STO: Who needs sleep?

I'm here in the computer lab at UCD, slumped into my seat, 10 minutes removed from a difficult search for a free computer, 45 minutes from waking up at the end of my phonology class, 15 hours from posing as an Olympian, 3 days removed from exiting Stockholm, and over 6 weeks since I arrived in Dublin. Wow. It's been a tiring stretch, both in the recent past and in the longer picture. In the short term future, I cannot wait to get back tonight and just fall into a nap, maybe waking up to catch the Ireland-Cyprus game. In the long term future, I cannot wait to get back home and curl up inside a warm house and admire the snow from outside, and then go see friends I hadn't seen in 7 months. But let's rewind the last 2 weeks.

I left off in London getting wasted in a pub with random Georgetown LSE people who heard I was in town and flocked towards me. The next day, after a prolonged slumber, I got going at 2pm to do some sightseeing. International phone rates and limited battery power complicated matters but eventually I learned that my housemates from Dublin, whom if you recall were also in town, were STILL sleeping, and I decided to meet up with this girl Jenna, who plays Frisbee at Notre Dame and is also at UCD. After lunch at a pub where Crystal and I sat down with two older women, one of whom was celebrating her birthday, with incredible life stories. I reluctantly had to leave that conversation prematurely to travel on the tube to the Imperial War Museum. It was a pretty cool museum, although while I had set out to learn about how the British conquered my people, I instead saw stuff like homelife during World War II, a Holocaust memorial and a movie documenting genocide. After that, I asked for directions to the Houses of Parliament, having absolutely no idea where they were, and was stunned to find out they were within a 20 minutes walk. In London, a lot of the famous tourist attractions are right next to each other, so in a 5 minute span, I passed the Eye of London, checked out Parliament and Big Ben and then walked right up to Westminster Abbey. These are all very famous sites and I really can't add a whole lot more to, especially since the twilight sky really made it difficult for me to take good pictures of any of them. I really wanted to climb onto the face of Big Ben and get my picture taken there, ala my Great Wall of China picture, but that didn't happen.

Afterwards I did manage to meet up with my Dublin housemates. En route to dinner, they explained how ridiculously exhausted they all were, especially Chad, who woke up at 5 past the meridian. I won't get into details, but let's just say they had a VERY hard night out. As a result, while we did go out that night, it was extremely subdued. The highlight was us asking cabbies for a good place to go out and overwhelmingly being directed towards the SoHo area. Sounds like a cool place, I need to research the history of Soho but I know that's a city section you'll find all over the world (South Houston in NYC, a chic living place in Hong Kong). Well we go into a bar there, and after mulling around for 10 minutes, we start up a conversation with the bartender, who happens to be a Mexican American from San Diego who informs us that we're in a gay bar. Apparently SoHo is the gay party area of London. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal, but we were fairly alarmed that everyone had told us group of 4 boys to go to SoHo. When Europeans think you're gay, it might mean a need to reevaluate.

I got home safely the next day, saying goodbye to Crystal and verbally slapping her for neglecting me upon my arrival. Getting home from the airport was very uneventful. I wish I could say that for my housemates. Chad and his friend Pat never boarded a 10pm plane, because they had actually booked a 10am plane. They realized their mistake during the day but still went to the airport and feigned ignorance, before biting the bullet and buying another ticket for the last flight out, arriving back around 12:45am. Matt was supposed to take a real early flight on Monday morning, but as it so happens, he had booked a real early flight on Sunday morning and realized halfway through the day as well. Well he didn't even bother going to the airport, and instead did some quick online transactions. He ended up boarding a train to the west of England, taking a ferry over to a coastal town on the south of Ireland, then another ferry to Dublin and then 2 buses to our house. While I was able to sum up his travels in one sentence, they actually encompassed over 12 hours because of extensive waiting at each port of entrance, although only a grand sum of £110. He got back Monday evening.

The week flew by and before I knew it, I was taking up the window seat of a Ryanair flight to Stockholm, with my high school compatriot Greg Speidel in the aisle seat. So why Stockholm? Raise your hand if you can find it on a map of Europe. Hmm, that's probably like half of you. Raise your hand if you know it's in Switzerland. Well that's 3/4 of you. Unfortunately, you're all tools because Stockholm is actually in Sweden, which is Scandinavia, north of the North Sea and rather separate from the rest of continental Europe, whereas Switzerland is smack in the middle of continental Europe. For your edification, stare at this for a while cause knowing European geography is really important in my book (although I've yet to find a publisher). So before I even reached Dublin, I knew I wanted to visit something "off the beaten path" of other American tourists. I definitely wanted to see Italy, London, Berlin and perhaps Paris, Amsterdam or Barcelona, but I wanted to do something different too, and I wasn't sure what that would be. Could I hit up Lithuania, Poland or the grand Prague? Or further into Eastern Europe and go to Serbia and hope to make it back to blog about it? What about Denmark or Switzerland, are those off the path enough? What about Oslo or Helsinki? Nay, after much consultation I decided I'd go to Stockholm and Sweden. My cousin Shu Yi of the Oxford trip has been to all those Scandinavian capitals of Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki, and told me Stockholm is the best. Furthermore, one of Justin's friends in Hong Kong was from Stockholm and told me that city rocks, and I had once played Diablo II with some Swedes (I'm really setting myself up for something there). Then a look into Stockholm's wikipedia page really had me watering at this opportunity. Finally, Sweden just sounded exotic. Now I know when most people think exotic, they don't think blond hair blue eyes, but screw most people. Sweden was just so far north, I wondered what could go on there.

Well somehow, there was a tremendous city waiting for us. Stockholm is laid out over an archipelago of 7 islands and is as beautiful as that would imply. The water that flew through it was possibly the bluest river that I've ever seen go through a city (resoundingly defeating the Charles, Liffey, Thames and Hong Kong Harbor). The city was very European in most aspects, with a strongly commercialized sector but still a very vibrant old town called Gamla Stan, based in the center island. Gamla Stan consisted of many buildings from the 15th century and the grand Stockholm Palace. Sweden is a constitutional monarchy and Stockholm Palace is the historical and current nesting grounds of the royal family, although I don't think they actually sleep there (it's their official residence but not their private one). It's rather unremarkable on the outside, appearing as a stocky, rectangular block on a small hill a block away from the water, dwarfed by some other nice historic buildings on the island. We went around it on our first day but were too late for the tours (they ran from 12-3) so we didn't do a whole lot there and even considered not going back. I insisted we needed to do this tour cause it was a must-see in Stockholm, although I had no idea why. So instead we toured Stockholm City Hall, where we thought the Nobel Prize is given out. Instead, there's just the Nobel Banquet held there, and for some reason the award is given in Oslo. Lame. The city hall is pretty grand and polished, complete with a dining room large enough to hose a wiffle ball tournament. Next up was the Nationalmuseum, no space in the name, which was your standard art museum that contained a lot of European pieces, none of note, and a fair amount of Swedish culture. It would make my list of top 10 museums I've been to only because I can't name 9 others.

That night, we had an early dinner where we had authentic Swedish food, which was an uninspiring plate of Swedish meatballs for me, and some very generic pasta and mashed potatoes for Greg. We hadn't ever heard of Swedish cuisine beforehand, and now I realized why. If you're not in India, China, Japan, Italy, France or wherever they have kebabs, odds are you don't need to feel obligated to try the local cuisine. We then went out for a nice of debaucherous drinking, except we couldn't find good bars to go too. I mean we left at 7pm, and walked around, back and forth throughout the city, and kept running into bars that hadn't opened yet, bars that were empty, clubs that were too expensive, bars that were too expensive, bars that were too full and a big building named "Pub" that got us all excited until we realized it was a department store, and it was closed. Greg and I both stood outside the entrance with our jaws dropped, and as we walked away we heard a Swedish couple chuckle, presumably at us. I can't blame them. The sad part of the weekend was that we found two kick ass clubs/drinking lounges: the Absolut Ice Box, and Cafe Opera, and went to neither of them. The Cafe had been recommended by my friend Emelie, who was actually Justin's cousin that I met in Hong Kong who was raised in Stockholm. I wanted to go there, but the cover charge was astonishingly high, about 23 euro, and Greg would have none of that. The Icebox was apparently 1 of 3 in the world, with locations also in London and Hong Kong. Guess what? I've been to the one in Hong Kong, and it's pretty freaking cool, no pun intended. Well this one required advanced booking, and an 18 euro cover that included a drink, with further drinks 9.50 a piece. That's a steep price but I was willing to pay it - Greg was not. Not that I begrudge him but he was pretty stingy that weekend, and that wasn't my idea of a weekend in Stockholm, which was a capital city that required quite some capital. So our nights out were rather uneventful - one of the nights I think Greg had just 2 drinks.

The next day we did see the Royal Palace and that was freaking cool. When we arrived, people were all standing around kinda awkwardly and still, so I expected there was some sort of formality going on. Sure enough, a bunch of guards come out and raise some flags very stiffly. When we get inside, I'm amazed to find the place so ornate. Here in the cold northern hinterland of Europe, in a palace that looked like a concrete block from the outside, was just a lavishly decorated marble built environment. While the tour guide kept talking about how the Swedes were overwhelmed by Versailles and trying to emulate that palace, I thought the interior surpassed Versailles. Perhaps that's a scandalous statement, but within a smaller framework, it was really just exquisite. The best rooms had corinthian style columns on 4 corners, with beautiful Sistine Chapel style artwork on the ceiling frames, and gold statues popping out from the art. It's a room easily worth billions of dollars. So Versailles is about 10 times bigger, generally much more grand, and doesn't look like a piece of shit from the outside, but I think Stockholm Palace is still one of the best palaces I've ever been in. After that, the last eventful thing we did was to go out to a bar in Gamla Stan. The bar looked pretty cramped and generally European from the outside, but inside there was a stairwell leading down to what was termed a "Jameson Cellar" which was as cool as it sounds. Basically, I felt like I was in the wintertime of 15th century Sweden, and things were so cold that all people could do was dig a cozy little hole and nestle in and get drunk. That was what the cellar was like. It was small rooms connected by gnome-like entrances, and somehow they fit a 3 man band in there. Twas one of the coolest bars I've ever been to.

We took a bus back to the airport, a typical Ryanair airport that was 80 minutes from the city and containing an astonishing 6 gates. It was easily the worst airport I've ever been in.