting for me. We explored the entire ship; the deck, the restaurants, the shops and the lounge/bar, which had old people dancing. Carol and I forgot to do the titanic thing! The buffet was really good though, it was the first time in a really long time that I could eat all I could eat, so that’s exactly what I did. We went to sleep at a pretty reasonable time, because the next day we would be exploring the capital of Nokia Land!
Stay tuned! We’re not quite Finnish-ed.
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