Christmas Tour 1-- Copenhagen and Stokholm
Trip Start
Sep 06, 2008
1
12
13
Trip End
May 01, 2009
Copenhagen, Zealand, Denmark
Friday, January 2, 2009
The next morning we woke up early and hopped on a tour bus for a tour of the city. Copenhagen isn't very big so I felt like we passed by certain things a couple times, but my favorite stop on the tour was when we went to an area right on the water that had a statue of the little mermaid! I didn't know that the original story was set in Copenhagen, which our tour guide explained was the cities claim to fame. It was really neat. After the tour we went to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, which we were all super excited about since we hadn't had a burger and fries since leaving the United States! It was delicious. Hard Rock was right next door to the giant Christmas/amusement park called "Tivoli," so we spent the rest of the afternoon playing around there. We went on rollercoasters and whirly-twirly rides and drank hot chocolate and bought cool hats-- it was a great day. Probably one of my favorite days in all of Christmas tour. It wasn't even that cold since we were running from ride to ride! After Tivoli we walked back through all the decorated streets to our hotel and ate a small dinner on the way.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and since most European's celebrate the Christmas holiday on December 24 and not on December 25, pretty much everything was closed. The ice skating rink was open though! Pretty much everyone on our program rented ice skates and skated around the rink for a couple hours. I am a horrible ice skater but it ended up being a lot of fun! We had a small lunch at one of the only places actually open that day, and then we went back to the hotel and relaxed until the big Christmas eve dinner that the school had set up for us! They ended up giving the whole big back room to us and had it decorated all Christmasy and nice. Everyone was planning on going out to a little pub that was open later, but Chelsea (my friend and roommate for xmas tour) and I ended up going up to our room and noticed that an english movie was on TV! How could we pass that up? So we spent Christmas Eve watching "Cold Mountain" and falling asleep by the time the pub opened. It was a very relaxing and peaceful Christmas Eve indeed! I was woken bright and early around 7am by my Alaskan family to wish me a Merry Christmas, so that was an even better way to start my Christmas day! The day wasn't very exciting, we just rode a train for about 5 hours to Stokholm, Sweden. We watched Christmas movies on a girls laptop all the way there so it wasn't so bad.
Stokholm is a pretty big city but is pretty spread out since it consists of many different islands all connected by bridges. We stayed in a pretty nice hotel (not as nice as Copenhagen, but we were spoiled there) and dinner was ready for us when we arrived. Afterwards everyone made the "merry christmas" calls to their families, but I was already ahead of the game on that one!
The next day in Stokholm we had a morning bus tour of the city, like we did in Copenhagen, and then were dropped off at this "open air" museum called Scansen. It was pretty cool, it had a few cafes, some neat shops where we watched glass being blown, various animal farm areas (sort of like a zoo), and many different places that offered a great view of different parts of the city. It was cold that day, but I still had a good time. We walked through the city center of Stokholm to get back since we wanted to see more of the city, but realized how cold we were in the process and made our way back to the hotel shortly after! We ate dinner at this delicious Indian restuarant (no pasta on this trip!) and had a good time.
Day number two in Stokholm started off by going to the famous Vasa museum, which is all about the shipwrecked...ship! Apparently this King commissioned the making of this incredible ship to use, and instead of making sure that the ship could sail, the workers spent all their time making it beautiful and appealing to the eye in order to express the King's wealth. So when the first trip was to be held on the ship they sailed for about 20 minutes before it capsized and sank. 20 minutes! That's it! And now there is a whole museum dedicated to this famous ship in Stokholm. It was interesting in the beginning, but after spending about 3 hours at a museum with only one big ship in it, it got kind of boring. But after the museum I tried the famous olympic sport of curling! It was so much fun! We all split up in teams and played on the ice for about 3.5 hours! Everyone was slipping around, and actually one girl on my team ended up slipping and cutting her chin open, but other than that it was super fun to try. After curling, the school dropped us off in this old area of Stokholm and we went on a ghost tour of the small part of the city! The tour guide was a really good actor, so he made the experience very entertaining, but he wasn't able to change the weather. By the end of the tour everyone was frozen solid. So what's the cure? Thai food of course! More food that you can't find in Italy! It was gooooood.
Our last day in Stokholm wasn't too exciting since we had to leave around 1pm to catch our ship to Finland! A few of us girls went out and got coffee, but that was about it! Stokholm was a really cool city, but I think I liked Copenhagen a little more. It makes sense though since Copenhagen is one of the richest cities in the world! Stay tuned for the next chapter of Christmas tour...coming soon!
