Stockholm used to be just an island, and since Stockholm has expanded outside of the island, the island portion has become the old town, known as Gamla Stan.

Some buildings in the old town have fake windows, because glass was expensive back then (3rd floor middle window).

There’s a random piece of Viking runestone on the corner of a building. And it’s protected by a cannon barrel on the street corner…

The Scandanavian countries really like their royal guards…

H&M sells home products in Sweden! I haven’t seen that anywhere else.

At our hostel, we met some awesome people and went on a bike tour with some of them, guided by a local Swedish fellow. He took us to the top of a hill overlooking the river and Gamla Stan.

Welcome to Earth!!

Our guide showed us this cool snack. It’s herring with cucumber and onions on flatbread.

This is an indoor bike tunnel going under a bridge!!

This was part of the common area at our hostel. They did a good job with that antique look and they even made us take our shoes off when inside.

At the Stockholm Royal Armoury, they showed off a bunch of carriages. Since we are nerdy engineers, we spent a while analyzing how its suspensions worked.

I heard Swedish meatballs are famous.

The Vasa Museum was probably the most incredible attraction. The Vasa was a Swedish warship that sank on its maiden voyage. It was supposed to be a symbol of Swedish military might at the time, but it sank because it was too top-heavy due to the many cannons it had on board and not enough width to counter the tipping of the ship from its weight. It was later discovered that the ship was very well preserved and now it is on display.

What is more Swedish than going to Ikea and eating meatballs? There is a free shuttle that goes to Ikea too!

The best part of the trip was meeting a bunch of cool people in our hostel room! We had a room of 8 and every single person was fun to hang out with as opposed to normally I don’t get to talk to everybody. This time, the 8 of us got to chill in the room having beers and stuff. One of them was from Kentucky who was currently living in Alabama – of course all the America jokes were directed at her. Another was from Australia who had just finished his contract with the ANZAC navy after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq – he was quite open in talking about his experiences and I learned a ton from him! I also learned a nice trick to cooking pasta from one of the Italians: always salt the water before cooking the pasta! He even said that people thought he was crazy when they saw him salting the water. I also got some good hookups in Shanghai from our Chinese roommate – awesome when I decide to go there! It was amazing how well we all clicked and definitely an unforgettable experience in my travels.

That’s it for Stockholm!

Photo album: Stockholm

We first went to the Koerner Pub, but found that there was too many people, so we went to Mahoney’s instead.  We sat down at a table with about 20 people just literally just talked while we drank.  I had about two pints and started feeling a little bit dizzy.  The rest of the people there had at least 5 pints.

I rarely participate in social events like this.  I’m not sure why I agreed to go.  Either way, the I thought experience was pretty good.  I got to know my roommates better and finally acquired a taste for beer.

Yesterday, I decided to give this a try.  I scooped two cups of rice into a bowl and then filled it with some water  to wash it.  After draining the water, I transferred the rice into the rice cooker pot.  At that moment, I realized that I could have just used that container to begin with.  I filled the container up to the line that said “2”, since I only used two cups of rice.  I plugged the rice cooker in and set it to cook.  It was that simple.  The rice I cooked would be for my lunch for the next day.

While cooking this rice, I helped my roommates cook lasagna.  There were three of us, so we delegated different tasks to each person.  My job was to cook the ground beef on the frying pan.  The last time I did this was in the cooking class in Middle School.  I took the spatula and broke apart the big clump of ground beef.  As I did that, my roommates would add peppers, and onions to the mix.  I then moved the bits around to cook the red parts of the meat.  Even I know that red is bad for ground beef.  I cooked it until all the beef turned dark brown.

While I cooked the ground beef, one of my roommates prepared the sauce.  All he did was pour some pasta sauce into a pot, fill it with water, and heat it up.  He also added some spices, but I don’t remember what.  Another roommate cut up some veggies to put into the frying pan with the ground beef.

Once the beef and the sauce was prepared, they poured some of the sauce onto a lasagna pan, then added a layer of lasagna pasta.  I grated some cheese for it too.  Grating the cheese proved to be more difficult than it should have been since the cheese was just taken out of the freezer, which meant that little chunks would break off while I was grating it.  They would prepare layers using a combination of the sauce, pasta, cheese, and veggies.  Once they filled the  pan to the top, they put it in the oven for about half an hour.

They said, “this is how you make homemade lasagna.”  Once it was done, we ate it and it was pretty good.  I guess this has taught me that cooking stuff like this isn’t that hard.  I’ll also need to get used to it, since I’ll probably be cooking for myself regularly once I move out.