oddgirl’s blog

That’s how I spent my day. Well, about 5 hours of it anyhow. After a rough night: sleeping, waking up, dozing, waking up to chat with A. before she left Leipzig for home (we shared a time zone for about 15 hours), and then sleeping again, I walked around Gamla stan in Stockholm. It was beautiful, quaint and tourist-y. My hotel is a short walk to the old city and I can see it from my window and since I only have one day of being a tourist it seemed like the thing to do.

So far I’ve found the people here to be very attractive and both not unfriendly and not friendly. Mostly in the tourist area they speak English but only if they have to. Almost all of the signs/menus/historic plaques are only in Swedish and as far as I can tell most places don’t take euros unless they have to. About an hour into my walk I converted the euros I bought at SFO into krona. The exchange rate seems kinda crappy (or I got taken at the tourist trap restaurant I wandered into) my burger and two beers for 217 SEK or about $34.00. And the food was pretty awful at that – although the beer was tasty.

There was a brief snow flurry while I was out walking which was great tho short-lived. I kinda think that if you are going to have to put up with cold weather (it’s 34° now, but it’s only 5 pm) you should at least get to enjoy the beauty of snow. The good news is that I was warm enough in my new jacket, wool socks, and fuzzy boots.

Tomorrow I head to the office around 8 am where I’ll spend basically the next 3 days. According to the schedule it looks kinda grueling – from about 8-6:30 for 3 days straight. So tonight – it’s a quiet night in and early to bed for me.

Yeah – I have been lame-o. I have been unpacking boxes, buying stuff for around the new place and cleaning up after the cat. He did not adapt well in the beginning but he seems to be coming along now and getting into the swing of things.

And looking out at the next 6 weeks or so, I’m only going to be in town for like 4 of them. Much traveling to very, very cold places. Like Sweden cold. Brr. I like the sun and warmth, that’s not in the plans. Supposedly I’ll need something called a “parka”.

In other news, I am amassing a very large stack of very excellent sounding games that I have zero time to play. I’ve started Bioshock, Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Beautiful Katamari and tonight I picked up a copy of Super Mario Galaxy. Given my work and life schedules I shouldn’t have to buy another game for oh… about a year at the rate I’m playing them.

But life is good. My new place is good. I love my puny commute (fastest time: 12 minutes!). And I am actually both somewhat anxious and a little excited about traveling to the frigid places.

I will try and blog more. I promise.