Princesses, futbol matches and the place where the sun never sets.

Scandanavia was incredible!!!! Hence, our decision to stay there for an extra week instead of heading down to Spain like we planned. Stockholm, Sweden is one of the coolest capital cities we have seen so far. The entire city is placed on a group of islands, which, though beautiful, makes navigating the city quite difficult. Oh by the way, everyone is going nuts there about their princess getting engaged to a "commoner." It's pretty funny because in literally every store window they have placed a massive portrait sized poster of their engagement photo to show their support. We also went to the Nobel Prize museum and toured the royal palace and stole a box of cocoa puffs from our hostel... they were delicious.

After Stocholm, in our quest to go above the arctic circle, we took a 12 hour train ride (though it was probably longer because the Swedish rail system does not know how to tell time) to Boden, Sweden, which is a little town that is very enthusiastic about their local futbol team. There, we went to our first European futbol match and they won 2-0! They even gave us free team scarves when they found out we were visiting!

Onto Narvik, Norway, which is above the arctic circle! It is surprisingly warm up there. Check out the picture of the random street- that is outside our hostel at 2:30 in the morning- it never gets fully dark there in the summer. THe first night we were there, we had planned to go hiking but the combination of fog and rain kept us inside. However the next morning, in our slight over-eagerness we set out for the mountains armed with trail-mix at 7 am. Yet to our dismay, upon reaching the peak, we were still fogged in. So, as there was no chance that we were going to head all the way back down without seeing anything, we hung outside at the top for about 1.5 hours in the fog- but when that fog finally broke, it was so amazing. We've never felt so small. We could see mountains, ocean, waterfalls, snow, beach, and seemingly everything in between. If you've read our earlier posts, this place beats the alps of Iseltwald, Switzerland, which we thought impossible. Paris posts coming soon! Love, Dan and Erica