Swedish Honeymoon, Day 3: First Day in Stockholm

Events of July 14, 2009

The sun rose at 2:30 am, waking me up for a while. Eventually, I was able to get back to sleep, and when we woke up for good around 9 am, we headed off to Stockholm via the commuter rail.

Our first picture in Stockholm, just outside of the Opera house:


We walked through downtown Stockholm and eventually ended up on Drottningsgatan, a street with lots of shops and cafes. There we found one of our favorite places in Stockholm, "The Coffee Place", a little coffee shop with free wi-fi, which proved to be invaluable for making phone calls using Skype on Melissa's iPod Touch. This trip really taught us how versatile and powerful that little device is. Besides making phone calls around the world, we could play games, check email, send tweets to Twitter and Facebook, and surf the internet.

Because Melissa traveled to Sweden with only a Swedish passport, we realized that to get back to America without getting a visa, she would need to get an American passport. So we tracked down the US embassy and asked how to get a replacement passport. They told us to come back tomorrow at 9 am.

We tried going to the Vasa Museum, but it was packed, so we went to the Nordic Museum instead. The Nordic Museum is a huge museum in an amazing building that is all about Swedish culture, with displays about music, art, furniture design, and many other things.

The exterior of the Nordic Museum:


A wooden sculpture in the Nordic Museum of King Gustav I Vasa:


The interior of the Nordic Museum:


After the Nordic Museum, we went on a boat tour around the island of Djurgården. Stockholm is built on a series of islands and is frequently called the Venice of the North, so hanging out near the water seems to be one of the best ways to see the city.

As we were waiting for the boat to leave on the tour, we saw the "Håbo Buss," which sounds like "hobo bus":


Me on the tour boat:


A house on Djurgården:


Another house on Djurgården:


The tallest structure in Stockholm (which we never visited):


After the boat tour, we headed to Gamla Stan (the Old City). Gamla Stan is full of ancient buildings and tiny alleys:


Another small street in Gamla Stan:


And an alley with little shops:


In one of the big squares in Gamla Stan, right across from the Black Sheep restaurant where we ate a delicious meal. All communication with the servers was in Swedish until they saw my American credit card, then they wouldn't stop speaking English :)


Another beautiful square in Gamla Stan:


Melissa posing in Gamla Stan next to the famous statue of Evert Taube (he wrote the song that Melissa and her father danced to at the wedding):


A tiny, winding staircase down an alley in Gamla Stan:


The houses of Gamla Stan:


A tourist street buzzing with shops in Gamla Stan:


After leaving Gamla Stan, we headed back to the house we were staying at in Tumba and settled down for the night.

Previous: Day 2: Arrival
Next: Day 4: Applying for Passport

Swedish Honeymoon, Day 2: Arrival

Events of July 13, 2009

We arrived at Arlanda Airport outside of Stockholm at around 3:00 PM local time, or 15:00, as they write in Sweden. Melissa's cousin, Andreas, was very kind and offered to let us stay at his flat in a suburb of Stockholm called Tumba. So once we deplaned, we took the express train from the airport to Stockholm's central train station and then took the pendeltåg (commuter rail) to Tumba.

Andreas' apartment is just a few minutes walk from the Tumba train station, and is just next door to a mall of sorts called Tumba Centrum. We were so tired after our flight that we decided to just go straight to sleep after eating dinner. We went to the grocery store in the mall and bought frozen pizza which we gobbled up and then tried to go to sleep. The sun didn't set until 10:30 PM, but I was tired enough that I feel asleep quickly anyway.

Previous: Day 1: The Flight There
Next: Day 3: We tour Stockholm!

Swedish Honeymoon, Day 1: The Flight There

Events of July 12, 2009

After our successful and beautiful wedding in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia the previous day, Melissa and I headed to Dulles airport to fly to Sweden for our honeymoon. Just three hours before our flight was scheduled to leave, Melissa realized that she had left her US passport in back home in San Francisco! After a few minutes of complete panic, we realized that because she was dual citizen, she could use her Swedish passport to leave the country. But the Swedish passport was over an hour’s drive away at her parent’s house.

The passport:


She frantically called her parents, trying to get them to bring the Swedish passport from their house to the airport, but they were watching a play in a theater and were not answering their phones. Thankfully, her brother soon answered his phone and headed over to the house to find the passport. But once he got there he realized that he didn’t have a key to the house, so he was forced to break in through a window. After a few minutes of looking, he rushed to the airport and we were able to leave on the next flight.

We both settled in relief as we finally sat down on the airplane and could look forward to our trip. British Airways charged us a large fee for moving to the next flight, but in exchange, they bumped us up to Business class, so our seats were extra large and they had footrests. I had so much leg room! I had never been so comfortable flying before.

Our comfortable seats in British Airway's "World Traveller Plus" class:


Previous: Wedding Day!
Next: Arrival

Wedding Day!

Melissa and I got married on July 11th in Alexandria, Virginia in the beautiful Lorien Hotel in Old Town. The courtyard in front of the hotel served as a meeting place as everyone gathered for the pre-wedding and wedding events:


We lost the marriage license the day of the wedding, and of course, panic ensued. After two hours of scouring the hotel, we gave up the search. Thankfully, we later found out that we could simply get a new copy from the courthouse and file that, so the marriage is official!

We asked Melissa's uncle, Brian, an actor of stage and screen, to perform the ceremony for us, but due to Virginia law, he could only marry us if he was a minister. So Brian joined the ministry of the Universal Life Church and we had a minister! We had the wedding itself in a vined courtyard inside the hotel which gave the wedding pictures a great backdrop:


At the moment we were officially married, I sent out a tweet to inform the world of the glorious occasion.

The reception was great, and featured the bride and groom dancing to music by William Shatner, group singing by Swedes and Danes, and a comic interlude brought to us by our best man and maid of honor, Jarred and Angela.

The cake was a very unique Scandinavian dessert called the kransekake:


Stay tuned next time for the beginning of our honeymoon in Sweden...
Next: Swedish Honeymoon, Day 1: The Flight There

Cherry Blossom Parade

This past weekend, San Francisco had one of those rare weekends where it is warm enough to go walking around outside all day long in t-shirts and shorts-- if only you owned a pair of shorts. To celebrate, we took a trip out to Japantown for the annual Cherry Blossom Parade and Festival. Vendors of every kind sold mochi (a gooey rice confection), drinks, and trinkets of Japanese and not so Japanese origin. If you've never had mochi before, find someway to get some soon. It is very tasty.

Then the parade started, led by this beautiful fish:


Next up, tradition Japanese drummers performed as their float passed by:


And then, scores of women performed intricate and graceful traditional dance:


But the highlight of the parade was its Grand Marshall, George Takei, who played Sulu in the original Star Trek series and movies:


He even gave Melissa and the crowd around us the Vulcan salute, made famous by Spock. Unfortunately, we were too excited to get a picture of it, but here's another picture of George to give a sense of the profound majesty of being in the presence of the God-like being that he is:

Pacific Coast Trip, Part 2

I continued my road trip by driving to the beach, where dense fog gave the beach an eerie feel to it, which was uncannily beautiful:


Next I drove into the Redwood National Forest, where I encountered the unbelievably tall redwood trees:


If you have not seen these trees in person, you really can't fully comprehend how huge these are. Here is me (with a weird expression caught by my camera's auto-timer) standing completely inside a living tree, and this is not by any means one of the largest:


A little further on, I drove through the world famous drive-through tree:


After leaving the forest, I headed out into the wilderness on a dirt road. I spend nearly three hours on this road, seeing another human only once. The spectacular vastness of the Northern California wilderness is truly breathtaking:


After leaving the dirt road, I passed though a few more scenic valleys before hitting the highway to head home back to San Francisco:

Pacific Coast Trip, Part 1

Melissa went to Niagara Falls, New York for a long weekend to attend a wedding, leaving me behind to fend for myself. It sounding like the perfect opportunity for a road trip, so Thursday morning, I rented a car, and took off driving north out of San Francisco along the Pacific Coast Highway. This was actually my first time driving a car in California, so it took a little time to get used to driving again, but not as long as I thought it would.

I started by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, then quickly began my journey driving the winding roads that brought me over the mountains of Muir Woods. After emerging on the other side of Mount Tamalpais, I reached the Pacific Ocean. I pulled over to the side and walked out onto a huge rock that jutted out into the ocean. I just stood there admiring the huge ocean and the trip ahead of me:


One of the things that quickly struck me upon leaving San Francisco is how empty California really is. Everywhere I went, vast stretches of untouched land engulfed my vision:


I continued on for a few more hours, and eventually pulled off to visit a beach. These beaches are nothing like the beaches I had grown to know so well in Florida. Huge rocks protrude from the sea reminding all visitors of the tumultuous geological past of our coast:


The beaches are not made of sand, but trillions of beautiful smooth pebbles of every color:


For lunch I stopped at a beautiful roadside cafe in the middle of a huge garden. The hosts were an elderly couple who made a delicious salad out of cheeses, fruits, and vegetables from their garden:


That night, I made it to the little town of Eureka in northern California. Bright and early the next morning I got up and prepared for my second day of travels, leading me into the great redwood forests:


To be continued...

New Apartment

We moved into our new apartment in North Beach, also known as San Francisco's Little Italy, last week. I will take some pictures of the neighborhood soon, but for now, here is our place. Excuse the mess, we are still unpacking and getting situated.

Our building. Our apartment does not face the street, but an inner courtyard on the back side of the building:


Hi! Come on in...


Here is my office nook in the bedroom:


More of the bedroom:


And a little more:


Here is the as of yet unfinished living room:


And our bright, inviting kitchen:


I am writing this sitting in this chair right now:


And the rest of our kitchen, right after a large lunch:


Hope you enjoyed the tour...

Glen Canyon

One of the coolest things about San Francisco is that you don't even have to leave the city to visit the great outdoors. There are tons of little parks throughout the city that resemble standard city parks, of course, but there are also a handful of parks that are very wild places. One of these parks is Glen Canyon. This park is in the middle of the city, but is huge and as it's name implies, it's a canyon. It's a nice place for a weekend hike, or even a place to go rock climbing!

You enter the canyon from the bottom, where a little creek flows through a forest:


The majority of the canyon is alternately grassy and rocky, so you get many scenes like this. It is hard to give a good idea of the scale of this picture, but to give you an idea, the large rock on the bottom left of the picture is about 40 feet tall and was being used by rock climbers for a little exercise:


Here is another view of the rock-climber's rock from high above the canyon where we climbed:


At the end of the hike, everyone needs a little relaxation:

Pride Weekend

This weekend was San Francisco's Gay Pride festival, and I have never seen San Francisco so crazy. Every street was alive with people dancing and singing and eating and drinking and partying. The city converts the entire Civic Center neighborhood into one big block party, and since I live a few blocks from Civic Center, I couldn't help but wander through all the craziness and observe.

At the end of the event, the parade passed me and I got this shot of some of the hundreds of motorcycles:

On a rooftop, a DJ had set up music and people were dancing to his records:

The Opera House lit its lights that night in a rainbow in celebration: