Oh Scandinavia

I'm back home in the land of fitted sheets, normal daylight hours, free water, and boring architecture: America! I can't even begin to describe how amazing exploring Scandinavia was! We started out in Vetlanda, Sweden at Emily and Hayley's school. I saw both of them graduate and bid their goodbyes to their new, sweet friends, and we were off to Copenhagen!

Danish country was beautiful. We did all the "touristy" things like canal tours, shopping, Royal Palace visits, the mermaid statue, and even a steeple climb! I won't bore you with all the silly details, but I will say that the first night we were there, we were ready for some pizza and a movie night after an exhausting day of traveling. The only problem was the entire web is in Danish, and so the google translating began to figure out what things like "ost" and "kylling" meant, which only lasted about 2 hours before we finally got our food. A few other laughable misfortunes in Copenhagen? One REALLY large, unintentional detour in the rain (our trip to the Royal Palace took about 3 extra hours) and one trip to an "artsy district", which turned out to be a drug ward area. ...Oops! But Copenhagen was truly breathtaking; I could've sat on the main canal all day long.

After our 3 days were complete, Emily boarded the plane to head home, and Hayley and I went on to Norway (and I say "Emily boarded the plane"...more like "planeS"- my poor friend had some serious flight trouble that landed her in different airports for about two days). And off to Bergen we flew! Day one was absolutely beautiful- it was unseasonably sunny and the air was warmer than usual, but the next two days didn't disguise the typical wet, cold weather of Bergen. We mozied around the harbor, went on a fjord tour, saw the town from above, and ate in the fish market on the water! And no worries, we had quite a few laughable misfortunes of our own in Bergen also. Caught in the pouring rain on some random streets, and then there was the case of our silly hostel room skylight. Because it's so far north,  there's only about 4 hours of total darkness up in Scandinavia. So, when we got to our little room with the skylight that had no shade, we had quite a predicament. Luckily, I had brought my eye-mask to sleep in, and we were able to build a tent sort of thing from the stolen airplane blankets to keep some of the sunlight out for Hayley.

Third stop in our Scandinavian tour? Stockholm. We were in Stockholm for less than 24 hours, but it couldn't have been a better end to our trip. The weather was warm and sunny (shorts and a t-shirt weather, which was QUITE a change after my two-pairs-of-socks-and-three-jackets bundle in chilly Bergen), and the Gamla Stan "old town" was beautiful. Our 18 hour stay was the perfect amount of time: we hit the biggest tourist stop, sat on the edge of the bay for a couple hours in the sunshine, and mozied through the main shopping street back to our cave room (which was such a change from our skylight room in Bergen to our window-less black-out room in Stockholm). Laughable misfortune of Stockholm? Peanut butter sandwich overload. We didn't spend a dime on food (on almost the entire trip), and had peanut butter sandwiches for nearly every meal. ...I've had my fill to last me a lifetime, to say the least.
And the next day we were off. Flying 9 hours to Chicago for a 6 hour layover and then another 2 hour flight home!

I still can't believe that the adventure has come and gone, but it is so nice to be back home. It's so good to have Emily and Hayley here again, and I'm excited to catch up with friends, start my summer job, and just relax. I'm also so grateful for the familiarity of life here and the ease that comes when everyone speaks English!

...And of course after all this traveling, I'm positive I won't be missing out on the opportunity to study abroad next year, if I can only figure out where to go...