goteborg, stockholm

today is tuesday august 26th. 16 days left. argh!

m 18 frog walk!!!!
t 19 train helsingborg-goteborg
w 20 goteborg, theme park, south park, punkd, cous cous with pesto and cheese mmmm,
th 21 train goteborg-stockholm, private room, raaaain, cafe
f 22 private room, shopping, boots, stealing stuff, x files movie
s 23 dorm, skansen, pet sounds, johannus and two canadians, maccas
s 24 dorm, everything closed, central station, tried laundry, rory and jeremy
m 25 dorm, laundry, shopping, buffet
t 26 ferry

so here we are, at the end of sweden. our bags are packed and scattered around us as we huddle at the free computer on the rygerfjord I. we've got 4 hours or so before our FERRY departs from the stockholm port, set for helsinki. we dock at around 9:30am tomorrow, so that makes it about a 15 hour trip, or perhaps 14 because i think there's a time difference. whatever the particulars, its sure to be a difficult and uncomfortable journey considering we couldnt reserve seats and have to rely on our speed and cunning..... uh oh.

sweden has been such a beautiful country. the people are very strange, lots of cool fashions and waif like model people but not so many of the typical 'scandinavian type' with the bright skin and white hair. the highlights of sweden:

walking through the woods...
on our last night in helsingingborg, in a covert attempt to avoid katerina we took to the woods behind our house, braving the rain and the bitterly cold winds. sweden has a law which dictates the 'right to nature', which means that you can walk, camp and pick berries from anywhere at all that you like. so we walked through the woods, around an old castle (we couldnt find anyone to tell us whose castle it was, but apparently its just offices now), met a border collie, SAW FROGS!!!, took photos, got lost, found black sheep, found horses, got found again. the swedish woods are so beautiful. looked for a bear, but luckily didnt find one.

goteborg...
a perfect hostel (with imperfect directions, took us 45 minutes and a bit of fare evasion to find it) with a kitchen to make delicious salty cous cous and watch punkd and south park and the olympics and sex and the city. we only had one day in this pretty little uni town, sweden's second biggest, so of course we went on more rollercoasters..... expensive but these were even faster than tivoli!!! sweden has a weird penchant for those scoopy lolly selections like what they used to have at kmart, they're absolutely everywhere, so on our goteborg day we caved and paid far too much to end up with a serious sugar shock headache and stomach cramps... not worth it.
we found a little cafe to soothe our pains, got the soup and a bagel deal with delicious broccoli soup and a cream cheese bagel for 55 kr.

skansen...
steve from behind me just said 'mm, skansen was awesome'. it's supposed to be a miniature sweden in the heart of stockholm. miniature amish sweden maybe, because it was missing the coops and overpriced restaurants that we've encountered. anyway, its this huge property with little amish houses and farms and mud structures and rose gardens and statues and..........NORDIC ANIMALS. so cool. reindeer are so little and helpless, i cant believe so many people eat them... they're only about hip height and they shed their antlers! so weird. meese are big and scary and their heads are enormous. the wolverine is a tiny animal who should not be an x-man because he is so unthreatening and hilarious. bear cubs! bear gonna eatcha! we got seriously close to some huge brown bears and watched the babies feeding, sooo awesome, photos to come one day. more horses, a huge owl, some tiny pig babies which made steve almost never want to eat ham again, BISON ARE BIG TOO, and a bit where you could pat goats which was supposed to be for children under 5 but there was nobody watching so i jumped in and found some baby goats and put them in my bag and they're here right now eating magnums. awesome.

RAAAIN.
the most serious downpour ever. we ran and ran for shelter but we got seriously owned, our clothes took 3 days to dry! drenched to the skin, its not normal for little aussies used to endless drought! we found a cafe deep under the ground and had toasted sandwiches and coffee and shivered in true wintry style, except it's summer here... how depressing.

SPIDERS.
everywhere. dont come to sweden for that reason. spider gonna eatcha.

X FILES
is the worst film ever. dont see it. dont even think about it. or maybe do see it. it's possible that it's actually not bad, it's just so brilliant that regular people can't understand it. and we paid 25 bucks a ticket. :(

PET SOUNDS BAR
and cocktails with a german called johannus and some canadian chumps. fun but too crowded and waaay too expensive, at 20 dollars a cocktail. maccas on the way home, an unsuccessful search for a 7/11 with some 3.5% beer (that's all they're allowed to sell outside the government shops, sweden has serious alcohol control) and home to bed.

RANDOMLY MEETING PEOPLE FROM THE JOURNEYS
rory and jeremy, the guy whose laptop i ruined in a drunken incident in copenhagen, were wandering down the canal in stockholm. i could hear this 'jes! jes!' and finally i realised! they went on a 20000 dollar cruise with their grandparents and ended up robbed in russia, drunk in the sea and plied with free food and alcohol by old people looking for toy boys. good adventures.

EVERYTHING IS CLOSED ON SUNDAYS
that's really annoying.

finland, ho!