On the road again...

This post comes from on the train headed for Jonkoping. I figured I’d recap the morning since it was already eventful even though I kind of wish it hadn’t been.

I was not able to fall asleep again after 5:00 so Brandy and I got dressed and made our way to Central Station around 7:00 so Brandy could get her train ticket. The offices didn’t open until 7:30 but Brandy was worried the trains would be booked so she wanted to get there early so that she could be one of the first to go. We walked around the station for a bit and I found out that egg mcmuffins from McDonalds are like $4 here! I couldn’t believe it. They Americanize this country in a shoddy way like with McDonalds and then jack the prices up. I was glad I don’t eat there. When they opened the doors, everyone flooded in and she was number 6. She got her ticket with a seat that we thought would be next to mine (not the case as we’ll see later). We walked back to the hostel, packed a bit and then decided to head out around 9:00 to see if any shops were open. We bummed around on the computers and in the lobby until then and started walking back down Drottningatan so Brandy could get a Sweden shirt for her sister. We stopped in a couple of other stores along the way, mostly chocolate stores or bakeries but didn’t get anything other than a bottle of water. On the way back, we walked around the Galerian in Sergels Torg, which apparently is huge and has a ton of stores.

Unfortunately, they all did not open until 10:00 and we were heading back to the hostel at that time. We got our stuff together and walked out at 10:30, thinking it would take us awhile to get all our stuff to the station. In reality, it took us like 5 minutes. We wandered around the station, figured out which platform we had to be on (#11) and after lugging my big suitcase down some stairs, I then had to lug it back up some stairs to actually get to the platform. About 5 minutes after we got there, a train came. We were in compartment 4 but there were only 3 compartments on this train and we almost got on the 3^rd one until we realized how early we were and how this was the 10:40 train to somewhere else and not our 11:20 train! We laughed thinking that it would have been hilarious and not a surprise if we had gotten on the wrong train and didn’t realize until we were half way across Sweden in the wrong direction! When sat on the platform for awhile and then all the sudden 3 of our group members came up the steps. They had gotten in this morning and were on the same train to Jonkoping with us.

We talked to them for awhile, relating our horrible sleep stories to their lack of sleep stories from the plane. The train finally got here around 11:30 and we got on and realized that my seat was in one row and Brandy’s seat was behind mine. No big deal… until my bag wouldn’t fit anywhere. I blocked traffic, had a woman get mad at me because I was blocking her path (although it was a bit funny when she kept talking to me in Swedish and I was like “um, I have no idea what you’re saying”), and finally had a guy tell me to just move it into the bistro car behind us until people were seated. I did that and then Brandy and I tried to lift it into the cubbies up ahead, with me laughing the whole time and thinking about how typical this was. When that didn’t work, I moved it to the front of the carriage and into this side cubby, only after having to move other people’s stuff around. Now I’m enjoying the ride and especially enjoying the fact that a huge canvas square is right over the whole part of my window, so I can’t really see anything that we’re passing… At this point, I don’t care. I’m going to put my laptop away and either read or sleep (preferably sleep if I don’t want to be amazingly grumpy when we get there).