300km beyond the Polar Circle

Here some impressions of the Kiruna trip at the end of November:

Trip to Tallin

Last week some friends and I went to Tallin, in order to check out one more of the baltic cities, which are really easy to reach from Sthlm.

As the weather forecast predicted, the waves were nice and small and fortunately the ‘Near Gale Warning’ (see image) was a little bit ambitious.

Tallin itself is definitely worth a visit! Probably one of the most interesting cities around the Baltic See.

Thanks to Simon, who is living at the moment in Tallin, we got really nice impressions of the city and excellent coffee

Challenging the Baltic Sea

This afternoon I am going to depart to Tallin – again with a ferry from Tallink. I am not sure if this is a good idea but I checked the wave forecast of the Finnish Institute Of Marine Research.

According to these forecast results, the weather is going to be nice and calm – nothing compared to the light gale we got into, when we travelled back from Riga a week ago.

Stockholm-Riga-Stockholm in only 51 hours by boat

Hej!

A week ago, some of my friends from Tyresö and I went on a boat trip to Riga. We choose to take the Tallink ferry because this is much more friendly to the environment and additionally pretty cheap. It was especially cheap, because Tallink had its ‘Crazy Weeks’. When we booked our tickets, we had no idea that this loose promise of craziness would be fulfilled.

Before we entered the ship, we saw at the check in desk a weather forecast. In there it said something about a gale warning. Since we are not used to this jargon we asked the officer behind the desk, what we should expect with having a gale. As nice as the man was, he just said something about some waves, which isn’t quite a good explanation for this phenomenon.

We had the pleasure to travel with the Regina Baltica, which is a ship with quite a bit of history – as one can read in this article. I like especially this part of the article!

The bad thing with the good consciousness regarding the climate is that the such a boat trip does not take only 1.5 hours but 16 wonderful hours. The great challenge is to spend this time, without going crazy. So one has to avoid the ‘best band in the Baltic Sea’, which is playing almost constantly in ‘the night club’. Further, one has to make sure to make a big circle around the karaoke event. If one is really curious about very individual personalities, which do not care to make a fool out of them self, one might want to have a look at this. However, this is basically the same as American Idol but without the experts comments – so not so much fun. Anyway, the most exciting thing on the MS Regina Baltica is the show dancing event. This is so strange and boring that I can’t explain this here.

So long story short moral: it is a good feeling to leave the ferry in Riga for a couple of hours.

Riga itself seems to be a beautiful city. Unfortunately we did not see to much of the city, because the weather was so bad, this means it was very windy, cold and snowing, that we stayed most of the time in cafes, churches and restaurants.

Nevertheless we had a good time at this place and returned back to the ship just in time. As we were making our plans, how to spend the time on the ferry in the most possible pleasant way the crew anounced that the departure would be delayed for approximatly 10 hours due to the bad weather conditions.

This basically meant, that a collegue and I could not make it to the presentation of our homework at the following day. So we checked if they could provide us with an internet access, which the crew could not arrange. What we did finaly was sending SMS to another student in Stockholm, asking him to tell the teacher, that we are stucked on the boat in Riga.

The evening was actually not to bad, however it makes a huge difference if the boat is moving and you know that every minute that passes by brings you closer to Sthlm or not.

In the end we left Riga 14 hours later as originally intended and passed the rest of the storm.

Kayak Trip in the archipelago of Stockholm

Tjena tjena! Here are some pictures of the kayak trip on the weekend 22/23 September 08. The pictures are made by Sebastian Prost, who seems to be an excellent photographer!

Jan cooking the best meal ever over the open fire.

About the trip: we started our tour in Dalarö, which is in the south of Stockholm. Dalarö is basically directly in the archipelago so therefore one is surrounded by islands right away! Since we had food and water for a weekend with us, we used only kayaks for two persons, which makes it less exhausting to paddle.

On the evening of the first day, we had to find a nice and quiet place, where we could stay over night. This turned out to be a little complicated, since you can’t tell, if there is a good place on an island as long as you are still in the kayak. So we had to stop, get out the kayak, check the island and back in the kayak again… However, we found a perfect place: on a little island, far away from any houses and civilisation. Jan cooked us there on the open fire the best meal one can imagine!

Kayak Trip in Trollbäcken

Today was probably one of the last days, which could be called late summer days. So perfect weather for a kayak trip since it was cold but sunny! Together with three other guys from the Tyresö dormitory I went to Trollbecken and we rented there kayaks for the day.

All I can say is that if you have the chance to go on a kayak trip in Sweden just do it!

Have a look at Google’s maps where this was: Klick Here

Trip to Skansen – Stockholm

Hey hey!

Last week I had the great pleasure to visit the museum Skansen in Stockholm. This visit was organised by the course Swedish History and Societe, which I attend in order to get to know a little more about Sweden. The first advanture in the context of this visit was that I was 30 min. late when I came to Skansen becuase I had a so called laboration this afternoon in Kista. Kista is the place where most of the courses I attend are taking place, which is quite a challenge. This is because I get travel-sick quite easily in Stockholm’s Tunelbana. However, when I arrived at Skansen there was nobody I knew at the entrance so I just asked at the entrance if they let me in, since I was late and missed my group. Luckily the nice person just let me in and told me to call somebody and ask where in Skansen they were.

The guided tour in the museum itself was very interesting, since the person, who showed us around could tell stories about every single artefact. In Skansen you can see little houses from the far North of Sweden as well as framer houses of the South. Also some buildings build by king Karl Gustav III are there.

Fig. A hut from Lapland (Jonnie Nord (User:Zaphod))

Besides the buildings there is also a collection of various animals e.g. elks, reindeer and brown bears.

(Picture taken by Alisdair McDiarmid from Glasgow, United Kingdom)

So if you ever have the chance to go to this place: do it. You will get some nice impressions about the life in Sweden and besides that, it is like a little vocation from the big city Stockholm

Trip to Vaxholm

Last Sunday a bunch of Erasmus-people and I had a trip to Vaxholm. It is a nice thing to do if you have nothing else to do on a typical Sunday afternoon.

Vaxholm claims to be the capital of the archipelago. We could not figure out if this is true but in any case it is a town right in the archipelago next to Stockholm.

This picture (Thanks to Wikipedia, published under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5) shows the castle of Vaxholm. The best part about this place is that the movie “Pippi Långstrump på de sju haven” has been shot partly there. Besides this happy part of history this place hosts a lot of huge guns – so if you are not so much into this stuff there is basically no reason to take the boat to the castle. But actually the boat, which brings you to the castle is worth to take a little boat ride because the furniture and all the things inside are in such a nice old school way – just great!

In any case – Vaxholm is probably a beautiful place on a summer day. On the other hand I should also get used to the northern fall, which is not so sunny and bright as I hoped it was ; )

Helsinki Trip – Some Pictures

Hey hey,
here are some pictures of the Helsinki trip. So I would like to thank those, who made those pictures!

Trip to Helsinki [Updated]

Hej hej. Going to Helsinki is always a good idea. However, it might be clever not to take one of these ferries, that depart from Stockholm. These are basically all swimming drinking halls, selling tax free alcohol. This sounds tempting but it is not since it not possible to drink as much alcohol as some Swedish and Finnish people do. Further the ride takes 16 hours.

Aside from those challenges one has to manage Helsinki seems to be a very nice place. We did not have much time there but the first impression was really good.

So I wish I would have stayed there for a couple of days – maybe as a couch surfer or so, just to get more insights in this city.

Soon I will add some pictures…