From Sweden with Lingonberry Sauce

In order to complete Meghan's Memorial Day to-do list, I'm finally contributing a guest post about my recent trip to Sweden for the big MRI conference.  Overall, it was a great trip, and Sweden was beautiful.  According to the Swedish tourism folks, the things Swedes are most proud of are - in no particular order: 1) Pippi Longstocking 2) Moose 3) ABBA.  I also learned that even though it's May, that doesn't mean that it won't be cold and windy.  And so, I present my photo journal of the land where Pippi Longstocking rides moose while listening to the music of ABBA:

First, while it's a few weeks past Mother's Day, I thought I'd lead with an interesting advertising campaign for Sprite.  I can't remember the last time that I had a Sprite, so I guess I'll have to disagree.

Next, it was off to one of my favorite imports from Sweden - IKEA!  The journey was not easy.  Just getting to the Stockholm IKEA required a couple of trains and probably a mile walk, but it was well worth it.

Actually, it was pretty much the same as the store in the US, but I enjoyed myself.  One huge win was the cafeteria.  Stockholm was very expensive, especially for food. But at IKEA you can get the Swedish meatball plate for only 15 Kronors (about $2!). 

At this point I discovered what makes spring in Sweden so charming - the afternoon sleet storms.  Did I mention it was a bit chilly?

One of my favorite things in Stockholm was our trip to the Vasa Museum.  Basically, it's a museum built around a ship that sank in the Stockholm harbor in the 1600s after sailing less than one mile!  The ship was raised in the 1960s and beautifully restored with many exhibits covering historical descriptions of how peopled lived, how the ship was built, how it was restored, and the science of what went wrong leading to its demise.  Also, as Brett pointed out, something like this would never happen in the US - building the country's most famous museum to its most embarrassing and miscalculation in engineering.  Here are a couple of dark photos; you can search the internet for better photos and more information.

We were definitely very fortunate in our choice of hostel location (Castanea Hostel, I highly recommend it).  Located on Gamla Stan, it was in the center of Old Town Stockholm.  Here's a taste of the architecture:

Here is a beautiful European square, but what's that at the end?  A TGI Friday's?  USA! USA!  And here's an even stranger fact: the first TGI Friday's was opened in NYC, the second in Overton Square in Memphis and is now closed - at least according to Wikipedia.

Other things I learned included that trolls can protect your home...

I would be more interested in high fashion if there were more monkeys involved...

In Sweden, there's no need for guard rails; a small sign is sufficient to protect yourself from liability if someone drives into the harbor...

The Snuggie has not made it to Europe, and it seems like it would be a major market...

I also learned about MRI, and here's proof from the conference center...

Hope everyone has a good Memorial Day!