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The tide goes always out,
The Vikings go forth to trade,
And mead is on tap.

As Mathieu and I stepped off the plane in Skavsta airport, one of the first things we noticed was that, dammit, we were in Sverige (Sweden in Swedish) and it was 10 degrees warmer than in Deutschland. Fricking Deutschland.

We met up with Alex, and the first place that we decided to check out was Nyköping (pronounced "ni-SHEP-ing"), a small town just 7 minutes from the airport by bus. It was, um, basically adorable, and it afforded us the opportunity to bring Mathieu to his first ocean (sort of..) and to eat some delicious and reasonably-priced lunch (that was... the last time that happened). Then we hopped on a train, which was thankfully faster than the trains in Poland, and headed to Stockholm.

So Stockholm is basically awesome. It looks like Wien, but it is located on an archipelago, and 14 islands comprise the city. When the glaciers carved that area out, they just sort of hung out on top of it for a while, crushing everything down, and now the islands are slowly rising out of the water, about 50cm every 100 years (hey, Mr. Geologist, are you going to elaborate on this?). So Stockholm is no longer filled with seawater, but instead is really in a massive lake that drains into the Baltic Sea. When we first arrived, it looked like the tide was going out really strongly, and then... 8 hours later it was still going out really strongly. But our Viking tour guide enlightened us as to what was up.

Oh, Saturday night we went out for dinner at one of the oldest restaurants in Stockholm. We had Swedish meatballs, which we were informed include reindeer meat. Then we went home to make party on our boat hostel. :D 21st birthday, part ii!

Might I now mention that we were all highly annoyed by the law in Sweden that you aren't allowed to drink in the streets. It's going to be hard to come back to the states... But that meant that we had to do all of our drinking in bars, where a pint of beer cost around 65 kronor, which is about 6.50 euro or $8. Ugh. Expensive. We were informed by a random Swedish guy that a low-end salary in Stockholm is around 50,000 kronor per month, which is $7,000. Damn.

The following morning, we had some delicious breakfast at our hostel and hopped on a ship to Birka, aka Swedish Viking Central. It was the site of the first city in Sweden, and also a UNESCO world heritage site. We got the lowdown on lots of Viking stuff; apparently the Swedish Vikings were the tamest of the bunch, and they mainly traded with Russians and the rest. The rape-and-pillage-style Vikings were more from Norway and Denmark. Also, Vikings didn't actually wear the horned helmets that they have become renowned for; that was an aesthetic detail added by some archaeologist who found a helmet (not designed for battle, just for a statue) that had ornamentations on it that were a bit broken and resembled horns who happened to decide that Vikings should be a little more badass if they wanted to be set apart from all the other pirate types in Europe in that era.

We heard some awesome stories about the village that used to be in Birka, including how it became Christian (our tour guide's comment was that "they already had Odin, Thor, Freyr, Frigg, so, Jesus? A bonus god? Great!") and then burned down the church when they discoverd that Christianity wanted them to keep just one god. And I was amused when he started telling legends about Valkyries.

After another 90-minute boat ride, we found ourselves once more in Stockholm, this time starving. We found a medieval restaurant in the old town that had exactly the ambiance we were looking for after poking around Viking shit all day. They had mead on tap, and our silverware was a steak knife and a huge spoon each. The napkin for the three of us was one really long piece of cloth, and we shared a "Viking feast" that included salmon, sausage, pork, sauerkraut, peas puree, apple pie, delicious soup, bread, and weird bread-topping that was some kind of sour cream-based stuff. Mmmmmmm... dead stuff. Good heavens, I am a terrible vegetarian.

With roughly 5 hours until the first bus left for the airport and no hostel to stay in, we wandered the town and met some crazy Swedish people and enjoyed the ambiance of the archipelago. My fuzzy vest was sometimes more- and sometimes less well-received, but I still thought it was basically awesome, and it attracted some amusing attention at times. Mathieu and Alex both acquired Viking drinking horns (and by that I mean cow horns that were hollowed out with the intent of filling them with mead), and all was good.

Skål!

carry on dancing

The Blue Danube Waltz,

The city of Strauss, a night

Of old melody.

Wien!

I'm pretty sure that this is my new favourite city: it was full of gorgeous things everywhere. It was also comparatively much cleaner than places I've found myself on other weekends... Athens, for instance.

Okay, how did we start... we got in to Wien at about 08:00 on Saturday, then tried to check into our hostel. Yours truly had, in some kind of inconvenient date-telling time warp, booked the room for the following (i.e. wrong) night... so we asked very nicely about a room for the correct one. It was only 4euro more, and we got a private room instead of a dorm. The hostel was super nice, though: it was half hostel and half hotel (the Do Step Inn, in case you ever find yourself in Wien), and it was really clean, it included towels and linens, it had nice kitchen facilities and free internet. Not to mention that it was located right next to the Westbanhof in Wien, which is their big, international train station.

Anyway, we got a room and headed off to explore. Wien has a CityBike programme wherein one need only register for 1euro in order to use any of the bikes (located outside of every U-bahn (subway) station) for up to one hour, free of charge. After an hour, return the bike for 15 minutes and take another free hour! What a deal. :D So we did this to take a trip down to the Schönbrunn Palace and gardens, and the oldest zoo in the world. The gardens were massive... it took us 4 hours to get around what we saw, and what we saw was far less than half of what there was. One of the most ridiculously impressive bits of the park was the Gloriette, which sat atop a hill. From a distance, it looked like the Brandenburger Tor (see post on Berlin), but it was much farther away than we could have guessed. The scale of the thing!

More bike riding through gorgeous, old areas of the city followed. We saw the Hofburg, which was the "winter residence" of the Habsburg dynasty. It was awesome. And now the streets by it are lined with, predictably, stores like BVLGARI and Giorgio Armani. Oh, and shops for tourist junk. :)

There happened to be a market in a parking lot that we passed, so I picked up a nice party top. Probably not anywhere close to as fancy as something I'd need to get into a Viennese ball, but those are in the winter, anyway.

The next stop of note was the Republic of Kugelmugel. It is essentially a crazy man's own private nation. He started printing stamps of his own (infuriated by taxation) and was arrested, but instead of being thrown in prison he was pardoned by the President and permitted to set up his own republic in the middle of... an amusement park. Too bad he didn't seem to be around when we stopped by; I'd've bought a stamp for sure.

We ate some Wiener (in English: Viennese) cuisine: Wiener schnitzel! Haha. I guess schnitzel can be made from any meat (much to my relief), so I tried some made with chicken. And Austrian beer is pretty tasty, too.

We went out for the night with a group of other travelers from everywhere. There were some from Australia, some from Mexico, the US, Austria, and even Canada (this guy was particularly hilarious in his stereotypical lumberjack-plaid shirt and furry beard). They were a lot of fun.

The next day brought us to the Zentralfriedhof, where Mozart, Strauss, Beethoven, Brahms, and other famous composers are buried. There are also sections of old Wiener presidents/rulers (one was labeled as a Burgermeister, which made me think fondly of one of my favourite movies), Buddhist philosophers, and a Jewish section. It was interesting how well-manicured most of the Friedhof was... excepting the aforementioned Jewish section. It was sadly overgrown. :( Probably this had something to do with the massive Catholic church in the centre.

Also we made a stop at the Blue Danube of song to take a look at the Danube Tower, and we were shocked to see a rescue of a drowing person during our brief visit there. A guy jumped into the river and was pulled under; under a minute later, there were firetrucks, police cars, a rescue helicopter, and scuba rescue teams to find him. I'd never seen scuba rescue teams. It was kind of scary... but they did find the kid and pull him out. I hope he's okay. A few seconds of decision can make a big impact.

Then... well, there was nothing else in particular that we wanted to see in Wien, so we took a brief trip to... Bratislava. That's in Slovakia, and under an hour from Wien. The language there is Czech, which is a far cry from anything I can speak (or even pronounce). Hardly anyone spoke any English, and they didn't seem to be accustomed to tourists. It wasn't as bad as it looked to be in Eurotrip (45 cents couldn't buy us a palace... *sigh*), but I did learn why we are kindly asked by some rail lines to refrain from using the WC while in the station. They didn't make any effort to disguise the fact that it simply, um, opens onto the tracks.

So that was the weekend. Well, that and another overnight train trip to make it back to Darmstadt just in time to get to work during which we were awakened by the Polizei for a passport check because Mathieu looked like a felon they were searching for. He had encountered a swastika charm on the train back from Bratislava, which he had fortunately dropped sometime in the interim. I wonder what would have happened if they'd found it on him...

Beautiful.