Visitors! Hooray!

Hey all you potential visitors... take a look at how much fun a weekend in Stockholm is and actually buy your tickets and come visit us! Kelly, who studied with us at UW, is on the same fellowship that I am on now, but who lives in Copenhagen, came to visit last weekend. It was great to have a visitor to give us a reason to go out and explore Stockholm in the middle of winter.

Kelly got in on Thursday, but after some traveling issues, we decided to take it easy on Thursday with a night in. Nothing blog worthy there! But Friday, Kelly explored on her own before Blake and I met up with her after work, and that is where the adventure begins. We started out the evening with dinner at a very old, traditional Swedish restaurant, Kvarnen, where we had a dinner of meatballs (they really do eat a lot of meatballs here, it isnt just a cliche!):

After that we took Kelly to Gamla Stan (Old Town) to a cool medieval bar for some mead.

After awhile Blake started to make me mad, so I took care of him medieval style:

Just kidding.... After a drink and when we got tired of playing with candles, we wandered around Gamla Stan, which is quite deserted in the middle of winter in the middle of the night.

The nest day we were lucky to have some sun while exploring the city. We saw a few churches, city hall, Gamla Stan, and even had traditional fika (coffee) in the afternoon at this adorable cafe.

That evening, our friends Bjorn and Ulrika came over for dinner and to join us for a night out. We had been meaning to check out a few places in the area, and we ended up finding this great club with amazing music about 2 minutes away from our apartment. We danced the night away:


We also found out that Blake was part ghost, which is sort of weird that he didnt mention it before:

The next day we had plans to go ice skating on one of the lakes, but there was a huge snow storm, so we decided to go to Skansen (an outdoor old fashioned museum). But on the way to the ferry, it was snowing so hard that we decided to go somewhere indoors, and went to the Museum of Moderm Art, which also has a small Architecture Museum. Blake and Kelly are both structural engineers, so they were all about that. We had planned on taking the ferry back to the island that we live on, since it is the most convienant way to get back there, but after waiting for a half hour in a snow storm and watching the ferry boat pass us, we realized that it was never coming.

Luckily a bus driver saw us standing there (pathetically I assume) and came to our rescue, and we were able to get Kelly off in time to catch her plane.

We took a bunch of photos between the 3 of us, so if you want to check them out in all their hillarity, go here.