After my disastrous attempt at getting to Sweden, we arrived in a lovely city blanketed in snow.
It gets cold in Cologne, but usually not enough for it to snow, so this was a pleasant change. The first part of our trip entailed my 2 friends and me retrieving a bike that my friend had left there and bringing it to the hostel, which we would later take to the airport to bring back to Cologne. Later in the evening we contended ourselves with walking around the city. At one point there was a Nazi demonstration, and they had the most beat up cars I have ever seen.
We left the demonstration and wandered around more, arriving at the harbor, where a lovely statue adorned the docks.
And overlooking the water
More walking around followed, and we saw some other attractions. I also had a local beer when we went out to dinner, which I wrote about here.
Saint George in the Stockholm Cathedral
Getting dark
Some statues that gave off a creepy vibe
Earlier in the day we had met another gentleman who was in our hostel and we had been exploring the city together. He proposed that we go on a pub crawl with him, and we decided to join him. We had a pretty good time as we walked around Stockholm. I think we went to 3 different bars before we got to the final bar. By that time, I and the others were fairly drunk, and we got kind of split up. I didn’t realize that there was an underground level, and I was just hanging out on the ground level talking with some other people. I kept hearing loud cheering from the other end of the bar, and my curiosity persuaded me to investigate. As I approached the source of the cheering, I realized I was now looking down a giant hole in the ground to the floor below, as if a balcony circled the wrestling arena below us. Yes, there was a wrestling arena with only women wrestling on it.
I went downstairs, and while it was pretty entertaining to watch, the amount of alcohol I had by that point honestly made the rest of the night fuzzy so I can’t really comment on too much else. We somehow got back to the hostel, and one of my friends and I found an entire bottle of unopened vodka. We tried to find our other friend, who had already gone to her separate room, but our searching yielded no results. We wanted to do some more shots with her, but she didn’t answer our calls, which was probably for the best, since we were drunk already. We eventually gave up and went to bed, ready for another day.
Just some cool Greek-element sculptures
And the harbor
A park’s entrance on the way to the ABBA museum
And then we got to the ABBA museum. Only 2 of us went in, but I thought it was great and would highly recommend it to anyone who likes ABBA. It was supposed to be a general Swedish pop museum, but it was like 90% ABBA.
Us 4 as the ABBA members
This was only a small part of all the awards they had won
They had some fun, interactive exhibits. I did some karaoke (which I won’t post because it’s so terrible) and I made my own “ABBA musical.” They also had a body recognition camera, kind of like an Xbox Kinect, and I had the outfits of the ABBA members superimposed over me as I danced around the room.
In the cafe at the ABBA museum
We then left the ABBA museum and walked around the city some more. We went to a cafe and then we saw a changing of the guards at the royal palace.
The friend that we made at the hostel went his way as we went to the airport and flew back to Cologne. We brought my friend’s bike that we had recovered from Sweden, and I also never needed my passport as I went through security again…
I had a great, albeit fairly short weekend as we only arrived Saturday morning and left Sunday evening, but I still feel like we got to see quite a bit. I look forward to going back someday in the summer to see Stockholm without any snow, and I will probably attempt to do some camping when I do so.