Officially one month in.

Stockholm is awesome. It's like the nicest parts of so many other cities I've been to, between the tiny cobblestone streets and the pretty water features. My hostel is great too, with an especially impressive "free" shelf that I've been taking advantage of. It's also strangely empty despite being cheap and ideally located. I have 3 full days here, but I'm starting to wish I had more.

Yesterday I took a ferry over to the Vasa Museum a few islands over. The Vasa is a ship that sank immediately after leaving port on its maiden voyage from Stockholm in the 1620s, and was pulled from the ocean floor in the 1960s. Because the Baltic is so much less saline than the open ocean, wood doesn't rot in the same way as it would elsewhere; as such, the Vasa is extremely well preserved and presented almost completely intact in the museum. It was really cool, though I will say that I wish there was more of a way to see inside the living quarters of the ship. As it stands, the exterior is the only thing really on offer and while it's impressive, the inside is probably the most interesting part for me.

After this I walked around the island some more since the east side is a large, wooded park. It was very nice green space and remarkably uncrowded. I walked all the way back from there to my hostel and left a few minutes later to see Anton. He'd chosen to meet in a tiny little restaurant only a couple blocks from where I was staying, which was extremely convenient. It was great seeing him again. I was worried things would be awkward or that I wouldn't recognize him, but it was really like picking up right where we left off 4+ years ago in New Zealand. A little while in his girlfriend showed up and she was super nice too. Apparently, in a bizarre coincidence, she also was stuck in New Zealand during the pandemic, but met Anton in Stockholm. They told me about their time doing humanitarian work in Madagascar and it sounded like an extremely interesting, though also very trying, experience. For food I had Swedish meatballs with lingenberries (probably the most Swedish thing I could possibly have tried), and it was very good. We went to a nearby pub for a few drinks after and it was a really great evening. I appreciated having a local to talk to for the first time in my travels, since otherwise I've been pretty much exclusively with other tourists. Since his girlfriend isn't working at the moment, she has a lot of free time and I might go with her to the National Museum sometime today.

Because Geneva is so absurdly expensive, I'm only going to spend one night there. I booked bus tickets to Turin the following afternoon so hopefully I have a decent amount of time to explore the city before leaving. Turin isn't cheap either, though, so I may not spend much time there. We'll see what prices for other places look like.