Vacaciones

This past week I had a week off from classes, so I traveled to London, Oslo, and Malmo (Sweden).  This was not at all my dream vacation, and the places I went weren't overly exciting, but I got to travel with 3 friends I hadn't seen for a while, and that's the most important part.

I had a layover in London anyway, so I extended it for a day so I could go meet up with Nancy.  After the 1.5 hours spent in the customs line (I hate Stansted), I finally made it to her flat ridiculously late at night.  But I then had the entire next day which we spent walking around London to the majority of the main sights and eating good food.  We went to an amazing frozen yogurt place:

Here's me in front of the flowers by Buckingham Palace:

And we walked by Westminster Abbey, the parliament building, and Big Ben, so here's Big Ben from the other side of the bridge.

Other sights include: Covent Garden, King's Cross, the British Museum (mostly just walking through), Trafalgar Square, etc.  It was really fun seeing Nancy's apartment, eating non-Spanish food, and seeing a lot of the main sights in London that I had forgotten from when I was there 13 years ago.  I saw a lot during the single day.

I then continued my trend of traveling at very inconvenient times to catch an early flight to Oslo.  I met up with Brenna at the bus station, and I wanted to go see the Viking Museum before it closed, so we split up briefly so I could go to that (she wanted to go see the botanical garden instead, which unfortunately hadn't really started blooming yet).  Here's one of the three old viking ships from the 9th century that was in the museum:

I took a short boat ride to get to the museum.  Although Oslo isn't an overly impressive city, it's really pretty and I love how it's right on the water!  It reminds me of Seattle in a way.

I also stopped in an old fortress which had nice views of the sea, but again wasn't anything too impressive.

Then I met back up with Brenna and we sat by the water talking for a while, then wandered around the city and found the a cheap pizza place for dinner.  I was quite excited by non-Spanish food, and it still ended up being about $10 a person to split a cheese pizza.  Oslo is the most expensive city I have ever been in!  On the way out, I had the equivalent of about $1.20 left, so I was hoping to buy a piece of fruit or something at the airport, but they tried to charge me $2 for a small banana that didn't even look very good.  Basically, I couldn't even buy the cheapest thing in the convenience store for $1.20.  Anyway, after dinner Brenna and I wandered around some more.  Here's the palace:

I think this photo makes it look more impressive than it actually was.  We then headed back to the bus station to catch a night bus to Malmo, Sweden.  We got into the bus station at 6:30 am and went to the hostel.  We were very lucky that they let us shower, eat, and drop our bags off, so we had energy to go wander around the town.  According to one person working at the hostel, here's one of the biggest tourist attractions of Malmo:

However, we couldn't even enter in the tower because it's a private residence.  We wandered through a couple nice parks, found a reasonably priced grocery store, and saw a windmill, a lighthouse, and the main squares.  We then went back to the hostel, met up with Stevie, then wandered around some more.  We cooked dinner at the hostel, which was quite fun since I've been missing cooking a lot.  Someone left some curry flavoring, so we made a stir-fry with that for dinner.

The next day, we decided to go to one of the nearby places to hike that someone at the tourist office had suggested.  We took a bus from just in front of the central train station (pictured below), yet somehow even with getting to the bus stop 15 minutes or more before the bus should have been there and watching the whole time, we managed to miss the bus and had to wait another hour for the next bus.

We got off the bus station here.

Thankfully after wandering up the road for a few minutes, we found the lake and trail network we were looking for.  It wasn't an intense hike, but it was nice walking around the trails there.

When we had had enough, we headed back to the hostel, made dinner, went out for magnum bars, played cards, and went to bed.  The next day, instead of going on the other hike suggested to us by the tourist office, we decided to rent kayaks and paddle around the canals in Malmo.  Here's Brenna and Stevie playing card as we were waiting for the kayak store to open.

And here they are on the canal (it went through a park).

It was really fun!  I'm glad we decided to do that.  We then went to a chocolate factory in Malmo; however it was more of a store with a few old artifacts instead of a factory/museum as advertised.  We then went to a park for a little bit, ate at an Indian restaurant, and bought a tub of ice cream for dessert which we ate while playing cards in the hostel.  I left early the next morning to bus back to Oslo to catch my flight the following day.  This bus was stopped at the border and they brought on a dog to sniff everything.  They took several people that the dog had sniffed off the bus to question, and then they finally let us go (all of us except two Afghani guys who the dog hadn't paid special attention to).  It was interesting.  Anyway, I spent the evening wandering around Oslo, seeing a couple interesting buildings I hadn't noticed before, and I went to bed at the hostel only to get up at 3:30 am to catch the bus to the airport to fly back to Seville.  Overall, it was a fun trip and I'm glad I had a chance to spend time with friends from back home.