Vem drack mitt kaffe?
June 19th, 2001It's been a while, huh. Remembering the events of a week ago can be difficult, but I'll give it a shot.
On Tuesday, we went into school for the end-of-year-type-thing ceremony. Courtney was called up on stage and they gave her a book and the class I'm in was declared brilliant and won some sort of prize.
We came home, packed our bags and beers, and hopped on a bus into Gothenberg to catch the train to Abisko. Having an hour or two to kill in Nordstan (shopping centre), Courtney thought it would be fun to have my eyebrow pierced. So now I have a hole in my head.
After finding our way to the correct wagon and room, I heard a cry of distress, as one of the other Australian exchange students recognised me. We ended up as five Australians and one poor, random Swede in that room. About 24 hours and a change of trains later, we arrived at Abisko Tourist Station.
The rooms were allocated and we dumped all our gear into them. There was even room on the couch for some random wanderer…
After dinner, we took a hike up a mountain, crossing some stream, and up a bit further. There was a bit of snow around at the top of the ski lift (great summer this place has!) and it was quite cloudy, though the view was pretty nice.
The next day, Thursday I suppose, we caught the train to Narvik, on Norway's western coast. The scenery along the way was quite spectacular, with a view over some canyon-like things. Apart from the language, the place didn't seem too different from anywhere in Sweden. Actually, the language is pretty much the same, too.
One thing to note, of course, was the beer situation. Wow. The supermarket had quite a selection of lovely, imported beers. They had Foster's, too. There was no restriction on alcohol content (like Sweden's 3.5% for sale to 18 year olds), either.
But evidently something had to be wrong with all of this. This, naturally, had to be the price — at least three times that in Sweden, which is high enough. Oh, how I felt like crying…
Anyhow, back to the story. After having our passports stamped, just for fun, we caught the train back to Riksgränsen, a small (tiny) town a few hundred metres within Sweden. We looked at a bunch of souvenirs and then watched a show of Sven Hörnell's photographs of Lapland. That was pretty good, he took some amazing pictures.
In the following evening, (after eating of course) those of us who cared to took a little walk to take a look at a (reconstruction of a) traditional village, with huts and fox traps and so on. We stayed up for a little while afterwards to check out the midnight sun.
On Friday, we took another walk (I'm guessing around 20km) and had lunch in the forest. Just to see the sun wasn't cheating, we decided to stay up that night and make sure it didn't go down. To amuse ourselves, we made a little man out of ketchup, mustard, salt and teabags and laughed at nothing.
As a result of this, we were able to sleep away most of the train trip on Saturday night.
Can I stop writing now?