Scandic West Gävle

... for buying me my Swedish outfit :) A great Christmas idea from you! ;)

We came back home around 3:00 p.m. and lounged around. It was glorious! Lounging around! What a concept :) We made homemade margherita pizza (Europe's "cheese" pizza) and played Rock Band on Playstation.

I was showing Hanna some of the souvenirs that I have bought and I got so excited that, in 12 days, I'll be doing this with my parents!

We have our ...

... of these fish recipes from her before I forget). Yesterday we drove around Siljansjö, which is a large lake and then checked out the town of Mora and went to a Dalicarlian wooden horse factory. Most of the rest of the time we've been hiking around the area and enjoying scrumptious pastries. So soon my journey will be coming to a close as I return to NY. I hope you all enjoyed my travel blog!

Today was a little more of a relaxing day, trying to get over the full week of traveling.

The day was pretty dull, going to mall in the afternoon, spending way to much time on the computer till supper.

In the evening I went into town to meet up with a friend, and to meet some of her friends. I had never actually met this girl in person before, but we had talked for a couple of years, her ...

... the rain to the grocery store for some ice cream cake. It was a little cold, and I returned quite wet.

That evening Carina and I went to a friends to try a Finnish style sauna. This involved sitting in a very hot sauna, untill you got too hot and then jumping into the body of water that the sauna is near by to cool down. The sauna was very hot, hot to the point that breathing was kind of hard. But jumping into the cold water after sitting in the extremely ...

Somehow I managed to wake up extremely early the next morning, and stumbled down for breakfast. As we walked back up to our rooms, I saw a horrible horrible sight. As you would walk onto the boat, there are people there that take very rushed pictures of you before you enter. They put copies of all of the pictures up so that people can purchase them, and they even take a select few people and blow them up super huge, just to show that you can get different sizes of the photos. As we were ...

... It was very relaxing just standing on the deck and commenting on all of the different cabins and houses we passed. Then we decided that it was time to head into the duty free store, and spend way to much money on candy... delicious, delicious candy. After spending a little time relaxing (and eating candy) we made some time for wandering into shops and people watching. There weren't many people to watch, as it was Wednesday and the boat was not very busy, but we ...

Today was more of a relaxing day, just spent getting over jet lag and re-associating myself with my surroundings. I decided that I should take some time for some shopping and wandered over to the mall. For the size of the town, Valbo has an amazing mall. Tons of different options for shopping, and just happening to be there during summer sale season was pretty awesome. I think that I probably came across as a little too happy to people working and other shoppers ...

... find a place, or so we thought. To camp successfully here in Sweden, it pays to park your car somewhere and to walk for about a km or so away from the roads, even the dirt roads, and then you will be able to find plenty of places. This is something we discovered later on in the trip. But for the first night, we took one of the side roads and eventually we came across a few dirt roads that would take us in to the heart of the forest. We left the car near the ...

After travelling around in Sweden for the past week I returned to Uppsala and unwound at the "Snerkes" student nation. Student nations are pretty much like American Fraterneties or Sororities, except operate somewhat more like bar/restaurant/clubs than living quarters. The evening got off to a slow start after stuffing myself with crayfish again for dinner (notice a pattern here?) and being stuff downstairs at the nation ...

I just got to Sweden 2 days ago. It's great to be back here. My flight on 'wizz-air' was comfortable and packed with Polish youth headed to Sweden in search of work. Anna had this great crayfish party at her place yesterday. It's a tradition in Sweden to have crayfish parties this time of year and somewhat resembled the midsommar party I was at last year though it was somewhat smaller ...