Friday 18th December was quite a long day. First I had my final lecture for the year at University in the morning, and then I headed over to Manchester Airport to head off to Stockholm once that was done. Manchester had got me into the mood for Stockholm by greeting me with some snow that morning!
The flight managed to take off fine, and a short flight later I was in Amsterdam. I had to get a connecting flight from here to Stockholm, however the flight was running a little late, and in the end it was a good half hour late before we took off. In the end this flight went off with out any real trouble, other than for some reason making me feel really tired!
I arrived in Stockholm just after 11pm and managed to meet up with Jamie at the bar at the airport. He decided he fancied this trip about a month or so after I had booked it. His flight had arrived direct from Manchester about an hour earlier than mine, and had headed straight to the bar. He was a little miffed that the airport bar stopped serving alcohol at 11pm!
We made ourselves to the impressive Arlanda Express Train, this was running at some 200kph despite the snowy conditions and was really smooth! Doubt we’d be able to sort something like that out in England. Then despite nearly walking in the wrong direction we made ourway quickly to the hostel. I was loving the snow, and it wasnt slippy at all, they clearly treat the stuff properly here, unlike in the UK where you risk killing yourself!
We had some trouble getting into the hostel however! The chap who was meant to be on the desk had taken off to help someone out, it wasn’t until someone else went in did we get into the warm! We eventually got all sorted out, and confirmed ourselves onto the Tuesday Sauna trip. I had originally not intended to go out that night, but after a strong JD & Coke (I brought 1 of 3l I still had that I brought back from the USA this summer) Jamie managed to change my mind.
We headed out and just started asking random strangers where was decent to go. In the end we just walked around for quite a while rather unsure of where to go. There was a lot of clubs which Jamie quite fancied, but I put my foot down, going in there sober would be a big mistake! We eventually found a bar still open at 2am! We went in and had a few drinks there – it was very pricey though! By now it was about 3am so we tried to head back to the hostel, only for me to get slightly confused and find ourselves going back a different direction. On the way Jamie managed to do the splits and fall flat on his arse, I found this hilarious! We ended up asking some drunken Swedish chaps to point us in the right direction. Which they did well, and Jamie then proceeded to flukely find a short cut which lead us right back to the door of the hostel! Good times. Some random chatting to people in the hostel then followed before calling it a night at 4am!
One problem, we had already paid for breakfast which finished at 11am, so we had to be up reasonably early for that the next morning!
