Nordic Breeze | Iberian Seas

Hello! I regret not keeping up with this blog through the rest of my time in Sweden. It turns out it takes much longer to write even a basic post than I had anticipated and I was very very busy this year! I also love to share photographs (and I have many thousands of photos to share) but the storage space on this site is limited without significantly increasing the cost. What a blessing to have too many exciting adventures to keep up with. It’s a poor substitute for in-depth storytelling but in the next few posts I will attempt to summarize my year so far.

January

I kicked off 2025 with a wonderful New Year’s celebration in Stockholm with a group of friends from my choir. We drank champagne and watched fireworks from the top of the hill with many other people. To top it all off, it started snowing thick beautiful snow! It obscured the fireworks a little but was completely magical.

January was dark and cold but overall it was quite a mild winter by Stockholm standards. The days slowly get longer after the solstice in December but are still short; on January 1st the sun rose at 8:43 AM and set at 2:59 PM. The sun never comes up very high in the sky. It’s a bit eerie for newcomers like me but I honestly enjoyed it. One benefit is that you get to see lots of sunrises and sunsets! Stockholm is very cozy in the winter and life continues through the darkness. With a fresh layer of snow, Stockholm is especially gorgeous.

In mid-January we had our exams for our fall semester classes, so quite a bit of January was spent studying, finishing up projects, and taking exams. While occasionally stressful, this also meant I spent a lot of time with my friends, both studying and blowing off steam with long walks, shared dinners, and game nights. It never got consistently cold enough to skate on natural ice but we went to the free outdoor public ice rink near school a few times to skate. One evening we had a Dutch vs. American pancake cook-off. The conclusion was that all pancakes are delicious and it’s not necessary to crown a victor.

In late January I went on a ski trip with a bunch of friends from my program. We took the night train from Stockholm up to Åre. I wrote a separate post about that so go check it out at this link: Skiing in Åre.

February

February was full of all the fun winter activities I had been looking forward to when coming to Sweden: ice skating, ice hockey, ice bathing, and a trip up north to the Arctic Circle!

This winter was very mild by Swedish standards but in February we finally got a cold snap that allowed Brunnsviken, a body of water near campus, to freeze over and allow us to skate. This was something I was very much looking forward to and I had an absolute blast skating (and making snow angels) on natural ice with a thin layer of powdery snow.

One afternoon we borrowed some hockey sticks and a puck and played the slowest and most chaotic game of hockey that public rink had ever seen. Don’t let the photo below fool you – I spent most of that afternoon falling on my butt.

A few days later, my friend Stijn and I went to go watch the professionals show us how it’s done. We cheered on a club called AIK in their big game against rival club Djurgården. It was a lively and competitive game and AIK won!

One weekend in February I went on a retreat/rehearsal weekend with my choir. We went to a nature reserve just outside of Stockholm called Bogesund. We spent the weekend singing together, getting to know each other, and enjoying the natural elements. I went ice bathing for the first (but not last!) time. I made snow angels between stints in the sauna. We had a lovely gasque (a type of dinner party that is a cornerstone of Swedish student tradition) full of good food, fun skits, lots of singing, and maybe a bit of drinking.

In late February I went on a spectacular guided group trip up to Swedish Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle. This trip is deeply deserving of its own post and I hope to follow up with one soon. I fulfilled two items on my bucket list: seeing the northern lights and seeing a moose! I went hiking, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing, went ice bathing in Abisko National Park, learned about Sami culture and reindeer herding, went dog sledding, saw both the old and new cities of Kiruna, and enjoyed absolutely breathtaking views of the landscape. We got cold but temperate winter weather (high 20s, occasionally above freezing) which was simultaneously pleasant, lucky, slightly disappointing, and mildly concerning, as locals told us it should be about negative 20 degrees (Fahrenheit) this time of year. Still, it allowed us to safely and comfortably spend many hours outside playing and enjoying the beautiful land.

When I wasn’t outside in February I was settling into spring semester classes, trying out bouldering with friends at the indoor rock climbing gym, enjoying choir rehearsal, exploring bakeries and cafes, cooking dinner with friends, and reading. It was a very fun month!

March

March marked the beginning of the transition from winter to spring. I celebrated my birthday on March 10th by studying for midterm exams. I did treat myself to a morning fika (coffee and a kanelbulle) and a miniature princess cake for dessert. I’ve heard princess cake is becoming popular in the U.S. and I can see why!

I also celebrated Fettisdagen (Fat Tuesday) on March 4th with the traditional semla, a Swedish pastry designed for decadence: a cardamom-flavored sweet bun filled with almond paste and whipped cream and topped with powdered sugar. The semla (plural: semlor) is probably the second-most iconic Swedish pastry behind the kanelbulle (cinnamon bun). I tried a few flavors (pistachio and dark chocolate pictured below) but the traditional cardamom and almond is always the best.

I did not spend the entire month eating pastries (or at least it’s not the only thing I did!). I spent lots of time walking and running around the many parks and green spaces in Stockholm as the days quickly got longer and the weather slowly got warmer. The crocuses and daffodils marked the beginning of spring.

We had a choir concert in the gorgeous S:t Johannes kyrka (St. John’s Church) in Stockholm. Our repertoire was all American music, by chance, which was quite fun for me!

The highlight of March was a visit from my parents! We had all been to Stockholm for vacation in 2016, so for this trip we decided to visit some other Swedish cities – Gothenburg, Malmö, and Lund – and take the train across to Copenhagen to visit family friends.

In Stockholm I took them to Skansen, the open air museum. I got an annual pass in September and had a lot of fun going for different events and seeing Skansen throughout the seasons. It’s a huge place with lots to see, including buildings from different eras and regions of Sweden. There is also a zoo and aquarium with many animals native to Sweden.

We rode many trains and ferries across Sweden and Denmark. My parents are avid road trippers so it was a pleasant novelty to sit back and relax and enjoy public transit.

In Gothenburg we ate shrimp, fish stew, and a tasting platter of sill (pickled herring) at the Feskekörka. I even talked my dad into getting the aquavit pairings to go with the sill. We went to a maritime history museum and a museum of the city itself. My dad loved walking down by the water and seeing all the boats and construction in action by the port. Gothenburg is very different than Stockholm in many ways so it was nice to show them another side of Sweden.

From Gothenburg we took the train directly to Copenhagen and met up with our family friends, Jan and Tina. We had a busy day seeing the sights of Copenhagen. I had been once before, in 2019, but this was my parents’ first time in Denmark. We climbed up the Round Tower, saw the changing of the guard at the palace, took a boat tour of the city, got a hot dog near colorful Nyhavn, toured Christiansborg palace, and admired the opera house.

The next day we went to Frederiksborg, a palace a bit outside of the city but absolutely worth the visit. It is magnificent and breathtaking in its opulence. Click through the slideshow below to see some photos.

We said goodbye and thank you to Jan and Tina and took the train back across to Sweden. We spent the day exploring the Swedish cities of Lund and Malmö. In Lund, the highlight was an outstanding astronomical clock originally made in the 1400s. The clock contains information about the time, date, day of the week, season, and position of the celestial objects (sun, moon, stars, planets, etc.). The perpetual calendar that tells you the day and day of the week covers about 200 years and thus needs to be replaced every few centuries. We happened to be there at noon so we got to see the most fascinating feature: twice a day, an organ within the clock starts playing and a parade of figures comes out and bows to Mary and Jesus. It is mind-boggling to imagine the mechanics and mathematics necessary to create and maintain an object like this, and even more so to remember it was made over 600 years ago!

After lunch we took the train to Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city behind Stockholm and Gothenburg. My parents enjoying walking around the waterfront and seeing lots of boats. We mostly just wandered around and took in the sights of the city. We put on a quite a few steps on this day!

The next day we took the train back to Stockholm. We walked around Gamla Stan (the old town) for a bit just to soak it all in and then we had a really nice dinner at a classic Swedish restaurant called Tradition. My parents also got to meet two of my good friends from this year – Mart and Stijn – and it was fun to see my worlds collide a bit. The next morning I met my parents for a lovely fika at Skeppsbro Bageri before sending them off to the airport. I’m so glad they got a chance to visit me in Sweden and we had a really lovely week together.

The last few days of March were spent studying, running, climbing, hiking, and reading. The days were no longer short and not yet long – just a pleasant amount of daylight somewhere in the middle that felt normal to me. The weather was nice and I enjoyed a lot of time outside in the woods.

In my next post, I’ll write about late spring and early summer – wrapping up the semester, exploring a bit more of Sweden, and eventually saying a very difficult goodbye to this wonderful year!