Gothenburg

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Ok, so it's time for nice long entry.  So far all the trips have been just since day or weekend trips, but here is my first full week trip.  We started Tuesday morning, coincidentally also right after I had finished an exam, this time for Swedish, the night before, and we didn't get back until Sunday night.  This trip included Mike, Chris, Andre, Christoph, Jackson, Simon, Clinton (also California), and myself.  I was pretty much constantly taking pictures the whole time, so here is a small sampling of the pictures I have.

We started out by taking the train to Gothenburg, Sweden's second largest city after Stockholm.  Since the sunset is around 3:30 now, even leaving Vaxjo in the morning doesn't leave much time for sightseeing in the daylight after taking the train, but after walking around the train station to find maps and the tram station to get a tram pass, we headed to the hostel to check in and drop off our stuff, then got some food and spend the rest of the day wondering around the city getting a feel for things.  We spent much of our time walking up and down the main street, although we did venture around and found Liseberg, which is apparently the largest amusement park in northern Europe and has a roller coaster that was named the best wooden roller coaster in the world.  The amusement park was closed, but they had up their Christmas lights, and they were beautiful to look in at as we walked by.  There were tons of Christmas lights up around the main street and the stops too.  I guess the middle of November isn't to soon to be thinking about Christmas.

Central Station shortly after arriving

A skyscraper nicknamed the Lipstick Building

Gothenburg had tram tracks everywhere, the way we found our way back to the hostel
 before we figured out the city was just to follow the tracks. The tram here is the most
extensive tram system in Scandinavia reaching all the way to the outskirts of the city

Gothenburg's main street

The Christmas lights were up early

... and up everywhere

Some of them were pretty big and impressive too 

Entrance to the amusement park

No attractions open, but plenty of lights up

The water looked really nice with the colored lights

The front of the amusement park

The next morning Christoph, Simon, Clinton and I wandered around the residential area of Gothenburg trying to find the Slotsskogen, a huge park on the west side of Gothenburg.  I was surprised at how nice the park was and that there were animals and attractions there instead of just paths and fields.  I was impressed with the number and variety of animals, considering that it was a free public park.  The petting zoo was closed, but we saw seals, goats, sheep, horses, ducks, swans, deer, moose, and even penguins.  The others met up with us there, but didn't look around as much as we did.

The city of Gothenburg

During our walk, all the houses are exactly the same!

Found some awesome graffiti faces on rocks

The coolest part was that most of them could only been seen or made sense at the right angle

I guess taking down the old street sign was just too much work

At the park, the water is already starting to freeze over

But the ducks found some open water (unlike the seagulls who just stood on the ice)

It wasn't actually that dark out, but I really like the lighting and shadow in this one

I still have no idea what this sign is trying to say?

A beautiful place to sit and enjoy a view of the city from the top of the park

There were also these stones from the viewpoints that showed some of the major attractions in sight

Another lookout point

The park was a nice relaxing walk, but it was freezing

The view from the top of the hill in the park

A nice place to watch the sunset over the city

Just a great place to hang out

This one was a nice old, rustic feel to it

The goats were really not camera shy at all

And the moose was like a statue

I was very surprised to see the penguins there too

So after the park, and going back into town to eat and put on as much clothing as we possibly could, we headed to the main attraction of the Gothenburg portion of the trip, a soccer match between the Swedish and German national teams.  Seeing how about half of us were German, we did sit in the Swedish fan section, but right at the edge next to the German section.  It was cool just to be at the game and watch the German national team play with some big names like Schweinsteiger in action.  But the game was just a friendly, and a cold one at that, both teams spent most of the time getting their younger players some action and the game carried out to a very uneventful 0-0 tie.  

They really love their Christmas lights, I'm just glad I'm not the one who had to put these up

The front of the stadium

When we got there the stadium was looking pretty empty for warm ups

Christoph, Mike, Jackson, and Andre (left to right)

Clinton, Simon, and Chris

When we got off the train, they were selling cheap Sweden jerseys
in the station, so we all got matching jerseys (even the Germans)

The line up and anthems

Germany was pretty dominant, and we were right near their offensive goal all first half

The stadium filled in as the game started, but it was far from packed

The day we knew we just had the morning for sightseeing, so after checking out of the hostel, we took the tram to the edge of town and hopped on a ferry (also part of the public transportation system to see the Gothenburg Archipelago, a group of islands just off the coast of Gothenburg that is completely car free and home to about 5000 permanent residents and another 6000 who live there just in the summer.  It was a good idea, and would probably be an amazing trip at another time, but we were rushed for time, we were carrying around our backpacks full of our stuff from checking out of the hostel, the islands seemed to be all but deserted, and being on the water did not do much to help the cold.  We only had time to visit the first island that the ferry stopped at, and I'm sure that the larger islands further from the mainland would have been much livelier, but the island did have a nice view from the top of a little hill.  

The view of some of the smaller islands from the ferry

A bit of the town, it looks like most of the houses were on the other side of the island that we were on

A nice view from the top

Back to the coast to catch the ferry back to the mainland

One entrance to Nordstan, Europe's most visited shopping complex with over 35 million visitors a year

After getting back from the islands, we made our way to the city library to print out our tickets for the attractions in Rome (the website was down the day before we left Vaxjo, so we couldn't print out the tickets then).  It was a hassle to deal with signing up for a library card and to keep refilling it with money for the printing, but it was well worth the countless hours we saved standing in lines in Rome.

Then we headed off to Rome.  For the sake of ease of viewing, I think I'll go ahead a put the Rome pictures in their own entry.

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