Uppsala [Sweden]!

Although I was nowhere near ready to leave Portugal, it was high time I continued on my adventures - and I found a reasonably priced plane ticket. [I thought about taking the train to Sweden, but as it turns out, Sweden is much too far from Portugal for that to be reasonable in terms of either time or money.]

I took a train from Aveiro to Lisbon at 2:30 in the morning on May 13th to catch my flight to Arlanda, the airport in Stockholm. The flight was so empty that I had a whole row to myself and stretched out and slept the whole way - glorious. In the luggage pick-up area in the airport, I noticed a box where you could leave your mace - apparently it's illegal in Sweden.

On the bus to Uppsala, I saw an Ikea in its natural habitat!

Once in Uppsala, I feasted on Dutch cheese, Chinese buffet, American cream cheese, Finnish chocolate...okay, okay, I also had some Swedish bread and candy. I asked Anna-Stina's friends whether they ever ate at Swedish restaurants, and they said there pretty much was no such thing. You eat Swedish food at home, but there aren't really sit-down restaurants for it - at the most, meatballs at street food places.

Uppsala is one of my favorite city names. The stress is on the second syllable, which makes it slightly less fun than if it were on the first syllable, but it's still very fun.

After Chinese, we went to an Irish pub, where a drunk metalhead heard us speaking English and invited himself to our table. He declared his love for me and asked Anna-Stina whether he could go with her back to Finland. [I said "thank you" and Anna-Stina said "no."]

The next night, we went to a rooftop party at one of the dorms, where a guy made an excellent first impression by asking Anna-Stina about me [instead of asking me, even though I was right there?], getting my name wrong when asking about me, and then making fun of my lisp. Smooth! Good way to make friends. We also met a punk, complete with leather and chains and a necklace consisting of a chain held together by a padlock - later I was absolutely delighted to see him totally rock out to pop music. Yeah, you break free of those stereotypes! Nice!

When we headed back around 3:30 a.m., I was shocked to see how bright it was outside - I had forgotten how far north we were.

I had to do a lot of work while we were there, so I unfortunately didn't really get to see too much of the city, but it was still exciting to just be in Sweden. I attempted to use my Norwegian a few times, but people just mostly answered in English. Worth a try!