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Well, my Swedish experience is half way through, and has been pretty great so far. I took the cheap flight route, which meant waking up at 4 am in Frankfurt, taking a 2 hour bus ride to the Hahn airport, then flying Ryanair to Skavsta, which is a 1h40m bus ride from Stockholm. But a flight for 30 dollars total is hard to beat!

After arriving in Stockholm, I checked into my hostel, City Backpackers, which is about a ten minute walk from the center of town. The hostel is average as they go, I am sharing a room with two Taiwanese girls, and a Dutch boy who are all here together. Also good to note, the hostel should be called Stadtwanderer since it is overrun by German visitors. 

The hostel held a mini-walking tour in which our enthusiastic tour guide (a staffer of the hostel) showed us all things cool in our neighborhood and shared her passion for Astrid Lindgren (who all Swedes seem mildly obsessed with). Videos of the tour are coming (video takes a lot longer to get up than I originally thought). Video added below!

Mini-Tour of Stockholm from Keely Johnson on Vimeo. 

In general, I have learned what all Swedes know, that everything good in this world was really a Swedish creation. Take my note in the Frankfurt post about how American hot dogs come from Frankfurt. That, I have learned, is so wrong, as hot dogs are from Sweden. Who would have thunk?? Katie asked me what my theme for this trip is, and sadly hot dogs seem to be reoccurring, ironic since I don’t even like them that much. I will try to change that to ice cream as soon as possible.

I had two things I wanted to do while in Stockholm, to do a tour of the archipelago and to visit the Royal Palace. Well, the archipelago ferry captains went on strike yesterday, and the main parts of the Royal Palace are closed due to a state visit from the Greek prime minister. Sigh. Regardless, I have done a lot of walking around the city and Stockholm is much what I expected, which is great because I had very high expectations. I have met several really cool people at the hostel, as well as in day to day interactions, and had some very interesting conversations. More on all that later.