Stockholm

Now we come to the trickiest part of my travels. After eating very well in Paris and three meals a day in Tallinn - which is actually unusual for me, even in the United States - I won't be eating well. Not at all. Today marks the first day of these odd meals.

As I said, it was nice, eating breakfast on the ferry, even if I didn't think the food was that great. My lunch was just a handful (or five) of Haribo gummies ("Exotic Fruit" flavour). Although they were filling, they are also a sacrilege to the French meal.

Not eating lunch resulted in me being hungry way before the European dinner time standard at 17:00 or 18:00. I confess that before coming to Stockholm, I didn't do much research ... or any at all. I tried a relatively new site called AirBNB to book a room with Hus24, a home for young entrepreneurs. They were very busy, so I didn't want to talk to them. But, now I was so hungry, I could have eaten a whole horse on my own ... however, I didn't know a good place to eat. Should I choose a random restaurant? No, it was my only night in Stockholm and I wanted to eat good food. My solution? Ask one of the entrepreneurs. A girl was in the room where I was staying, and she recommended a restaurant that was "good and cheap": Vapiano. "It's like our second kitchen, and it's very close," she said. I, on the other hand, was skeptical.

In 2011, I celebrated my birthday in Seoul, South Korea. I was teaching English far away from my friends and my family, so I wanted to have a good birthday meal to help me forget that it was my first birthday on my own. A colleague recommended a restaurant called Vapiano for all of us to go to. Since it's been three years since we were there, I do not remember the quality of the food, but I remember that it was a bit more expensive than what I had anticipated.

So when the young woman told me it was cheap ... Well, who knows? Maybe it's not the same restaurant. After all, foreign restaurants in Seoul are not exactly known for being avant-garde. Seoul had only a Taco Bell near the US military base for several years (it now has another near the the university district). I would not say that Taco Bell is avant-garde, but American restaurants tend to grow fairly quickly after the first branch. McDonald's, Domino's, Pizza Hut, Burger King, KFC and Subway are all fast foods that I have seen in many countries).

But this woman had a lot of good things to say about Vapiano, so I decided to try it. It seems that Seoul is more avant-garde than I thought.

Vapiano has an interesting concept that makes it easy to rack up a high bill. Instead of ordering with a server or with a cashier whom you pay and whom gives you a number by which the server can find you, you receive a card that looks like a debit or credit card. At the different stations (pizza, pasta, salad and antipasto, dessert), you order with the chef of the station and give them your card, then he (or she) places your order via computer and swipes your card. Some stations you stay nearby until your order is ready, but others give you a buzzer like one you get when you wait for a table at Chili's or some other American restaurant like that, so you know when your meal is ready and you can pick it up. After you finish eating, you pay with the cashier by the door. The cashier checks your card and tells you the final amount.

The cuisine is Italian, which is not Swedish meatballs, but the way I see it is that you do not have to eat the cuisine of a nationality when in a country. That's not necessarily how the locals do. So going to an Italian restaurant in Stockholm is perhaps more of a Swedish experience of eating the smörgåsbord. Maybe.

Maybe it's because I missed lunch, but I - usually a two-, maybe three-slice-girl - ate the whole freakin' margarita pizza I ordered. Though ... I definitely was too full after finishing it. I had planned on eating dessert, but, no. There's absolutely no way I could have eaten it.

To help the digestion of the pizza, I walked around Gamla Stan, the oldest part of the city, where Hus24 (the place where I'm staying) is. I noticed that there were also many cafés and brasseries, and I remembered reading again that day that the Swedes also like to drink coffee, eat at a pastry shop and people-watch. Weird, right? Not too surprising after Helsinki, but weird. After all ... we are not in France. The last time I checked, I was in Stockholm, the capital of, you know, Sweden.

The next day I went to the official residence of His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. I guess it's like Buckingham Palace for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. I heard she spends much of her time (or perhaps she spent ... she is a bit old now and it might be too hard to travel there often) at Balmoral Castle. Anyway, I went to the palace before my train to Oslo in the afternoon. They have free tours (you have to pay the entrance fee), but they do not allow photos inside. It's a bit sad because it was beautiful inside. It reminded me a lot of Versailles - it even has a small replica of the Hall of Mirrors - which is one of the two palaces I have ever visited.

The other palace I visited was the present palace where King Carl XVI Gustaf, actually lives and the reason I missed lunch yesterday. The palace also looks like Versailles, but even more because the king was also a large garden.

So I am on this tour, right? The guide has a German accent like Rupert Friend when he played Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in film The Young Victoria, but his appearance looks a bit like John Cleese when he played Q in the James Bond films. His sense of humour leaned more towards the old more than the young, and when the other English tour caught up to us the second time, our group magically went from having about twenty people to five.

But it was clear he had great pride in his country because he told us a lot of information and our tour lasted several rooms more than the one after us. I think he only stopped because he realised the time. (He also guides the tour of the Treasure Room.) A very interesting fact is the name of the Swedish dynasty. I never really thought of the Swedes having many dynasties, like China or England, but of course it makes sense. The present dynasty is called Bernadotte dynasty. I don't know how much you know of Sweden, but Bernadotte certainly does not sound like a Swedish name. When I heard it, I thought it was Italian. I wasn't sure if it's just the way our guide (and the rest of Sweden) said it, or if this was just how the first king of the dynasty has pronounced itself. But wait, let me tell you a short story that pieced together all the mysteries and questions that I had been having.

According to our guide, a long time ago, Sweden had a war with Norway and they lost really badly. The king was overthrown and Sweden asked the great Napoleon for advice on how to have a leader who wouldn't lose easily. Napoleon was kind enough to send one of his own marshals up there to be the next king. So ... ta-da! Mystery solved. The Swedish royal family is actually of French blood. This guy, Jean Bernadotte, became King Carl Johan of Sweden overnight. His wife came up after him ... apparently coming during a Scandinavian winter is the best time and gives the best impression of your new country, so that's when they sent the queen, Her Majesty Queen Desideria, to her new home. She quickly fled back home to France for a while before coming back for good. In any case, they spoke French and it was only their son, the future King Oscar I, who learned Swedish.

But anyway, that puts a whole new spin on my perspective on all of these mysteries. And, looking back now, I realise that I probably could have understood at least half of the Swedish words that I had seen in the first Swedish palace. I'm not saying that because of a French man who became the King of Sweden the Swedish language suddenly became French, no. For you who know me personally, you know that I have studied (albeit briefly) many languages. So, in Swedish, I saw Latin, French, English and German. Uh, and some native Swedish words, of course. ^_^

Literally moments before I got on the train to as "Oslo S" (the Oslo Central Station), I went to McDonald's at "Stockholm C" (Central Station in Stockholm). I can just hear the groans now. But my choice of McDonalds was not actually a compliment. I went because I knew that they use a lot of fat when they cook, so that, although my meal was cold, it tasted the same and it was a long train ride. When I looked at my receipt, I amused myself by what I saw:

1 Cheeseburgare (Med Naturell)

1 Stor Pommes frites

Does anything look familiar to you? Yeah, me neither. :-P

With these new thoughts around in my head, I'm on the train to begin my next adventure ...

Note bene to the non-French speakers: The word, "[French] fries" is "frites" and we all know fries are made from potatoes (or so they tell us), which is "pommes de terre" in French.