Monday, December 10, 2012

Stockholm: I'm On A Boat! Or Am I?


After writing yesterday’s blog post Dom and I stocked up on snacks at the grocery store and made our way to the ferry way earlier than we needed to. I am always ridiculously early for anything transportation related but I once missed a ferry due to circumstances beyond my control and was paranoid it was going to happen again. I did a little happy dance when we got on board and got some strange looks from people but I was just so happy to be on board.


We checked into our cabin then did a short tour of the boat.  It was a decent sized vessel, much larger than any ferry I have ever been on before but much smaller than a cruise ship. There were multiple restaurants, and bars on board as well as a casino and a disco.  I didn’t get much sleep the night before so after we had seen what the boat had to offer we headed back to our cabin. Dom had never seen A Christmas Story before, how you make it to the age of 24 without seeing what is arguably the greatest Christmas movie of all time is beyond me, but I knew it was something I needed to fix pronto. I loaded the movie onto the laptop and promptly fell asleep until the credits rolled.  He thought it was ‘just alright’ clearly this kid needs some movie education.


The brief nap I had during the movie was pretty much the only sleep I got for the rest of the night. I didn’t manage to fall back to sleep until about 2am and minutes later I was woken up by the drunken idiots in the cabin next to ours. I was in the top bunk, which is a fold down bed against a wall. They kept putting their top bunk up and letting it slam back down, making a loud bang and shaking my bed in the process. I nearly shit my pants the first time it happened and the 30 times it happened after that it was all I could do not to go knock on their door and kick someone in the teeth when they answered. If that along with the constant shouting wasn’t bad enough, they started to have sex on the top bunk and my bed started to move with every thrust. Lucky for me buddy was a minute man but it was still a horrible experience, for me and probably the unfortunate soul he was with for those 45 seconds as well.  Round two began about 10 minutes later and didn’t last much longer than the first.


I was tired and grumpy when we finally arrived in Stockholm 16 hours setting off and the last thing I wanted to do was walk uphill for half an hour while carrying all of my worldly possessions but I didn’t have much of a choice. The walk to the tube was horrible but eventually made it there and in time to our hotel, which was on the top of yet another snowy hill.


I collapsed on the bed as soon as we checked in and that’s when I started to feel like I was on a boat. I was fine from Riga to Stockholm but as soon as a put my head down on dry land everything started to sway. It was very unsettling and I still haven’t entirely shaken off the feeling, luckily I’ve managed to move pass the nausea that accompanied the strange feeling this afternoon.


Because I wasn’t feeling well, and was stumbling like I was drunk, the one-day I had to spend in the city was pretty much a bust. I wandered around for about 2 hours before heading back to the hostel to lie down.  I ventured out again after a bit of a break but I still wasn’t feeling so hot and sightseeing in the dark just isn’t the same. I passed a grocery store on the way home and decided to pickup some dinner, the winning combination of potato salad and Pringles. Dinner of champions!


I’m now laying in bed trying to figure out why my body insists on thinking that it’s on a boat and hoping that I feel better in the morning. It’s an early start tomorrow as we catch the train to Oslo bright and early. Hopefully my adventures there will be a little more noteworthy so I can give you guys something worth reading.

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