Hey there! Just got home from another crazy adventure throughout Europe. This time Me and Marlee hit up both Stockholm Sweden and Berlin Germany! I am going to break these up like I did with our Scotland trip, so you will have LOTS to read.:)Just bear with me, my brain is frozen from the trip, don't expect humour in this one!

Day numero uno.

Our trip started bright and early on Tuesday morning as we headed out to Stansted airport for a 11:40 flight. My first impression of Sweden while landing in the plane was..."wait a second, did we land in a field near Endeavour Saskatchewan?!" Holy, no lies, we landed in the middle of no where with only snow and cold air around us. The building which was the "main terminal" looked sort of a quonset and I thought at any second dad would walk through with greasy hands and a belt or a part of a tractor in hand. Regardless, since we left our house at 6:30am we were not willing to argue about our whereabouts. We finally DID get into Stockholm and rolled into our hostel at around 4:30 in the afternoon. That's a long day of traveling seeing it was only a two hour flight!
We settled in and then decided to find some supper at a grocery store. Marlee's personal mission is to try the 5cent candies in every country and sometimes I have a hard time keeping her on track. I did manage to tear her away from the candies to get some sandwiches at least, still if I would have let her, she would have sat down in the store and tried every candy. After some eats we hit up the town with Greg. (A fellow teacher that we know who is from Ontario) We walked around Stockholm for about 234209384308 hours just checking out sites. A highlight of this walk about was the "Vampire Bar" that Greg said was a MUST see while in Stockholm. You see the name "vampire bar" and think oh la la, i'm going to see a vampire..or at least some spooky kinda atmosphere. Wrong. wrong and wrong. We walked into bar and it smelt like 30 grade 5 boys after a morning of gym class. I have never smelt nasty sweaty body odor like this. We walked down the stairs to be terrified alright. There were about 4 creepy people in there so we walked down, turned around and walked out. Vampire bar - let down. We also came across this like secret look out point where you had an amazing overlook on a lot of the city. It was a very pleasant and calm night and after 4 hours of walking around we were cold and sleepy!

Day two.

Day two started out bright and early again as we wanted to make sure that we saw absolutely everything that Stockholm had to offer. We got all bundled up because it was snowing like crazy and set off to see a museum of national antiques. It said it was all about vikings. Viking power yaaa.. We stepped out of our hostel and were carefully looking at a map when a nice old gentleman came up and asked if we needed help. He pointed us in the right direction, the people of Stockholm are SO friendly. When we found the museum it wasn't even open for the day yet! ugh! Plan B: Ship museum. At this point, we were not sure if the ship was IN a museum OR if the museum was IN the ship. :)This ship really was something to see, it was probably my most favourite museum I've EVER been to, which is pretty impressive since I have experienced the Preeceville Heritage Museum.
[prepare for long historical explanation, written by memory since my pamphlet is missing....stretch..shake it out..ok and read..]
The Vasa, was a ship that was built in the 1600's by King Gustav. He built the ship to send it off to Poland to basically shoot at them. He had lots of cannons as well as had the boat made with two floors so that more men could shoot at once. The boat only took two years to build which was pretty amazing in that day. A year into the making, and a year to the completion the creator died so he never got to see this "masterpiece" even float. Alright, so the boat is a BIT overdone. The King has all these massive statues basically saying..look at me..I'm the king..I'm a sexy king i'm going to put up lions and statues of me so everyone knows. So the King gets all of the kings horses and all the kings men..and instead of putting humpty together again he throws them onto this boat. Within twenty minutes the boat ultimately tips over because it is top heavy and BOOM sinks to the bottom of the harbour. 333 years later they finally locate it, dig it up and sail it into the museum. They have restored it and now it sits, 95% original. Pretty impressive I think. The museum is seven stories tall and you can check out the ship from every angle. They have this one part where the actual bones of the people who died on the ship are, as well as information that they gathered about them as in what they did, what they looked like and everything!
Ok, so thats my explanation of the ship, I'm sorry if I have wasted 5.23 minutes of your life, but I was SO excited about it that I had to write it all!
After the vasa we met up with greg lee again and went to the national museum of antiques. It was good, checked out some viking power. We then had some supper and went to our hostel where we watched the olympics for a very long time.


Things I learned about Canada while watching tv with non-canadians,

1. We have polar bears running around everywhere and at any second, on the ski slope where thousands of people are, a polar bear MAY jump out and grab the skiier so be prepared.

2. Moose. Don't mess with the moose, again, they may show up on the ski slope at any second.

3. If the polar bear and moose is not a big enough scare for you, the trees, in BC, may start leaking maple syrup flooding everyone out.

4. Curling is not a sport and is only for people who cannot play ice hockey. (believe you me, i argued this one for a good 30 minutes...grrr)

5. People watching the Vancouver olympics at the venues should dress warmer. Canada is cold.


And I shall end this blog at this point...stay tuned for day three of Sveeedeeenn yaa..and berlin!

Peace out homies!