We’re in Stockholm!

I’m writing to you from our bright hotel room in downtown Stockholm.  We’ve been in the country for about seven hours, and we’ve explored some really cool parts of the city.  Bryan just lay down on the bed, and he immediately lapsed into sleep.  Poor guy hasn’t slept in the last 27 hours:)  Photos are up in my gallery!

Our flight from Madison to Chicago and from Chicago to Stockholm went really smoothly.  I got about half-way through The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I enjoyed getting wine and a couple meals served to us on the plane.  Somehow mushy peas and bread-in-a-bag taste cool when they’re served at 35,000 feet.

Oh dear, my laptop battery is about to give out, and it is looking like the power adapter/converter that I brought along isn’t working.  I’ll post this now and hopefully be able to re-charge my computer soon so I can upload all the pictures I took today!

**Well, I discovered to my chagrin that the power adapter that I bought wasn’t intended for laptop use.  I think I fried it.  So I called the front desk, and they sent me down the street to an electronics store where I picked up a more powerful transformer.  It cost 240 kroner.  I think the exchange rate is eight kroner to a dollar, but I’m so terrible at doing division on the fly that I tend to be totally in the dark about how much things cost when we’re traveling abroad.  When Bryan and I were in Italy for our honeymoon, I remember being completely unable to do the math because the conversion was in the 1,000s.  It’s a little freeing, really, to have no idea what you are paying for item!  So anyway, now I have a laptop that can get charged, so all is good.  Pictures are currently uploading to Flickr.

I didn’t do a lot of planning before our trip.  At Terry’s knee, I learned that when you go to a new place, you have a wonderful but limited opportunity to delve into that place.  To learn, to appreciate, to suck the marrow out of life.  The idea of going to a neat city ignorant of the history, sites, and museums was ludicrous.  Terry’s method of travel involves extensive book buying, book reading, map creation, walking-route developing (with map highlighting), reservation-making, and itinerary-generating.

I like that way of exploring new places, but I’m also rather fond of the current Bryan-and-Althea approach.  We got books and movies from the library.  I learned about some neat places.  Then I forgot about them.  Then the trip was suddenly happening and we made last-minute hotel reservations, threw a guide book in our bag, and didn’t open it again.  Today we wandered around the old section of town.  We stumbled upon castles and huge churches, and neither of us knew anything about them.  But we enjoyed looking at them.  I’m no good at remembering the names of buildings anyways.  Things beginning with capital letters seem to slip easily out of my mind.  So frankly, we wandered blindly.  And we were rather sleep deprived, having gotten on the plane at 4pm in Chicago and gotten off at 8am in Stockholm.  It was a fun day!

Kaleb picked us up at the airport, and we all took the 20-minute train into Stockholm.  (This country appears to have a lot of trees.  There are also fields and fields of a mysterious crop with yellow flowers.)  After dropping our bags off at the Scandic Continental, we set off to explore and find some breakfast.

After a yummy breakfast, Kaleb headed back to the airport to pick up his brother.  Bryan and I spent the afternoon exploring the island of Gamla Stan (Old Town).  We walked nearly every street, and then we found a nice place to sit down and look out across the river at the boats and beautiful buildings.

From our bench, we noticed one very large, very tall building (I’ve since learned, it’s called Stadshuset (City Hall)).  We could just make out people walking around top of the tower.  We decided to see if we could get up there, so we walked around and stood in line for a very long time in a very stiff breeze.  The wait was worth it!  The view from up top was amazing, and it gave us such a neat perspective on this lovely city.

I think that about sums up our adventures for the day.  Bryan and I keep pinching ourselves because we can’t believe that our trip is happening!  We’re having such fun!  Now we’re off to dinner with Kaleb’s family.  We’re looking forward to meeting his wife and baby!

Until tomorrow (??),

Althea