Vasa -- the not so little viking ship that couldnt.

Wow, how embarrassing is this. Commission some huge battle ship with double decker cannons and ornate statues, crack that bottle of champaigne on it before its maiden voyage, wave as it pulls out of the port, and then watch as it topples over after hoisting a few sails! Well, thats more or less what happened to the Vasa. It sat around unnoticed on the sea floor right outside the stockholm for a couple hundred years until somebody took notice 50 or so years ago, dredged it up and put it all back together one piece at a time. It was pretty cool to look at -- unfortunately with its size and the dark lighting it was hard to get a decent picture of.

That second pictures of me right after visiting the Vasa museum, and just before heading back to get rid of all that hair Id accumulated! Wow it feels nice to be semi clean shaven again =)

Gotenborg (pronounced you-da-bore) a charming town which I hardly saw...

I stopped in Gotenborg for a night, wandered around town and had some pizza with a french-swiss guy from the hostel, drank weak heineken (some strange swedish law about alcohol content) with 3 cool Germans, slept absolutely marvelously in a nice chilly room, did some laundry, spent far too long trying to figure out how to do Norway before finally giving up and heading out to Stockholm -- and yes, all I have to show for it is a few pictures of me walking to the train station...

A quick update and some photos...

Yeah, yeah, I know, Im a bit behind. Pardon the lack of certain punctuation (namely the apostrophe) but Im typing on a swedish keyboard at the hostel and dont know where it is. If every now and then you notice a ä slip in where youäd expect to see one, thats because thats the key thats in its place... Anway, I dont really want to take too much time right now to give a long drawn out account of the last few days, I figure maybe Ill do that on the ferry tomorrow night on my way to Helsinki -- unless of course that turns out to be one rip roaring party in which case i might wait a little longer =)

This hostel does have wifi, but for some reason I havent been able to send out mail from my pda since getting to sweden, so Im hoping thats some wierd swedish privacy policy issue with googles smtp setup... Hopefully itll fix itself. Thats part of the reason I havent updated anything. I just noticed all the computers in the hostel have memory card slots though, so that makes life even easier to upload some shots which is what I figured Id take the time to do now. Sorry, Copenhagen is very, um, nonexistent in my photos. I unfortunately forgot to take the camera with me a lot of places. Ive been a little (very little) better about it in Stockholm at least. Stockholms been great. I havent really done all that much in terms of museums (I did make it to see the viking ship Vasa at least) but hanging out an wandering around and going out with new friends from the hostel has been an unbelievable experience!

Heres a few pictures though. Once I finish up here Im going to head out and see if I can find a spot to watch the sun set over the see.

En route to kobenhavn

En route to kobenhavn
Originally uploaded by dscheffy.

I wonder if I need to be dating these. Yesterday I tried sending my first post and I'm not really sure if it worked. For some reason all the pictures I took were unrecognizable on my pda -- corrupt or something. I tried again today and the ones I've taken since then seem to be fine. I guess my palm just didn't like the pictures I took of that pile of horse @$@#... Anyway, I haven't really gotten around to figuring out how to send text only posts directly to blogger.com -- I just know the email address I use for posting pictures as attachments via flickr so I tried sending the post sans attachment and I'm not sure if flickr appreciated that. It could also be that it doesn't like it when I send too much text. These are all things I'll figure out with time.



It's thursday now -- the seventh maybe? What, I got in on tuesday which was the fifth, so yeah, today must be thursday september 7th. Last night I went out again with Mark for a few beers and some Currywurst. Doener Kebab und currywurst, was sonst hat Deutschland anzubieten? Mark suggested when I get home I should open a restaurant that serves both. Of course I think most of the success revolved around his other suggestion of topless waitresses. I said that wouldn't go over so well in the states, but if I end up marrooned somewhere else rather than making it back home, I'll definitely keep the idea in mind;-)



It was another semi restless night, but by the time my alarm went off at 5:45, I didn't want to wake up... I hit the snooze button a few times and rushed down to take a quick bath and get ready to leave in a rush. We left a little later than planned, but Mark got me to the trainstation with plenty of time to spare. Now it's a little afternoon and I've just entered Denmark. The highlight of the trip was definitely the 45 minute ferry ride between the two countries. It was my first and I didn't realise that the train pulls into a lower level of the ferry and you have to get off if you want to see anything. I went up top to look around and have a little goulasch suppe. It's pretty gray out so the pictures I shot of the cloudy horizon aren't particularly mentionable, but I'm sure I've included one. Windmills -- no, not off the side of the ferry, but on land out the window of the train just now. I looked to the side and saw a big array of them. How's that for a nonsequitor...



The one picture I would have liked to get, but had already gone back in and put my camera away, was of a seagull. It was flying alongside the boat, but since we were both moving at the same pace, it looked as though the gull was just stuck in time, floating mid air, not moving at all. Every now and then it would jut a bit from side to side, but it maintained its course sitting in the same spot, mid air, relative to the boat. A couple stood next to it, the man holding a camera focused on something off in the horizon, completely oblivious to the bird less than an armslength away. I couldn't help but wonder if the bird thought it was racing us. Eventually it did start to overtake the boat and slowly moved forward -- bad move. There a maintenance man stood with a hose in hand. He'd been washing the deck, but now that the seagull was within reach, he found more entertaining uses for his hose... It didn't take long for the bird to abandon us.

Finally found a hotspot!

So I'm sitting on a bench in some random little square, which aside from the large pile of horse maneur on the street 50 or so feet in front of me, could actually be referred to as charming.  Nothing special, but relatively empty, quiet and relaxing.  Occasionally a car or bike goes by in which case you hear that slight jingle of the bell on the handle bars as the bike rides over the cobbelstones.  Anyway, I made it here safely.  Here is Hannover by the way.  The flight was relatively uneventful.  I had the great fortune of getting assigned a seat in the emergency exit row which meant plenty of leg room!  Even more fortunately, the flight seemed to be relatively empty (or at least not filled to the brim) which is probably why there was an emergency aisle seat available for the checkin girl to offer me.  I was a bit afraid I might end up sitting next to somebody else as big as me, but no, in the three seats there were just two of us (one seat empty betweeen us) -- me and a mid sized roumanian guy who apparenlty lives with his parents about half a mile from the house I grew up in.  We took off a little late and our seats made us privy to the real reason why -- it seemed there was some mishap with the food order and they had to get it straightened out at the last minute.  When meal time came I said I'd ordered a veg meal, but if there was any shortage I could take either.  No, there was plenty of veg!  My neighbor the roumanian asked for the chicken, but all they had was the "muslim" meal of mutton.  A minute later they came out with a chicken meal for him, but he'd already opened the mutton the gave him both.  I offered to take the mutton off his hands and he was more than happy to oblige =)  mmmm, free airplane food =)  Yeah, these were the highlights, relatively uneventful.  Anyway, we landed, disembarked, went through customs (if you can call it that -- there was no line and some guy stamped my passport and waved me on in matter of seconds).  Later on after the baggage check there was also a spot with two lines -- nothing to declare and something to declare.  This may sound odd, but I went through the nothing to declare line twice.  The second time there were two people in front of me and it looked like one of them was getting checked so I was frustrated with myself for walking back into that area in.  Basically after exiting I wanted to find somewhere that I could buy a sim card for my phone.  There was nothing downstairs so I went back upstairs.  I found a shop, but didn't like the price so headed back toward the train -- the stairs said baggage claim and to trains.  I imagine there had to be some other way to get back down without going through the baggage claim, but they could have pointed that out...  Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.  As I waited for my bags, I called a friend who happened to be in Frankfurt.  Man it was nice having euros including plenty of coins on me already!  Unfortunately she said she was pretty busy and didn't have any time to hang out.  She gave me some tips on where to go to pick up a sim card, but I didn't end up at the place she recommended until today -- and unfortunately didn't bother to bring my passport with me so couldn't get one!  Anyway, getting ahead of myself again.  It was frustrating watching the units drop down on the phone though, and rather than throwing another euro in, I unfortunately let the call get cut off just as I was saying, sorry, no more time, have to go!  I'll have to write her an email now that I've found a connection...
So I hopped on the first train for the main trainstation -- there must have been some recent construction, because I don't recall having to run all over the place to get to the tracks.  They were rather out of the way and as I was still carrying a duffle bag rather than a backpack (the backpack was pulled apart and stuffed in a duffle bag for the plane checkin) the walk was tiresome on my hands...  I eventually switched over to wearing the duffle bag as though it were a backpack.  By some strange twist of luck, my train was late and I missed the connection hannover in frankfurt.  When I checked for the next train, I saw there was one that left even later from the airport which I had completely missed, yet arrived earlier in hannover -- I could have had a direct trip had I paid better attention...  Oh well.
The train came, I boarded, and opted for an empty cabin.  The cabins are much more condusive to meeting people than the open seating areas, and I'll admit to at times even selecting a cabin purely because a cute girl was already sitting there (that is after all how I met one of my best friends here in germany...) but today I opted to take my chances and see who would join me -- somebody always joins you.  In this case it was and older german gentleman (presumably traveling on business) and soon thereafter a very obviously american couple -- also older.  As it turned out, the german was very amicable and had spent 11 years of his life working in various locations around the world and his daughter currently lives in the states so the ride was one non stop conversation (in english).  Not quite what I might have hoped for, but also more pleasant than it could have been.  I spent the first few minutes debating whether I wanted to shun my fellow americans, but gave up on those thoughts quickly.

Eventually we made it into hannover and I disembarked.  When I called my friends house I was happy to hear his mother's voice.  I hadn't done the best job preparing them for my arrival, so if nobody was home I might have considered moving on to some other location and finding a hostel.  My friends mother gave me directions to their place which I must have half misunderstood, but certain stops sounded familiar enough that I tried my luck getting off at one and asking some random locals which way to their street.  At last. I was home for the night.  I could set my bags down and relax!  We had a quick snack and talked for a bit, then I took a nap and rebuilt my backpack.  When my friend came home from work we went out for a quick drink and some nice catching up and capped the night off with one of my favorites -- a doenner kebab!  Mmm!  I planned on leaving this morning for Denmark, but the jetlag hit me a little harder than I hoped and I didn't sleep that well last night.  I was also battling my cold a bit, so decided during my sleeplessness that I'd stay and extra day in hannover to relax and recover a bit before moving on.  Denmark will still be there tomorrow =)
Ok, time to go do some more wandering.  I've been at this park bench long enough.  Till the next time...

Me and my new travel friendly hair

Me and my new travel friendly hair
Originally uploaded by dscheffy.

Ok, I realize this isn't the most captivating commentary, but everybody's entitled to one lame test entry and until i get the keyboard for my pda, this grafiti thing is just not going to be conducive to long descriptions and wont do me poetic justice!