Hello again everybody!! This post is about our day on Saturday (yesterday) (sorry again!), and all of the fun things that we did! For starters, we got to sleep in that morning!!! It was our first time not waking up before 7 am for awhile and combatting jet leg, so I cannot even tell you how nice that was! It was so nice that we literally slept until noon! Oops! But we definitely needed it, that’s for sure. So, after we woke up and showered, we went over to Espresso House for some breakfast. Espresso House is the equivalent of Starbuck’s in Sweden, since they do not really have Starbucks here. You can find an Espresso House on just about every street/corner, and I am here to say that they might even be better than Starbucks! And that is saying a lot considering I love Starbucks and go there just about every day while at Carthage! It is nice at Espresso House too, because they have generally the same coffees/frapps/teas that Starbucks has, but they have a lot more food! And when I say food, I mean actual food! Starbucks just kind of has like a few small paninis and cookies and sweet breads, stuff like that, but Espresso House has these great salads, sandwiches, desserts, muffins, fresh squeezed juices, just about anything that you would want to find at a typical café! And to make it even better, it is pretty reasonable and the inside is so cozy and cute and has really nice lounging areas! The only down side is that the whole entire menu and everything is in Swedish, they only take credit cards (no cash), and they don’t have anything like the refreshers that I LOVE from Starbucks! But it is a great place. Also side note on that subject: not many places at all take any cash in Sweden! Pretty much everything is done by credit card! At the currency exchange at the airport, I was convinced at the last minute to only convert $100 instead of $200 like I was planning on, and I am so happy that I did. I have about $7 left of that original $100 today (Sunday), because it has been hard to find places to actually be able to use it at! Also, another side note: it is super easy to figure out the currency conversions here, because right now, 9.52 Swedish Krona (SEK) equals $1 (USD), so you will see prices everywhere that just say like “159 SEK”, and you automatically can just divide that by 10 and figure out that that is about $16. ($15.06 to be exact, but you get the point, and it is really nice to not have to pull out the converter app on my phone every two seconds to figure out how much everything is!) Okay, back to my day now:
From there, we took the tram over to an area that we went to on the first day during our bus tour! If you remember me talking about the really cool and old German church that we went to, this was right by it! During our tour, the tour guide said that right next to the church was the best chocolate shop in Sweden, but it was closed at the time, so we decided to go there now and check it out and it just happened to be open again! It was super cute and just full of all kinds of premium Swedish homemade chocolates! Maybe if you’re lucky, you might be able to snag some from me! 🙂 I should have taken a picture inside of there, but I forgot because I was so overwhelmed with all of this chocolate and stressed out about what exact kinds I wanted to buy! If you know me, you know that I go nuts over chocolate so I was kind of in paradise! But, we discovered some other cute and smaller shops kind of near there, and one of them was a jewelry shop that makes hand-made jewelry pieces! The coolest part though was that they had two big dogs inside of there that greet you when you walk in, so we made two new best friends that day!
From there, we made our way over to Nordstan, which is the huge shopping mall here (the biggest in Scandinavia). We had a lot of fun going to all of the shops and I even bought a couple cute things that I am super excited about that were made in either Italy, France, or Sweden! One thing that I find super interesting over here too is how different their fashion is than in America. It is a lot more dressy and business-like, and very trendy and just a lot lot different. Like you’re not going to find a Lululemon or athletic wear store here, nobody wears leggings or casual outfits like that. Everything is very unique and designer-like and a lot more grown up and professional looking. One thing that I thought was super interesting was in one store, they had all of these velour jumpsuits on one of the front racks, and people were going crazy over them, and it is funny to me, because for Halloween this past year, my friends and I ordered some off of Amazon because our costumes were the Cheetah Girls (it was a group of singing girls that was a Disney Channel thing when I was young) and we thought they were so funny and ugly and ended up giving them to the Goodwill and here in Sweden I guess they are super cool and people go nuts over them!
We walked around Nordstan for awhile, and then went on some of the side streets by it as it got closer to dinner time and looked around in some small boutiques there as well. Let me tell you, you will never run out of stores to go to here in Gothenburg! Shopping is huge!! Here are some pictures of the streets that we were on that night:
We then went back to the hostel, because we had a group dinner, and for dinner we took a short walk to a Himalayan restaurant very close to our hostel! I had never even heard of Himalayan food before, but it was pretty good and definitely interesting! It is kind of a mix between Indian and Chinese food, which I guess makes sense, based on the geographic location of the Himalayas. The waiters here obviously had an even worse time understanding us than our favorite Italian restaurant, so we just ended up ordering some dishes for the whole table and sharing them and passing them around. Kind of like family style! Here are some pictures of the food below:
Yep, it was definitely interesting to say the least… but definitely super fun to try new things that you cannot get at home! They did have this amazing pita bread though, and they even had dessert pita bread that was filled with feta cheese and raisins! I could eat a whole bucket of that it was so good!
After the Himalaya restaurant, it was Matt’s birthday who is one of our friends on the trip, so we celebrated that!
Things I learned today:
- Starbucks needs to step up their game compared to these Espresso Houses!
- I need to get myself to learn to like coffee, wine, and beer, so I can look like a civilized adult and not be “that” person who orders hot chocolate and water.
- I miss the Denhart (my dorm) bathrooms and that is a statement in itself! European bathrooms are just kinda gross (maybe it’s because we share them with boys?) and weird and the toilets flush really weird. Yay America on that category!!
- Jenna (a friend on my trip) and I somehow managed to lose our tram passes so now we are smuggling ourselves on the trams with the rest of our group, so that’s interesting.
- It is definitely a challenge to be around the same 21 people every second of every day for two weeks but we are just out here having fun and making new friends!!
Well, that’s about it from Saturday! Goodnight from Göteborg!
Nicole's Adventures in Sweden 