Swedish Nerd Vs. The World

"Merry Christmas!" My girlfriend Felicia and I exchanged gifts, and the gifts would be that we would go to Hungary to meet the spring 4 months later. The time finally arrived and so did we to the capital Budapest which I quickly renamed to Budabest since I liked it so much. Pest in Swedish means plague so it sounded better to say best. Budapest is everything I expected Berlin to be, it's creative and charming since it has embraced the worn down buildings. They even got bars called ruinpubs situated in buildings that were doomed for destruction which are now instead equipped with rejected furnitures and beer taps. We arrived at night and took a quick walk around the block before we went to bed. The next day we immediately left the city center to go take a morning bath at the famous and yellow Szechenyi thermal bath. It's the largest medicinal bath in Europe and was opened in the early 1900's. It smelled like fart in the inner sections so we...

"So where did you go for your vacation?" "I went to Ukraine..." "Ukraine!? You know there´s a war right?" "Yeah..." If you're logical then you will never experience anything out of the ordinary so I said goodbye to all logic and went to Ukraine during the war with Russia for the Crimea peninsula. It was a part of my birthday celebration and I went there with my friend Erik the day after my birthday, to make sure that I would survive until I had gotten my gifts. We went to the capital called Kiev which is 11 hours by car away from the warzone, and we thought that would be safe enough. And since people were sunbathing on the city beach by the Dnieper River it didn't seem like the Ukrainians seemed that worried that there was a war going on in the south. As a statement against the Russian invasion in the country I wore my peace sign T-shirt when we landed on the airport. I had heard that the taxi drivers would try to rip you off and...

I slept through my first visit to Germany since my dad and I were going on a bus during the night to Czechoslovakia, as it was called back then. I was just a kid and I was amazed how the seats on the bus turned into a bunker bed and my dad and I got the upper bed. I was squeezed in between all the passengers around me and the roof of the bus above me. I got a bit claustrophobic but at the same time it felt safe, like I was sleeping in a womb. It was actually the opposite of safe because if the driver would have to step on the brakes, then we would all come crashing down on the floor in a pile of each other. I remember seeing the street lights passing us by through my closed eyes and I was excited to be in an exotic place like Germany. For some reason I will never forget this, and I both wanted to see Germany at the same time that it was enough just to know that we were there while I would be sleeping. It took me a long time to go back to Germany to see it for real, I was now an adul...

Everyone I know and all the strangers I don't know had told me the same thing, that Turkey was the worst country ever, so I was doubtful about going there. But at the same time they all had been to the tourist destinations like Alanya, which I don't consider "the real Turkey" and I was going to Istanbul, which is the cultural and historic center of the country.  I had always had a fascination for the city since one side of it is Europe and the other is Asia, two continents within the same city, only a bridge apart.  My friend Christofer and I hadn't seen each other for a long while since he now lives in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, while I still live in Gothenburg. We were 3 hours away from each other by train but we were also 3 hours away from each other by plane to Istanbul, so we chose the latter one and met up at the Atatürk Airport.  We arrived late at night so we took a cab to go to the hotel called Alilass to get some sleep so w...

My dad and I went to Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia as it was called back then, by bus from Sweden to go and see Sweden play a hockey game against the Czechs. All the stars like Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin were in the team and if I remember it right it was because NHL was in a lockout.  The only thing I saw on the way from the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia into the capital of Prague were gnomes and women for sale. I was just a kid back then but I could still figure out that the women who stood by the road were trying to get cars to stop by so they could sell sex. I remember I thought it was weird that one of the women even tried to stop our bus for the same reason, I thought it was way too much people on the bus for her and I felt sorry for the women. When we arrived at our hotel in the outskirts of Prague I took a picture of the view from the hotel window and a picture of my dad in the room. That was about the only pictures I took on the ...

Talking about Sweden is like talking about someone you have been married to for 35 years, you love it but you also know all the flaws. I despised my home country before I started to travel, and I can see why. It's dark and cold for 9 months a year and people think everyone should fit in the same mold, and no one should think they are something special. Just go to your dull work for 65 years and then retire and be happy about it. Don't complain and don't try and become something more than ordinary, because then they will laugh when you fall. Well they can laugh all they want, because I'm travelling the world and they're just sitting in their newly renovated kitchens with mortgages to pay for the rest of their lives. Guess who will be the most satisfied of us on the deathbed? As you can see I definitely feel bitter about some of the things with Sweden and the attitude here, but actually I have started to love it too. All I wanted to do before I started travelling w...

I have always viewed United Kingdom as four separate countries in the shape of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but it's actually just one big country. So how did I end up spending a lot of my childhood vacations in Scotland of all countries? Well, my dad Björn was out riding his luxurious motorcycle called Gold Wing in Scotland when he arrived at a gas station in the northern part. A young fellow named Sean who worked at the gas station helped dad clean his motorcycle and since my dad was a neat freak he immediately took a liking to Sean. Björn told Sean he should get on the motorcycle and that he would take a picture of him, and send to him when he got back to Sweden. Sean waited and waited for the picture to come, but when he probably had given up hope, an enlarged image arrived at his home and this was the start of a lifelong friendship.  My dad got invited back to Scotland to see Sean's family consisting of his mom and dad, Kay and Leslie, and his...