Last weekend I went to Stockholm...and I have to admit...it is a lovely city

I like it better than Oslo, actually. Stockholm has a very nice old city core, Oslo doesn´t really have that. The museums in Stockholm are also much more interesting.

We went with 8 people in total, 2 French girls, 3 German girls, 1 French guy, 1 Norwegian guy and moi. The French girls would only stay one night. The bus trip from Oslo to Stockholm took nearly 7.5 hours...we departed at 22.30 and after a looooong night in which I only got one hour of sleep, we were dropped off at an empty Stockholm central station at 5.45 in the morning, an evil time to drop lost student tourists in an unknown city, if you ask me. I mean...everything was closed, yes, it WAS early, I know, but I also know that our bus was NOT the only bus arriving at that ungodly time...there were lots of people stumbling around looking rather lost (and tired).

Luckily we found a very small restaurant just outside the station that sold coffee and, more importantly, was open. We drank something there and sat down for a while until we felt more human. Then we decided to slowly walk through the city towards our youth-hostel (slowly since we could check in from 11.00 and it was only 7.00 by then). Walking through an unknown city at 7.00 AM is quite an experience...and in this case it was a nice one. The city just started to wake up...it gradually got lighter, more people slowly appeared on the streets and I even managed to get a Swedish version of Metro

It almost felt like home...

We first strolled through the old part of the city...lovely...with many old looking shops and pubs. Cool.

After we checked in into our Youth Hostel we decided to go to 3 free museums (the next day we would buy the Stockholm Card and with that card we could get into even more museums and nice things for free). So that afternoon we went to the Modern Museum, the Architecture Museum and the East Asia museum, all pretty cool, especially the East Easia Museum, there was a Manga exhibition and a very cool Meet Buddha exhibition.

In the evening I went to see a very very cool movie with one of the German girls, House of Flying Daggers, luckily her Swedish is also pretty good, cause when we were about to sit down I suddenly realised that the movie would be in Chinese with Swedish subtitles...and I wasn´t sure how good her swedish was. But she thought she could manage and she confessed that she actually followed a chinese course...so...no problem, luckily. I really loved the movie. Wow...impressive!

On saturday we wanted to begin using the Stockholm Card at 12.00, then it would be valid until 12.00 the next day, which fitted in great into our Big Plan

So we did some shopping first and saw the changing of the guards in front of the Royal Palace (which we visited right after). In total we went to 5 museums that day, the Royal Palace, the Royal Treasuries, then we did a pretty cool boattrip thingie, we went to see a church and the Nobel museum. After that we went to the Medieval museum (very cool!), and eventually we took a very cool old tram to the place where an Andy Warhol exhibition was held. After we had dinner we decided it would be cool to go to the TV tower to look at the view, so we did that as well. A busy day, all in all.

On Sunday we got up early cause we wanted to see 3 museums before 12.00 (we had to make sure we would be at the last one at least before 12.00, to be able to get in free :D) We first went to Junibacken, that is the Astrid Lindgren museum.. I loved it...it is so nicely done! When you enter you walk into this old fashioned looking square, the children´s books square it is called, I believe, and there is a selection of the main characters from the most popular Swedish Childrens´ books. It is very interactive, you can see many things there, climb on stuff (if you are a child, that is) push buttons (oooh! BUTTON! I WANNA PUSH THE BUTTON! uhm...sorry about that) and do lots of stuff.

From there you walk into the waiting room for the Story Train, the highlight of the museum. So you get into the train, and you can choose in which language you want the tour to be (the website says it is possible to take the tour in Dutch, well, I checked, not that I wanted to hear it in Dutch, but still, and it is NOT possible ...so...grrr) anyways, you then enter this Droomvlucht kind of world, very beautiful. They had made dolls of all the main Astrid Lindgren characters and those stories and you drove past them and over them just as Droomvlucht, and when you finally got out of the train you were welcomed into Pippi Longstocking´s house which they had built there...so cool :)

I just HAD to buy one of Astrid Lindgrens books in Swedish and that turned out to be Ronja de Roversdochter :) and I bought the Swedish translation of Coraline by Neil Gaiman.

After Junibacken we went to the Vasa museum about an old Viking Ship that sank even before it left the harbour. A very nice museum. And the last museum was Skanken, an open air museum with old farmhouses and bakeries and stuff. Very nice. There I saw my first real life Moose :)

I had decided to take the train back, didn´t think I could handle another night in a bus. My train left at 17.05 so I did some shopping before that. I arrived in Oslo at 21.49, tired but happy after a looong weekend.

Pictures from Stockholm can be found in the photo section(more will follow and I still need to sort them out, but this is a start :) ow...and some of them might look a bit wobbly...but please remember that many were taken on a friday morning, very early, after yours truly had only slept for one hour. Thanks ;)

This week not much happened...been to college, had a cold...and went to the Historical Museum and the Runic Archives today with my runology class and met James Knirk. He works there fulltime and is responsible for everything that has something to do with the actual runic inscriptions and material in half of Norway. That was pretty cool. I mean ...wow... they have EVERYTHING there... they even have the notebook from Sophus Bugge (THE first ever runologist) in which he wrote until a few days before he died in 1907. Wow. We saw some very old letters, including letters from Carl Marstrander, who is actually a Celtologist, but also extremely interested in runes, the only problem is that he has a bit too much of an imagination... which isn´t always a good thing when you´re involved in runology.

The funniest thing they have there are the scissors of Aslak Liestøl, the predecessor of the guy we met today. Aslak Liestøl was a very influential runologist and he was the first to work with the runic material fulltime in the Runic Archives, he was so driven that he inscribed the following on his scissors, in runes: Aslak owns these mighty sharp scissors (on one side), leave them lying here you ugliest of thieves (on the other side). Now, isn´t that cool? :D He also showed us a ´christmas card´ that one of his employees send him a few years ago, it is a wooden stick, in the same style as many of the sticks found in Bryggen, Bergen, and on it he had carved a Christmas wish, hehe, he had made a hole in it and a ribbon with a piece of paper with the address and stamp was tied to it, so it could actually be send...hehe. Runologists are cool!

After that we went to the Historical Museum to look at the Jubileum exhibition, the museum exists for 100 years now, and to celebrate they also have 5 runic inscriptions on display that have never been on display before, so, naturally, we had to see those. There was a rib bone which said Kiss Me (found in Gamle byen in Oslo somewhere around 1050, I believe) and some other cool inscriptions including an amulet which had as inscription Tetragrammaton 'The Four Letter Word' which is Greek and ´means´ Jahwe, the Hebrew God. Interesting, isn´t it?

Let´s leave it at this today... :) I need some tea...