The next two days were spent partying in the hostel for the most part rather than going out after spending a small fortune on alcohol in bars. Sunday I went and did some grocery shopping with the intention of making Curry in the hostel that evening, but that didn’t materialise. After I got back I met an Aussie girl called Angela, a Mexican chap called Pablo and the Brazilian guys who I’d only met drunk before! We headed on down towards Djurgarden with the intention of seeing some Winter Solstice festival thing that was on that weekend. Jamie came along too despite feeling rather rough after last nights antics!
It took us quite a while to get there, but we had a good chat on the way. I managed to get us there in the end, despite everyone thinking we were lost, to be fair it was quite a walk! We eventually found the required ferry. However Pablo pressed the wrong button and ordered the wrong ferry. Yeah they have ‘order a ferry’ service here. The guy looked a bit miffed when no one got on! We eventually got on the right ferry and headed over to Djurgarden and to this festival thing only to find the place was closing! Rather annoying. So we just caught the ferry back to old town and got dinner at the first place we saw in the end! The brazilians decided they didn’t fancy dinner and left us to it, leaving Me, Jamie, Angela and Pablo. It was a bit pricey, but I did get the biggest burger I’ve seen, must have been nearly 1 pound of meat! Was quite a struggle to eat actually, but I got there in the end!
We headed back to the hostel next, but had to drink rather crap beer as the liquor store was closed, and other places only sell 3.5% beer, which is well, pretty much water! We played a bunch of card games and our group expanded quickly. Starting off with cheat, then heading onto Uno and then Kings. Half way through we went out to get more beer after running out. On the way back we decided to build a snowman. However the snow in Stockholm is really light and fluffy and just doesn’t stick together. So we had to basically make a rather small rock snowman!
It was all a good laugh, then around midnight on a Sunday night a bunch of people decided they wanted to go out! A little late I thought, and unsure if anywhere would actually be open, I headed out anyway. There was pretty much the same group as earlier going out plus a few others including Patrick (German), oh and Jamie stayed in feeling bad from last night. As you may have noticed, we kind of just knew people from their nationality! First we walked past some random bar which was open, so I asked if we could go in. The guy was a bit wierd with me, said it was a private Turkish function and we’d need to pay 150 kronas (just under £15). We nearly went in, but I decided that we shouldn’t. It looked a bit crap tbh, and people there would only be like what are you doing here? And the guy had been quite rude tbh.
We walked on further and eventually found a place that someone at the hostel had pointed out too us. We ended up splitting 3 bottles of wine between us and it was all good fun. We sat outside with big huge heaters about. Made a fun difference! Angela called over a couple of Swedish girls who ended leading us over town in the hope of takeaway food, only for the place to be closed, annoying! It was bitterly cold that night, and we had quite a walk back. After eventually finding a kebab shop still open we made it back.
Monday was spent buying Christmas presents for the family. However my baggage was lost, so I can’t go into much detail about that, as people still haven’t received them! What we did do though today was cook the curry we were going to have yesterday and then goto the Liquor store and buy sufficient beer!
More card playing was had then, however we basically had no-one we knew from the night before! Angela and Pablo had both left to get to go elsewhere, and there wasn’t really anyone else about who we recognized. That was quite a familiar thing in the hostel really. We eventually managed to get a decent sized group joined by a few German chaps (one called Phillip) and American girl Melissa, and a German and Austrian couple (Mara and Christof) – who I’d actually met in the TV Room a couple of nights earlier. The names I remember are squarely dependent on adding them on Facebook! Unfortunately we had no Uno cards tonight so it was just Cheat we really played. Although we did try and play chase the mystery card, but it was decided it was too quiet a game and stifled conversation!
Eventually we found our game completely taken over by a bunch of rowdy French travellers! It’s amazing how much noise we make, we had actually moved into another room cause they were so loud!
During this time Jamie found some other american girls (Amy & Sarah) who were going on the Sauna trip with us tomorrow. He felt they rather picked on him after moving the chair from underneath him as he was sitting down. I’d say that’s rather amusing! Eventually we called it a night, with an early start for the Sauna trip the next day. Early meaning 2am of course.