Swedish Nerd Vs. The World

One of Europe's smallest countries, Liechtenstein, is squeezed in between Switzerland and Austria in the Alps. My girlfriend Felicia and I went there to celebrate Valentine's Day. Since we had enjoyed Andorra, which is another one of the smallest countries, with similar landscape since it's also squeezed in between mountains, we had high hopes. But it was a total disappointment, Schaan which is the biggest city, just had a road going through it, and nothing more than that. Only 6000 rich people live in the city and you can tell because the vibe is so boring. We were just going to be there for the day and I'm so thankful for that, because I wish we never went there at all. The closest we got to romance was when Felicia got a rose at the pharmacy. I wasn't the best company this day either because I was cranky since I hadn't eaten for the whole day. When I finally ate a falafel plate, that also tasted surprisingly good, my mood got better and I thought we...

In upper secondary school my best friend Roman had roots in Latvia, and once at a break we stole a huge sack of potatoes and then sold it to our teacher. When she asked where we had got them from, we said Roman's dad was a farmer in Latvia and that we helped him sell them and she believed us. She even recommended us to other teachers and that's when we thought it went out of hand. Roman was my only vague connection to Latvia when I many, many years later set out on a cruise by myself to go see the capital Riga. It was the last of my three cruises in a week departing from Stockholm, I had already been to  Finland  and  Estonia . The boat was maybe in the worst shape of the three and my bed was even tilting so it felt like I was going to fall off at any minute. Instead of complaining I just thought of it as a part of the experience to go to a poor country like Latvia, and I had a really nice time on the boat with going to the spa and watching the Stockholm archipelag...

When I was a kid I had a classmate called Mario who came from Croatia and he spawned my interest for the country. We played football together and I loved the unique design of their national football team's shirts so I always cheered for them secondly to Sweden. Fast forward the time about 20 years from that and I found an extremely cheap flight ticket to the country that I had always been interested in visiting. I had been very close to my girlfriend Felicia before, and I usually have one best friend instead of many friends, but now we had broken up even if it seemed like we were going to find back to each other soon. So who would I go to Croatia with, because I couldn't let this opportunity slip away? I thought it would be nice to get to know my drinking buddy Andreas more, it would be fun to find out if we could have a good time without the alcohol too. And to my surprise he was up for it and to Croatia we went! Since the flight to Zadar on the coast of Croatia was so che...

The only thing that comes to mind when I think of Kosovo is war. And it's debatable if it's even a country since its independence is agreed by only a bit more than half of the nations in the UN. Serbia still sees Kosovo as it's territory and right before me and my friend Michael went there for a road trip Serbia sent a train to Kosovo with a loud message about this on the outside of the train. "Kosovo Is Serbia" was written in 21 languages on the train and I was afraid that this was a start of a new war between the countries. Me and Michael came from Macedonia by car and already in the customs to Kosovo I was both excited and scared of what was waiting for us. The roads were very poor and since they were falling apart on the sides you had to drive close to the oncoming traffic to still stay on the road. It's not often that you get happy that you survived every encounter with a car heading in the different direction. One time we went the wrong way and drove o...

China is the only country I've been to without knowing I was there. I went to Hong Kong on my trip around the world about 6 years ago and I thought it was its own country. I had no interest in going there but Christian who I went with wanted to see it so I followed along.  This was the first country that I had ever been to outside of Europe and it sure was different than I was used to, not in a good way though. The city was so polluted that they had to pretend it was a fog so that tourist wouldn't mind, but it's strange how it's a constant fog everyday in Hong Kong then. I bought a surgical mask to try and fit in, and to avoid all the fumes. At least I thought that was why they wore them, but I later found out it was only sick people who wore them to prevent the virus to spread.  Since I'm almost 2 metres long and got freckles and red hair you can say I stood out amongst the crowd in Hong Kong, but even more so when I went to the famous Temple Street Ma...