By train through Europe - 4th August - Stockholm
Early in the morning, we took the train from Uppsala to Stockholm.
Not actually our train, but I liked how it looks like
After ditching out backpacks in one of the lockers and buying some salted licorice (from a shopkeeper who was Finnish herself), headed out to the city.
The Stockholm train station has super pretty decoration!
What we hadn’t anticipated was the fact that we stumbled directly into the pride celebrations. The arguably best encounter we had was a pair of baroque drag queens.
Aren't they magnificent?
Stockholm is full of beautiful churches and orange houses. I’m generally not a fan of big cities, but Stockholm is very aesthetically pleasing.
Impossible to take a picture of this road without also having a picture of someone taking a picture of the road. Damn tourists :P
We tried to avoid the big touristic streets (which is harder than anticipated) and looked into the smaller side alleys for interesting restaurants or cafés. That’s how we found Sturekatten, a small café with a lovely courtyard and two cozy rooms to sit inside.
We shared a pastry with I had assumed was filled with caramel, as that’s what I had understood when asking about it.
It was cardamom. Imagine my surprise upon biting into it. Still delicious tho, still delicious.
After wandering the city for several hours (and literally destroying the band aid keeping my right foot from bleeding all over my shoe), it was time to grab our backpacks and make our way to the ferry. 38 minutes walking, google maps said. Easy!
Or not. Turns out that the harbor was being rebuilt, which forced us to take a longer route, upping the time to one hour. What a good thing it was, that we had left earlier than intended!
Around 18:30, we finally arrived for check-in, just to see that we’d have to wait an hour for boarding. Oh well.
Never having been on a ferry for that long, and especially never having slept on one, I hadn’t anticipated how tiny the cabin I had booked (the cheapest I had been able to find) was. It was a 4 bed cabin (2 bunk beds), which barely had any space between the beds. Luckily, no additional travelers joined us.
A quick dinner on board, a tour around the ferry, and then we went to bed.
That's well.. what most Finns think as extremely generic sweden.
Everyone is wearing a dress, furniture is super fancy and everybody is eating only sweet pastries.
Pretty close to the truth.
Always happy to reinforce stereotypes
Is the sky always clear in Finland, or is it just me thinking it is?
I didn't know there was a part of me that loves tourism. In fact, I don't think I've ever liked the idea. But you make it seem like fun and I feel like I'm missing out.
The second day in Finland was very rainy xD