Day 1 and 2: St Louis to Gothenburg

Day 3: Shrimp and Salmon Cruise in Gothenburg

Day 4 and 5: Finishing Up in Gothenburg

Day 5 and 6: Starting our time in Stockholm

I’m sorry to say that I’m doing a blog post on only one day again today. I have a ton of pictures to go through, and I think 1 day makes that easier. It does mean drawing this whole thing out for longer, but I hope you are excited to read about my trip for longer! Hey, it beats hearing about my normal life, right? (Don’t answer that, please.)

Okay, on Day 7, we woke up feeling quite refreshed, which was great. We got coffee and breakfast at a place near our airbnb called Cafe Schweizer, and got cinnamon rolls and yogurt with cappuccinos.

They do a lot with freshly squeezed orange juice there as well. We were lucky to get two seats outside, and enjoyed the morning air. It should be noted that we opted to sit outside whenever possible on this trip, because regardless of what the weather was, it was always more pleasant than that weather in St Louis in the summer.

Anyway, today was a big day: we had a boat ride at 1 to Drottningholm Palace, and then we would be seeing an opera there in the evening and getting home close to 11. We decided to do Rick Steve’s Walking Tour of the Gamla Stan in the morning now.

I don’t know if it’s me, or Rick, or Sweden, but in the past I have found Rick Steves’ guidebooks to be invaluable, but for this trip, I found him to be less helpful and frankly, a bit judgmental. I suppose that’s his shtick, and maybe it’s me and as I’ve gotten older I’m less judgmental, but he makes a lot of snide comments about cruise passengers, comments about how the Gamla Stan isn’t the best place to sightsee and YET spend the majority of his book on places there and gives them 3 stars, and various other things. For his section on Estonia he makes a remark about how the guides wash their faces and comb their hair for the walking tours which seems a little bit…implying they are dirty otherwise…and for Finland he completely insults the entire city of Turku calling it a pale shadow of Helsinki, when we found it to be a delightful place and completely different.

In any case, I used a combination of his book, Fodor’s guidebooks, Trip Advisor, Rick Steve’s Forums, Reddit, and general internet searches trying to find blog posts that weren’t entirely click bait and paid for by the tourism industry. But Rick had a nice walking tour of the Gamla Stan and we thought we would do as much as it as we could fit into the time we had this morning.

There were a lot of people. And cruise ships can definitely and do contribute to overcrowding, but so do Rick Steves Guidebooks which leave off entire cities like Gothenburg and Turku. I will say that Sweden is certainly less busy than other places!

I guess that’s what the building looks like! Or would. I asked Louie if we could get a giant drape for our house that looks like our house and he didn’t say no outright.

Also worth noting: it’s funny how there are all of these basically pedestrian only places like the Gamla Stan, but then there will be trucks, or random vehicles driving through. Like that SUV parked there, what’s the deal with that?

The pink church is called Storkyrkan, which means…the big church. It’s right near the big square (Stortorget), so you get a sense of how people named things back in the day.

There are a lot of old organs in the world, and this was a pretty one inside the old Finnish Church.

This is the tiniest statue which is outside the church in its courtyard. I should have gotten a better sense of the scale, but that’s the head of a flower.

I just loved the Gamla Stan: the buildings, the streets, the cobblestones. It is completely unlike St Louis, and I love it.

Various doors.

And then we were back at the Stortorget, and needed more coffee, because of course. We went to a really old coffee house possibly called Grillska Huset Brodbar that was recommended in the walking tour and enjoyed coffee and probably cinnamon rolls, I don’t actually recall (fail!). We did have real coffee from a pot.

The ceilings were very elaborate!

After that it was time to walk to where our boat was taking off, which was right by City Hall. We got there with enough time for Louie to see City Hall (I already had, but I was happy to look again.)

Always look up! You never know what you’ll see on the ceilings.

We chose to take the ferry to Drottningholm Palace since that was how you originally would have gotten there. It was the summer home of the Royal Family, but where they mostly live nowadays.

Various views from the boat.

It was a pleasant ride, just under an hour, and we stayed on the top deck the whole time enjoying the views and the breeze.

Seeing the Palace for the first time!

Anyway, we unloaded ourselves from the boat and headed to the palace to see the inside. We had prepurchased tickets, but it probably wasn’t necessary (and truthfully, we probably could have taken the 2 pm ferry rather than the 1, but whatever.)

We did the tour self-guided, and it was pretty nice to see. I’m sure we missed out on some of the details and intricacies, but we loved seeing the rooms and the art, and the signs were helpful and most of the time there was English to read.

Very fancy bedroom. A bit fancy for my taste, though.

I loved these ceramic fireplaces found throughout and kept noticing them. (I think there were ceramic, if not, then they were made of something else.)

Like I said earlier, be sure to look up! The ceilings often had elaborate paintings on them.

What I would really have wanted to see but wasn’t on the tour: how the Royal Family lives TODAY. Like, how fancy are their regular rooms? But alas, they get that privacy and we only saw historic rooms, basically.

It’s important to have a room full of your accomplishments in battle, paintings, calligraphy, etc.

After finishing the tour, we headed into the grounds and towards another building, the Chinese Pavilion. It was a lovely day, though a bit on the sunny side. The palace and grounds weren’t Versailles but hey, the royal family still exists and didn’t get decapitated, so I’d call it a win.

This was a fun building, full of treasures from China, which was considered a fascinating paradise to the Swedes at this time. Definitely some problematic things by today’s standards, but a cool building.

More fireplaces!

There was a nifty spiral staircase to go upstairs.

Anyway, we headed out after, back to the main area and for an early dinner and coffee/relaxing. Stuff was closing around 5 and the opera was at 7, so we had that amount of time to spent on food and whatnot.

We wanted to eat dinner outside, but it was actually starting to rain, so we went inside instead. We had some soup and shrimp sandwiches and then coffee and a blueberry pie for dessert.

I’d bought these tickets quite a time before, and the cool thing is that we were seeing a really old opera (Armide by Lully) in an old theater building with the original ways to move things around, so it seemed quite fitting. And then after buying tickets I saw that it was going to be in French with Swedish subtitles, and we sort of panicked and worried about it, and then a few days before I looked again and it said Swedish AND English subtitles and we were so relieved! But honestly, we still didn’t always know what was going on, haha. It’s opera!

Edited to add: one time when I looked at the website this was what google translated: “At Drottningholm’s Castle Theatre, clothing is optional, dress in something you feel comfortable in! At premieres, it can be fun to dress up a little extra, but it is not a requirement. Also keep in mind that it gets hot in the salon during hot summer evenings and adjust your clothing accordingly.”

They weren’t wrong. The place was super hot and I sweated profusely throughout, but we did enjoy the opera tremendously. It was well done and just terrific.

We ordered “interval” snacks, and enjoyed some wine and snacks, and then spent too much time trying to find the bathrooms which were farther away than we would have liked, or possibly we missed the closer ones.

In any case, it was a terrific night, and afterwards it was raining a bit, but we found the bus back to Stockholm (the opera had a bus or perhaps more than one you could purchase tickets for that ran directly back to the main station after the show). It was a quick ride and then a short walk home. We debated making another stop that night, but I was sweating and it was humid, and we decided going home was best.

And that was the end of a long and busy day! But we had a great time, and enjoyed almost all of it. Until next time!

Day 1 and 2: St Louis to Gothenburg

Day 3: Shrimp and Salmon Cruise in Gothenburg

I’m told that people are waiting impatiently to hear more about my trip, so I’m pushing ahead, haha. Teaching has started back this week but Monday and Tuesday are my “easier” days.

Day 4 started waking up in Gothenburg. I remembered to bring my phone down to breakfast.

Pictured: coffee, yogurt with some nuts and seeds, smoked salmon, a swedish pancake with jam, and some grapes. Just looking at this picture is making me hungry! They also had sparkling water on tap, so that’s probably what is in the picture because I am totally addicted.

This is where breakfast took place. You can kind of see how it’s a courtyard and there are skylights up above. I would absolutely recommend this hotel for breakfast alone, but the room was very nice too (and we had the cheapest category.)

After fueling up, we planned to make this a museum day. The first stop was the Gothenburg City Museum to learn about Gothenburg. We were up a little before they opened though, so we wandered around a nearby square, Gustav Adolfs Torg, first.

This is one of the government buildings.

Couldn’t resist a heart selfie, you know Louie is very romantic 😉

Anyway, once it was opening time for the museum we headed in. It was interesting for sure, and started with the earliest history of people in the area up to the present day. We didn’t make it all the way through, but we saw some really interesting artifacts and learned quite a bit.

This was a room showing the remnants of an old Viking Ship, possible the oldest that has been found. We also found it interesting that Gothenburg was a planned city, with a large zigzag city wall, and you can still see this on the map as well as visit parts that remain. It was founded in 1621 which is kind of late for some other cities in the area, so there aren’t as many really old buildings. (Though for us Americans, 1621 is still pretty old, ha!)

We spent about two hours there and then needed pastries and coffee to go further…

We shared a slice of princess cake and a kanelbullar with our coffee at Brogyllen Hamngatan.

We planned to go to the Art Museum next, so we walked that way.

Before going to the museum we had a lunch at Junggren’s Bar and Bistro, which I thought was fine, but a little heavier than I wanted. In any case, it tided us over the rest of the day until dinner so that was good!

We visited the Gothenburg Museum of Art for the rest of the afternoon.

Another view of the aforementioned Poseidon Statue, which was in the square outside of the museum, Götaplatsen.

Then we walked back to the hotel to rest before dinner. I’d had a hard time making a decision where to eat for dinner this night, but finally settled on a place called Familjen, which ended up being a terrific choice.

I ordered the Menu Familjen with the hake, and Louie ordered the Menu Supper with the cream cheese and zucchini. We both loved our meals and tried bites of each others. This was the first of many excellent strawberry based desserts (I guess they were in season!) and we had a wonderful time sitting outside on the patio.

It was still light when we walked back to the hotel, but it was probably after 9.

Signs and stores we found interesting.

We ended the night with a nightcap at the bar right by the hotel called the Bishop’s Arms.

One annoying/funny thing that happened on this day. I was wearing a nice pair of linen blend black pants from Old Navy that I’ve been wearing a lot this summer. I like the fit and the feeling of them. However, I realized before dinner (when I was at the hotel, thankfully) that I had worn holes in the inner thighs from all the walking that day! I was upset and so happy that I noticed before having been embarrassed. I was also luckily wearing black underwear so even so perhaps it wouldn’t have been too awful. This meant I was suddenly down a pair of pants, and unfortunately my lightest feeling pair, which meant that we just did laundry a bit more often and that I did regret not having packed a more capri length pair of pants. Anyway, lesson learned, I suppose, that I can’t trust Old Navy linen type pants with miles of walking in the heat.

Just for the record: on Day 2 we walked over 5 miles, Day 3 just over 10 miles (24466 steps!), and Day 4, the day my pants gave out, over 7 1/2 miles (18223 steps). Day 3 was the second longest walking day of the trip!

Okay, so let me finish up our time in Gothenburg in this post so the next one will be about Stockholm and I’ll save one day of posting. We woke up on Day 5 and of course, had an excellent breakfast. We decided to walk up to Skansen Kronan after checking out of the hotel (which later we wished we had waited to shower and asked for a late checkout, but it all worked out).

This is Skansen Kronan. You can’t go in but you can walk around and it’s up on a hill so there are lovely views. It was part of the original city plan and helped keep the city safe from any potential attackers.

We took selfies in both directions. I love the sky in this picture, don’t you?

We walked downhill and back through the Haga District again, which was fun.

We saw a few sights/sites we hadn’t seen yet, like the Feskekôrka , or Fish Church.

We headed back to the hotel to retrieve our luggage and Louie relaxed in a large red chair.

And then we headed to the train station! We were taking a high speed train to Stockholm, which would take about 3 hours.

We thought NFC Fried Chicken was pretty odd as we are used to KFC.

If you are keeping track, we picked up sandwiches at the station to eat on the train. Our seats were in the quiet car and came with free coffee so we had that as well.

Anyway, that’s where I will leave you for now: leaving Gothenburg and heading to Stockholm! Please comment if you would like to let me know you are reading, and feel free to ask questions!

Present Day:

First of all, jet lag is real. This is day 4 of waking up before 6 am and feeling ready to go but as all days before, that hits me later. I have hopes that my brain is less foggy today, however!

I got started with telling you about our trip in a previous post and let’s move onto the next day now. Just so you know, I am (at this time) doing one day at a time so I can share with you all the amazing pictures I took!

Trip Report:

We woke up early in Gothenburg (or Göteborg) and headed down to the hotel breakfast. You guys. This breakfast was amazing. It was in a sort of indoor courtyard with plants, a 3 story high skylight ceiling, and so many stations of things to eat. A yogurt station with all imaginable add ins and several kinds of yogurt. A hot station with pancakes, eggs, various meats, oatmeal, hard and soft boiled eggs. A table with various salmon, herring, pates, cold sliced meats, cheeses…and so many breads and crackers to choose from, or toast if desired. And coffee with several kinds of juice. Oh, and croissants and other (small) pastries. We ate much more than we normally would for breakfast and tried quite a variety of things. Do I have any pictures? Evidently not from this day.

After that, we didn’t have any specific plans for the day until evening, so the plan was to get the lay of the city on foot, fight jet lag, and enjoy ourselves and enjoy being in a new country.

The streets are quite walkable, and in Sweden (and Finland) cars yield to pedestrians. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye out, but it means that if you need to cross, they will stop and let you know, and and that pedestrians have much more space in public areas. Throughout the day we were surprised by how FEW cars there were in Gothenburg and instead people were walking, biking, riding scooters, and taking trams and buses.

We never did try any taquitos, but 7-11’s were ubiquitous throughout Sweden.

We walked through some parks, up to the Art Museum, and all over, it seemed. Louie was navigating, which I like to make/allow him to do, since I am the one who plans the trips, it lets him take over and I can relax more that way.

I thought this row of buildings looked really cool.

I tried to get into Gothenburg University, but I didn’t get in.

The famous Poseidon Statue by Carl Milles. Apparently initially the status had a very large you know what, but the city objected so now it has a weirdly small one. The sun was a little tough to deal with so it’s not super well pictured here, I’m sorry to say.

Very cool doors. On an unrelated note, these are supposedly ankle pants, but seeing in these pictures, they are definitely shorter than that (tall girl problems). I think they are better when I wear them with flats rather than sneakers. Oh well.

We needed to get sunscreen (didn’t want to bring a big bottle, plus nivea had some nice sunscreens in Norway and we were hoping to get some more in Sweden) so we went to a grocery store. I highly recommend going to grocery stores in foreign countries anyway, because it can be so fun to look at the food and see what sort of things they have (and buy chocolate).

The Swedes don’t seem to be afraid of bread and crackers.

Many things that come in tubes! Mayonnaise type things.

The Garden Society. We walked through and saw the Palm House (palmhuset) as well.

We got soup dumplings at a place called 168 (what’s with restaurants only using numbers here, haha?) and figured we would walk a bit more before finding more food. We headed for the Haga neighborhood next, and happened upon a place that is quite popular called Cafe Husaren, which seemed like a good place for “fika” which means coffee, snack, and a little break, all in one.

Now, Cafe Husaren is actually known for their giant cinnamon rolls, but we are only two people and didn’t think we could manage.

During busy times they set up a stand outside for those that just want some pastries to go, but we waited in line inside to get coffees as well. Very good, and fun people watching!

We walked around the Haga district more and then headed up to Slottskogen to get a higher view of the city. Steps were involved.

This was a whimsically painted bus that was a bookmobile.

Anyway, by mid afternoon we were really dragging, so we went back to the room to take naps and get ready for our evening activity, a “shrimp and salmon cruise“, which sounds ridiculous, but I was so excited about it. One thing people and guidebooks said you should do in Gothenburg was see the archipelago, and this evening cruise seemed like a great way to do it while enjoying a fun meal. We weren’t sure what to expect, so let me tell you in case you are reading this and plan to go yourselves. Don’t bother arriving too early, because the seating is assigned, so there’s no benefit to arriving early. We got a nice table by a window in the dining room. You can walk up to the top deck anytime you want, and there is live music in the dining room, but not too loud, just nice dinner music from one man who played guitar and sang. Drinks aren’t included but you can order them, and dessert is also extra. We didn’t get dessert and didn’t feel at all left out.

Our boat. It wasn’t very big, but big enough for the few hours we spent on it. And of course there are bathrooms.

The decor was wood paneling, of course.

They provided wet tissues, which traditionally I am terrified and grossed out by.

The buffet room. It had so many different kinds of herring as well as two kinds of shrimp in the shells, shrimp with mayonnaise, smoked salmon, potatoes, breads and cheeses, various salads, and more. It was quite tasty!

After walking around all day, it was really nice just to have somewhere relaxing to sit and watch the world go by.

It was exciting to see the ocean bus in the water as well, because we had seen it on land earlier!

My first plate of food.

The pictures don’t really do it justice, though I love the water and sky in this one. As we got further from the city the islands got rockier and smaller. Some had houses and other buildings, some had nothing at all. We really enjoyed getting to see it all!

The trip was about 3 hours total, so just a nice amount of time to eat and relax. By the time we got back, we were just about ready to hit the hay, so we walked back to the hotel (at a leisurely pace) and called it a night!

Hi everybody! We are BACK from our epic trip to Sweden and Finland. We were gone for about 2 1/2 weeks and it was amazing. I spent yesterday, the first day home, just sort of doing stuff like unpacking, laundry and going to the grocery store (which was an adventure with my groggy tiredness and jet lag). I was impressed by Louie and I unpacking first thing, but we decided it wasn’t ever going to get any easier so we might as well just go with it. Most clothes were going straight to the laundry anyway! He went to work yesterday, but I get two days off: yesterday I did some emailing and catchup, but today I’ll be doing a bit more getting ready for the semester (setting up my billing) and I suppose I should do some practicing to see if I still know how to play the violin!

We may have gone a bit overboard with the chocolate purchasing, but some of those things are gifts, one of them is potato chips, and some are this stuff called salty licorice that I don’t care for but Louie loves.

Please note this excellent scene on the potato chip bag.

Anyway! Let’s begin. I don’t know if I will stick with one day at a time here, or what, but that’s what I wanted to start with to make the pictures feel more manageable. I called this title Day 1 and 2 because we left on a Saturday but arrived on a Sunday.

Let’s set the scene: or that is, some background. Did I tell you why we decided to visit Sweden and Finland? The idea sort of snowballed from a variety of things, but basically, we both loved Norway so much but felt it was too soon to revisit Norway so we would see another Scandinavia country (Sweden) which Louie had visited more than 20 years ago. But also, he had never been to Finland, so I wanted to add that on, and then we also ended up doing a short jaunt to Estonia as well, just a quick overnight via ferry. We started with a 2 week plan but things expanded with travel times…and so here we are. There and back, and it was terrific.

We had an afternoon flight to Chicago, which was delayed, but not a problem since I chose a connection that gave room for some delays. We had tortas at the Frontera Grill in O’Hare (and got to ride a little bus from one terminal to another without having to leave the secure area), and waited for our “big” flight to board. We had upgraded our seats on the way out to the “slightly more leg room” seats in the hopes we would be more comfortable and sleep better.

The seats were as comfortable as economy class seats can be, and I also used a new neck pillow from Wander which worked well. The flight went by quickly enough: not quickly enough to get a good nights sleep, but quickly enough to get to Helsinki.

We had a layover in Helsinki as well and got some coffees and juice and waited for our last connection to board. Helsinki to Gothenburg was next, and it was a short flight.

We landed in Gothenburg and I had to wait on a bag. We hadn’t intended to check anything on our flights over, but I was bullied by a gate agent into checking my suitcase, which normally wouldn’t matter too much but then we waited about 45 minutes or more for the bags! It was ridiculous and I was mad at myself and the agent.

We got bus tickets on the Flygbussarna, a bus from the airport to the center of Gothenburg, and off we went. I sometimes remember the first time I was in Europe and was fascinated by the different sorts of road signs…it doesn’t pop out as much now, but it’s still fun to notice the different signs and all of the little details that are different from one country to the next. We had a little confusion over which stop to get off because evidently the stop is different on the weekends versus the weekday, but we got off the bus and then used google maps to navigate the 10 or so minute walk to our hotel, the Elite Plaza Hotel Gothenburg, our home for the next 3 nights.

The typical Scandinavian bed set-up: two separate duvet covers. The headboard here was ridiculous and not typical. The room was very nice and in a great location.

The hotel, from across the street. We got cleaned up and headed out in search of an actual meal. Lucky for us it was already about 7 or 8 pm by this point, so we could eat and go straight to bed rather than having to force ourselves to stay awake longer. We had burgers at a nearby restaurant called 2112 and was a rock and roll themed bar. It was jarring to be in a different country, but exhilarating! Sweden uses the Swedish Kronor which you basically divide by 10 in order to think of the dollar amount, but it’s not exactly that. And nobody uses cash, it’s all cards.

After dinner we walked around near the hotel and the water as the sun started to set. I did not get to see if it set all the way down because I was too exhausted.

It’s a working harbor for sure! And so many cobblestones….

Stay tuned for the next installment!