Swedish Nerd Vs. The World

Let’s make this into a Benjamin Button story and begin from the end. About 2-3 years ago me and my friend Andreas went to Marseilles mostly to get as close to Monaco as possible, but I will tell you about Monaco at another time. I had heard so many good things about the French Riviera and I thought Marseilles was a part of it, but I would quickly find out it wasn’t. We arrived late at night at the Saint Charles train station with the bus from the airport and on the way to the hotel we saw a worn-down city with dog shit everywhere and lots of homeless people and this wasn’t the view I had expected since I had image searched the Riviera. We went straight to bed in the hotel in separate rooms which looked more like prison cells and it always feels so weird to be in a new place without being able to get a feel of where you are before you go to bed. I couldn’t sleep that well and the next day we went straight to Monaco so I was still confused about Marseilles, but I knew one thing, I ...

It’s so weird that it’s only a sea between the war in Syria and the endless parties of Ayia Napa in Cyprus. It really shows how different the world can be when in Cyprus the biggest problem seems to be that the buses come and go however they want. We got a taste of that when I and my friend Andreas arrived almost two weeks ago and the first bus from the airport dropped us of and the driver said “some bus will come sometime and take you to Ayia Napa”. We waited an hour before all 6 of us who had been dropped off got tired of waiting for something that wasn’t going to come, so we split a cab together. We all were couples of 2 people who knew each other and we told the cab driver to go to the center of Ayia Napa so we all could walk from there, but one grumpy old man of the company just yelled his hotel name all the time so the cab driver took us there instead, which was very far from the center. Fortunately the cab driver made a second stop and we finally arrived at the beach hotel calle...

Me and my friend Andreas had just been to the party paradise Ayia Napa in Cyprus when we arrived to the airport of the capital of Bulgaria called Sofia. It wasn’t easy to understand how to get into the city center because people didn’t know English and the information wasn’t very clear. We got on a bus and hoped for the best and immediately I understood that Sofia wasn’t trashy chic like Bucharest in Romania for example, it was just trashy. When most people left the bus we did too and we arrived at a bridge that was being protected by eagle statues. We decided to walk to the hotel instead of taking the metro the last way but we couldn’t help ourselves, since we had been drinking almost every day in Ayia Napa we thought it would be a good start to go to a roof top bar and take a drink. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was the center point of the magnificent view and I started to change my opinion about Sofia again, maybe I should give it a second chance, and not judge it from the ...

This was the trip that started it all, this is the big bang of the Swedish Nerd vs. The World. In early 2015 I had just broken up with my girlfriend and all our plans for moving abroad came to an end. Lonely, bored and with a lot of savings I thought, hey let’s do something fun. Not many would think, yeah let’s go on three cruises in the same week from Stockholm to Finland, Estonia and Latvia but then again, someone had to be the first to think that. At this point of time I had a very vague idea with the trip that it would also become the first trip of seeing every country in Europe, but that was more of a way too big idea that I couldn’t grasp just yet. I didn’t even think I would do that since it was so many countries left to be seen, so at the end of it all it was a start but I also didn’t see it like it had to be that. That would grow on me after these trips and here I am, two years later and I have seen almost every country in Europe and wants to see the whole world instead. Fin...

The only thing I had heard about Estonia before I went there was that the boat with the same name sank to the bottom of the sea during hard weather when I was a kid back in -94. It was during a trip from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and the Swedish capital Stockholm that a part of the boat got ripped and it started to take in water, and in the end 852 people died. With this in the back of my mind, me and my friend Christofer booked a cruise to Tallinn from Stockholm some 20 years later. We survived the trip only to find we had arrived in the medieval times. The old parts of Tallinn are surrounded by an ancient wall and you can tell this is a city with a lot of character. We quickly went into a time machine to the 1980s and 90s by going into the Depeche Mode Bar.                                         A bar totally dedicated to the famous English electroni...