nothing is sacred

Imagine a land with flowing blonde hair, eyes of sea-blue, and legs that stretch to the heavens and beyond.

Then imagine my name, precluded with a “SW”, and you’ve just become the Swedish version of Captain Cook.

 

discovering Gothenburg !

Gothenburg was the first city Ashlee & I had the pleasure of couchsurfing in, and it was with much ado that we met our friendly Couchsurfer, Nicolas, at Censtralstation, Gothenburg, on Australia Day.

 

Shenanigans at the local Australian pub, the Dancin’ Dingo

After the proverbial introductions were out of the way, the first words he greeted us with were a friendly, “Ummm …..soooo…. why did you guys choose to come to GOTHENBURG?”

 

 Yoh-teh-borg (how to pronounce Gothenburg in Swedish/svenska)

Despite his tales of “it being very boring in winter”, and my travel diary recounting Gothenburg as we “woke up at 3pm and went out everyday and still managed to do everything on our list [sic]“, I have very fond memories of Gothenburg …despite there being a severe lack of souvenir shops.

 

 One of the fond memories 

 Another fond memory: Meeting a Severus Snape lookalike in a Swedish club …or so we liked to tell him

Spending Australia Day in Sweden not only led to me discovering my un-Australian side with the ignorance of this song (someone who is Australian, PLEASE tell me that you HAVEN’T heard of this song before….):

 

but also being put to shame by Ashlee’s Asian side, as she demonstrated her extensive Chinese vocabulary in full glory on a Gothenburg tram:

 

But what other things happened aside from that night ?

…aside from getting lost on the Gothenburg trams at 3 in the morning, and walking half drunk along the tram tracks in a dark tunnel with zero light twice in less than twenty minutes …. (yeah, I’m surprised we’re not dead, either)

There was the discovery of kanelbullar..

an amazing cinnamon bun !!

getting sick of seeing ‘Eden’ variants everywhere in Sw’eden’,

and of course, who could forget the amazing ferry ride from Skårgårdsbåtar to Brännö Rödsten and back again.

 

 one of the many islands to the west of Gothenburg

 a beautifully amazing roiling sea

sunsets and snow

 Not to mention ignoring Swedish signs quite possibly warning us of impending danger…

 

 …and venturing forth to faraway rocky outlooks instead.

Possibly one of my favourite parts of Gothenburg was doing the entire city’s sightseeing in one night -

One of the shopping centres in Gothenburg (this wasn’t all the sightseeing to do)

- and spending hours looking for Göteborg’s famous fisktorget, the Feskekörka – an indoor fish market in a church!

It only took 4743243947649 hours to find the Fish Church, which by that time, was closed. Redirection: to eat seafood! As Sweden is meant to be famous for their seafood, we find ourselves on a “restaurang” boat called Rio-Rio.

Any normal person would think that a restaurant on a boat next to a fish market would sell ….well, fish, right?

As it would turn out, the night ends up with us reading a menu with anything but fish, and instead feasting on Mexican buffet food on a boat.

And after we’ve dined and are ready to leave?

We get roped into free salsa lessons with a group of Swedes …in Swedish.

Pity I don’t have any photos.

What I do have is a memoir of how freaking COLD it was:

 

Which is what I shall leave you with, because my feet are freaking freezing right now!