Seth, Sean, and Sweden

Seth and I are still getting our bearings here is Sweden. The Swedish language is a little difficult because there are really no words that even sound like English, so when we hear people talking we understand nothing. Luckily we are armed with our three Swedish words, though. I tried out my Swedish by saying "Hej" to every girl we passed. Hey means hello in Swedish. Then as we passed I would give them a "Hej da," which means goodbye. I got a few smiles, a few odd looks, and a good deal of girls just walked right by. I was just being friendly.

Today got off to a bit of a late start when we decided last night that we would sleep off our jet lag once and for all. One o'clock rolled around and we finally made our way out of bed and into the kitchen for some corn flakes and yogurt. Seth decided to have lunch for breakfast because of the time, but I am traditionalist so my first meal of the day must be some sort of regular breakfast.

The weather, which consisted of rain, convinced us to stay inside, so we went to the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a ship that sank on it's maiden voyage. After being built, the ship failed the highly technical stability test, which consisted of 30 or so men running from one side of the ship to the other to see if the ship would tip or not, and so the Vice Admiral still gave the ship his seal of approval since the King really wanted the ship to sail. So the ship set sail and sank only a few hundred meters outside of the harbor. The lesson here, folks, was don't build a shitty sailboat, then let it fail a shitty sailboat stability test, then sail it anyway. The museum itself was very neat, though. Thanks to the ships designer, which is why the ship sank, the ship was perfectly preserved at the bottom of the harbor. In 1957 there was a huge effort set out to exume the ship and now in the Vasa museum they have this huge, 17th century ship in amazing condition on display. It is quite amazing to see, but at the same time you have to laugh because of all incompetence that went into sinking the ship.

Our day ended with a great dinner prepared by cousin Tina. Tina's friend Kicki joined us and after dinner we headed to the bar. I was hoping to wake up at a reasonable hour, but now I am thinking that we are going to be up in the middle of the day again. Oh well, we are on holiday. As a side note, Tina pointed out some "typical" Swedish girls, and they were all beautiful. I am hoping I can win them over with my American charm. Perhaps I will have to learn more Swedish than "Hej" and "Hej da".