Sigtuna Good, Sn-rain Baaaaaaad

Sigtuna is a little town in Sweden. It's actually the oldest town in all of Sweden. I took a day trip with a couple of other girls in my hostel out to this cute and quaint little pocket of Sweden on Sunday.

Easily my favourite part of Sigtuna is a little coffee shop in a building from the 1700's. It is absolutely tiny and just the coziest place you will ever have a hot chocolate. The roof seems almost to be buckling under the weight of so many years and the lintels of the doors are so low that I hit my head going in AND going out. (A very Xin-esque thing to do)

Sigtuna, despite being so small that you can walk from one end to the other in the space of about 5 minutes, has its own museum displaying Viking artefacts unearthed at the Sigtuna locale. Whilst this exhibition was of only passing interest my companions and I got endless amusement out of the fact that the museum was housing a temporary exhibition of manga art - mainly just stills from Dragonball Z! :p

I left Sigtuna and Stockholmn via overnight bus to Gothenburg, a city in sort of the west of Sweden that is only a few hours from Oslo. Gothenbury is where I first encountered the phenomenon of 'snrain'. Note that the word 'snrain' itself is a Xinnism and it means snow that is so liquid it is practically rain. Snrain is bad, very bad. You can almost walk through it without an umbrella but doing so causes great discomfort. It also has none of the magic of snow - when it falls on the ground it just creates slush rather than fluffy goodness.

While this snrain definitely put a damper of Gothenburg the city was saved in my eyes by the plethora of amazing churches. Each church was so remarkably different from the others that even though I did a whirlwind tour of 7 churches in 2 days I am still not 'churched out' and am ready to see even more churches!

I'm current in Oslo staying with Mary and Darren who are kind enough to share their dorm (not to mention random food) with me. :p

PS: The photo you see is of Xin and Leah (Korean-Canadian chick I met in my Stockholm hostel) outside the Sigtuna town hall. The town hall is tiny! I don't think it could even fit a school class in it. It does evoke images of Stars Hollow small town life though which definitely gives it bonus points. (For those of you who don't know Stars Hollow please go back and re-educate yourself by watching some more Gilmore Girls episodes... :p)