Andrea told me that she’d have written totally different things to me about our trip to Scandinavia. I asked her what she’d have said, and this is it:
My version of our trip in Scandinavia 2003
Well, its been nearly two years since we went so Ive probably forgotten lots of things, and I cant look up the place names because I lent my travel guide (which is clearly superior to yours by the way, but that goes without saying;-) to a friend. But I think you will still find that we remember different things.
Monday, 30th June 2003
Its weird leaving a country by going to another country. A friend came to carry all my stuff back home to Germany, and I felt as if I was just going on holidays and come back to Coventry afterwards.
We had taken an overnight bus down to Stansted, arrived in Stockholm at about noon, falling asleep at random places. Well, thats what happens when you want to travel cheap. (The next night proved to be much more comfortable, slept in a boat that was slowly moving with the waves.)
Stockholm feels like a nice place, laid out over several islands. The underground is great, every station is a piece of art. Sadly, they have got a bit of a traffic problem. Wherever you are, you always have a big crossing or a major road in sight. But people where very friendly – the bus-driver would chat to random passengers – quite relaxed, a lot of trust in fellow citizens.
Wednesday, 2nd July 2003
We took a boat through the archipelago islands yesterday, passing islands with just a tiny house and one tree on them, and spent the night on a small island called Finnhamn. It had mostly summerhouses; some people seemed to camp there for life. Two former soldiers had taken their children on an adventure weekend. You dont imagine that you are just outside a big city.
From Stockholm, we took a swimming hotel to Helsinki, which incidentally my grandparents had been a few years earlier. Got completely soaked on the way to the peer, so we abstained from buying the welcome photo on which we could have been mistaken for wet rats. The cabin we were upgraded to was really nice, Max shower gel liked it so much that it stayed there. The boat was too big to be shaken by the waves, felt like being in an ordinary hotel…an ordinary hotel with a duty free shop, where I introduced Max to Strohrum.
Saturday, 5th July 2003
Helsinki is a wonderful place. A lot got rebuild during the 18th century so the architecture is very coherent. Its a bitRussian, a bit Swedish, a bit Finish. On the fortress island just outside Helsinki were You are leaving the American Sector-style signs in all three languages, especially my friends from Berlin really liked that. We stayed in Helsinki over the weekend. It was lovely weather, lots of musicians around the city, and lots of tourist guides speaking more languages than Ive got fingers on my hands (or maybe more than Ive got on one hand, but still.)
Monday, 7th July 2003
We took a train to Vasa, the famous lakes of Finland passing by. I would have liked to stay there for a bit, but Max probably wanted to go to Sweden quickly and I was already deformed enough by the mosquitoes we had near the city.(Thinking about it, deformed is probably French, but well…) We took a boat over to Umeåin Sweden, intending to go to Oestersund but ended up in Sundsvall, a nice small town without tourists but lots of randomly coloured dragons, probably designed by the same artist who brought the cows to Luxembourg. We walked around a little bit, grumbled about our incapacities in timetable reading (Apparently, neither a degree in law nor a chemistry PhD enables you to decipher letters into words.) and decided to make the best out of it by taking the train to Narvik. (Later, I got told of by a Swedish Erasmus Student for not having stopped in Luleå, his hometown.) We travelled all night and most of the next day. Impressive landscape, changing with every hour we went further north into higher mountains and bigger forests to become less vegetated in the very north.
Thursday, 10th July 2003
Tromsø really feels like a place in the Arctic, even the hot weather could not defeat this impression. Not that I have any experience in how the Arctic should be like, at least the several museums about the region, the life there in the past and expeditions to the North Pole gave you a feel for it. People in Tromsø are longing for colour, so the houses were particularly brightly painted here. I went running in the morning in a swampland valley, at the end of it, there was, dont know if you can call hat a glacier, at least a big block of old ice in lots of different colours. Really impressive.
Saturday, 12th July 2003
From Tromsø, we took a train down to Trondheim, only being interrupted by a piece of rock the train collided with. (Max slept through the entire event. Fortunately, Norwegian sounds a bit like Bavarian so I could understand what was going on.) The must have been quite close to derailing because we even made it on the radio news.
In Trondheim, we stayed in a repurposed students union. (The toilets had been turned into showers, just a showerhead above a toilet seat.) There were lots of other travelling students. Some Australian guy talked to me for about 15 minutes, but I guess Ill never find out what he actually said. In the dorm adjoining ours I met some French people and spent most of the night there. Nice sometimes not to have to make the effort to speak English.
Wednesday 16th July 2003
We took the Hurtigruten down to Bergen, the former post boat is now turned into a cruise boat for German tourists in their 60s. I was a bit disappointed because from the boat, you dont really see much. In the end, we took the Flåmsbana to get at least an impression of the fjords, which was truly amazing.
We were running a bit short of time, so we only had 2 hours in Oslo which we spent sitting on a square by the station…watching a man in a pyjama shaving his eyebrows.
We spent our last night near a buzzing whatever it was in Stockholm. Could have been anywhere else because Stockholm at night did not seem to be related anyhow to the city we had started our trip at.
Thursday 17th July 2003
I arrived in Lübeck at about midnight, was home by three and had to work at seven in the morning. My boss sent me home at nine because I kept speaking English to random customers, which was funny for everybody but the parties involved. So by the end of our trip, I had finally gotten used to speaking English all day, most inappropriate then though.
