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Stockholm, September 19-21

After leaving the house at 4am on Saturday, August 18, we flew from LAX to Chicago and then from Chicago to Helsinki, Finland, arriving on Sunday morning, August 19. We had a long layover in Helsinki at the Finnair lounge and then took the short hop on Finnair to Stockholm. This is how you travel using miles, not always in a straight line. We had booked the hotel in Stockholm through Oceania so their transport guy met us at the airport and got us into a pre-paid taxi to the Sheraton Stockholm, which is nice while still a Sheraton, but has location, location, location and a great view from the room of the water and City Hall, where they make the Nobel Prize presentations, except the Peace Prize which is given in Oslo, Norway.

We arrived at 2:30pm and got into our room at 3pm. We were lucky as the lobby was full of people waiting for their rooms as they had been fully booked the night before. The hotel is heavily used by Americans and Oceania actually had 100 rooms reserved for passengers on our cruise. We had originally planned to take a nap, but after showering and changing we felt so much better that we decided to make the short walk over to Gamla Stan, the Old Town. Stockholm is built on a series of islands so there is water everywhere and lots of bridges to cross to go anywhere. Gamla Stan was very busy on a Sunday afternoon. There are hundreds of cafes and restaurants on the narrow, cobblestone streets, all full of folks enjoying late lunches and watching the musicians. We walked up and down many of the streets and watched the changing of the guard at the Royal Palace.

Finally, we decided to have a very early dinner (our body clocks were completely out of whack by then!) and sat outside at a place with a Swedish style food menu. Rob had a pork dish that was very moist and tasty and Daryl had pike with small potatoes and sauces. It was the start of an eating adventure in which all of the meals were huge by comparison with what we normally eat. We were back at the hotel by 8pm and pulled the drapes to close out the sun, which shines until very late in Sweden at this time of year. We hit the bed and although we woke up pretty early, we were able to get back to sleep so that we would be acclimated to Stockholm time the next day.

On Monday morning, we checked in with the Oceania hospitality desk and signed up for the 11am bus to the ship for Tuesday. They will pick up the bags from the room at 9am, so everything is done for us instead of our usual independent hauling of luggage and finding a cab, etc. We can get used to this! We grabbed some coffee and juice at Espresso House, which is the Starbucks of Stockholm, and then visited the Concierge to set up a Panoramic Bus Tour for 1pm and a dinner at a typical Swedish restaurant at 7pm, again in Gamla Stan.

Since we had a few hours until the bus tour, we walked over to City Hall and along the river bank looking at old, partially restored boats and a nice residential area across the street. Our overall view of Stockholm so far is that it is clean and well cared for; relatively affluent; everyone cycles to work; and few people smoke, which means fewer cigarette butts everywhere on the ground. Our bus tour was 1 1/4 hours long and hit all of the high spots across the city. There is no way we could have walked to see all of this, but now we know the layout of the city and where we would want to go on a return trip. We had thought to go to see the exhibit of the Vasa, a ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1600 and was preserved under water, but by the end of the bus tour it was too late to go that far, so we headed back to the food market we had passed in the bus and walked around all the stalls. Swedish is an incomprehensible language for us as it has no basis in Latin or Greek or even Germanic languages, so we had no idea what all the fishes and meats were. We had a late and light lunch at a stall called Tysta Mari which carries lots of open face sandwiches with shrimp and smoked salmon. Then we headed back to the hotel again.

Our dinner was at a small restaurant on a side street in Gamla Stan, called Kry Pin. The place was full, mostly of other Americans, tourists and people from the cruise, so the concierge must have recommended it to everyone. The food was excellent (Rob: duck, Daryl: veal chop), but because of the low ceilings and the number of people, the rooms were almost unbearably warm. After dinner, we enjoyed the walk back to the hotel.

We should explain about something that is common in hotels in Europe. When you enter the room, you place your card key in a slot and this is what turns on your lights, air conditioning, etc. So anything electrical goes off when you remove your card key to leave the room for the day. Well, we had the air conditioning on during the night as the room was quite warm and we also had our night light in the bathroom in order to be able to find it in the dark. At 2am, we woke very warm to find the room dark and the electrical out so no air. We didn't get much sleep afterwards and called down about it as soon as we could in the morning.

So on Tuesday, because they couldn't seem to get this problem fixed, we showered in the dark and checked out of the room early, taking our own luggage downstairs to simplify things. We assumed that our room keys expired or something and caused the power outage, but still do not know for sure and why at 2am. They comped us to coffee and juice and we sat in the lobby until the 11am bus to the port was ready.

We got to the terminal and were fast-tracked right onto the ship. We put our carry-ons in the cabin, as we knew exactly where we were going (same cabin as last April). Then we went to the Terrace Cafe for the light lunch buffet. We saw 4 or 5 crew members on the way who we know from previous cruises and there were hugs all around. We have a tendency to bond with the crew and know their names, their families, etc. We had the same cabin steward as last year, Slava from Serbia, but a different butler, Rao from India. At 1pm the cabins were cleared for us to enter and our large bags arrived right away, so we unpacked and relaxed. Our dinner was at 8pm in Jacques, the French restaurant. Our waiter was Norman, from the Philippines, one of the cutest, happiest guys we have met and who we have known for several years, and our sommelier was Anton, Slava's husband, from Sri Lanka, so it was "old home week" there as well. We always have the French classic dishes on the first night and it was no exception.