Blogging From Sweden

As with most of my traveling posts, I was going to start this one out saying "Hello" in the native language....until I realized that I still haven't figured that out here! I have learned not a single word of Swedish so far, which is really unusual for me. I vaguely remember Ryan telling me about calling his friend Jonas and saying "He San" or something like that, but I certainly haven't tried it to confirm it.

This trip has been my most stressful trip ever. I had some extremely close calls on the way over here that almost caused me to miss my connecting flights and almost lost my luggage. Once I got here, I was so exhausted from the past couple weeks and jet lag that I slept from 5:00pm until 6:00am the next morning. But that got me nice and rested for a great day yesterday when I saw most of the good stuff in Stockholm!

I'll make my next post about the actual things I saw, but for now, I'll just leave you with a few observations:

1. I have never seen as many natural blondes in one place in my life. That being said, there are more brunettes than I expected from stereotypes (including the Royal Family here), but there are still a lot of blondes


2. This is the first country I've been in besides America where there is a lot of variety in types of restaurants. It is just like the USA from that aspect - any type of food you crave, there is a restaurant nearby.


3. If you didn't know where IKEA was from, you would know it as soon as you got here! Everything looks like it came straight out of an IKEA catalog. Even the McDonalds is decorated in those distinctive straight lines and bright colors. Here is a picture of the McDonalds I went in while I was waiting for the Stockholm Tourist Center to open

Well, I'm off. I've got one more major attraction I want to see before I head out to Tammsvik for the conference this evening.