📍Stockholm, Sweden 🇸🇪 & Oslo, Norway 🇳🇴

Day 1: By this point of the trip, we had taken numerous amounts of flights, have figured the crazy transportation in so many cities, and have checked in and out of plenty of hotels. Absolutely NONE of that prepared us for finding our hotel in Stockholm. Once we arrived at the airport, we took the metro toward our hotel. The walk from our metro stop to the hotel was supposed to be five minutes. If you haven’t gathered by now, it was not five minutes. What makes it worse is that we could see the hotel from the metro we took into the city. We saw the sign about 8 times as we walked around, but we could not find the entrance to save our lives. We followed the GPS to the hotel, but didn’t see an entrance, so we kept walking and saw an elevator. We took the elevator down and saw the hotel building, but could not find a door to enter. We walked around for at least 25 minutes going up and down stairs, hills, and different streets. At this time I was nearly two minutes from peeing my pants and was getting desperate. We decided to put the address back in the GPS and try to restart.

Turns out…uh…it was user error. We had passed the hotel in the VERY beginning of our search and had just missed the door. Sweaty, defeated, and about to have soiled pants, we run in and I sprint to the toilet before checking in. Good news, I made it to the bathroom. The room had very nice views and was, in fact, in a great location. We stayed at the Hilton Stockholm Slussen (for those looking for a challenge in finding hotel entrances).

We were absolutely starving, so we walked to a restaurant that was right next door to our hotel (couldn’t afford to get lost again). When we arrived the staff was really rude and we were not in the mood for that, so we left and found another place called The Greasy Spoon and it was delicious.

We had made some friends from our hostel dinner in Copenhagen and one of the girls gave us a few Stockholm recommendations. One of them being the Vasa Museum. This is a museum of the boat that sailed in 1628 and made it less than one mile before it sank. These days I’m not a runner, but even I can go further than that. I am unsure if I was more impressed by how much of the boat they recovered and have in its original condition or by the fact it didn’t even make it a mile. Either way, impressive.

J was set on visiting the oldest IKEA (still in use) and I was set on eating at the IKEA cafeteria, so it worked out. We took the bus (way too far for an IKEA, but that’s besides the point) and we had ourselves a Swedish meal. Did we also use our valuable time walking through the entire store? I am embarrassed proud to say we did. We then took the bus the wrong way back and added a good amount of time to our journey, so we did not get back to our hotel until very late. All for some IKEA meatballs. Ridiculous. Worth it.

Day 2: It was time to explore some of the city. I wanted to watch the changing of the guards, so I got up a bit earlier than J and made my way to the Royal Palace.

The ceremony was really long and even had two people playing instruments at the end. Apparently, in the summer it’s even longer, but this 40 minute performance was enough for me.

I then went to roam around the downtown area since I had not yet seen much of it. I must’ve really liked the look of the streets in the city because while looking back at my pictures, I noticed I had about 294 different pictures of streets on my walk.

I walked by an cookie shop with a line so, naturally, I joined the line. By the time I was up to order the cookie I wanted was sold out. I asked if he had any more and he told me if I came back in 12 minutes he will have a fresh batch for me. Say less. I roamed around for 11 minutes and 59 seconds more and went back to Sponge Cookies. As promised, my cookies were there and fresh. Conveniently, J had met me right as I got the cookies so he also got to join in for this taste test. Very good, would eat again (often, actually).

We grabbed some lunch, because it was already getting pretty late and then continued to walk around the city.

The girl we met in Copenhagen had also told us to go to ABBA The Museum, so we got tickets for the last entrance of the day. This is important to note: we were running late because our scheduled metro was not running for whatever reason. So we hopped on scooters, rode in the freezing cold, and got there just in the nick of time. Frozen, but made it. To be honest, we didn’t know much about ABBA, except for a few of their famous songs, but the museum was interactive and fun. There was also a video that was meant to provide a “brief” background but played for well over 30 minutes. That’s a movie, not a video.

We had seen that some of the metro stop walls (I think 9 stops or so) had art so we went for a little ride around the city looking for said walls. Luckily, some blogger had found the stations that had the best art so we were not roaming around too aimlessly.

We ended the night at Meatballs for the People, which was delicious and the place J tried both moose and bear meat.

Day 3: We booked our flight to Tromso, Norway with a 24 hour layover in Oslo, meaning we had a short time to fit in a lot of activity and a busy day. We landed and found our hotel, Citybox Oslo, successfully on the first try so things were looking good. It was kinda gloomy, which was fine. It was also kinda icy on the groud, which was not as fine. We walked to the Opera House for the views and I had almost taken a tumble within the first two minutes.

We then did a quick stop at Akershus Castle because we thought that is where the changing of the guards was at. It was not…and we only had a short amount of time to find the correct location, so we asked one the castle staff for help and hurried over to the Royal Palace.

We made it just in time and got to see these finely dressed men and women do their thing.

We then went to Vigeland Sculpture Park, which, unlike the palace and castle, was very unlike any other stop on our trip. The entire park is filled with naked statues. A lot of them.

Also, please notice the steps. This was a very dangerous excursion. Please also notice the shoe accessories the locals were wearing…we were a bit unprepared for this.

Anyway, we continued on our journey for finding unique things around the city and found Grass Roots Square, which met the “unique” theme requirement. It was 50,000 little army men…in the ground.

From there we found some fun graffiti/wall art and then realized we had not eaten in a very long time, which is concerning for us. There was a food hall, Mathallen Oslo, close by. We ate Vietnamese food and then J ordered a pastry…and liked it so much he ordered 3 more.

We somehow made time for laundry and I passed out at 8 pm. J kindly finished the laundry and I slept for a solid 11 hours. Seeing naked people all day is exhausting.

We packed up and got ready for our flight to Tromsø!