From Oslo to Stockholm

After an awesome day yesterday we were absolutely exhausted and crashed early.  We had booked a 7:30am train to take us from Oslo to Stockholm.  It is about a 5 hour train ride so we figured that would give us half the day to explore Stockholm.  Everything was perfect until we got to a station about an hour outside of Stockholm.  The train stopped randomly and they came on and announced that there as a delay.  About 20 minutes later they came on and made another announcement, however this time they did not bother to translate to English.  We watched a few people get off the train to smoke so I figured the delay might be longer than we were anticipating.  I eventually decided to go ask a conductor who told me that the power lines were knocked down and they were calling for buses.  However, the problem was that there were 15 trains ahead of us! Eventually, after sitting on the tracks for about 2.5 hours they had us switch to a commuter train.  Since everything was in Swedish Kathleen and I just followed the crowd and hoped we'd end up in the right spot!  After a transfer we made it to Stockholm Central about 3.5 hours after we were supposed to.  We were bummed because that pretty much killed our day but we decided to try to make the best of it.

After checking in to the hotel, we decided to walk around and explore.  Our initial observation is Stockholm is the busiest, most metropolitan city of the 3 we have visited.  Stockholm is made up of 14 different islands and we definitely hit 3 or 4 of them.  In between two of the islands we crossed the Slussen, which is the lock between the Baltic Sea and Lake Malaren.  Of particular interest was the island of Gamla Stan, also known as Old City.  This is a hilly section with lots of cafes along cobblestone streets.  We picked a random one to have dinner at and it was delicious.  I had been warned that Stockholm was very expensive but honestly our dinner was not much more than what we would have paid in the US.  After dinner we tried to find the Absolut Ice Bar, a pretty famous spot in Stockholm. We finally found it but were disappointed to find out it was closed for renovations until April 15th.

Tomorrow will be a full day of touring Stockholm. Another IIHF friend, Malin, has graciously offered to be our tour guides and show us the ropes.  I'm excited to see her and more of Stockholm!