Västra Götaland

After a 4 and a bit hour train from Stockholm we made it to Gothenburg on Thursday afternoon! Our first day turned out to be a half-day because we slept in until noon to catch up on the 2 previous nights of little sleep. We started this day with a breakfast (or lunch?) of some delicious bagels from a New York-styled cafe which was very cool. It was overcast and misty so we made our way through town to the Universeum which was a science museum exploring landscapes, space, the human body etc. we had so much fun in here and were there for 3 hours! It was almost like a zoo mixed with a way better scitech. They had created a rainforest habitat in the middle of the building that was 3 stories high- so inside it was misty and humid with birds flying around and even an enclosure with 2 sloths! We both had never seen a sloth before so we were very excited. We even saw one move and climb to get its food! It was so cool. There was marine life (little sharks, lots of fishes). And there were reptiles too with lots of dangerous snakes. On Saturday the weather was much nicer so we walked to Gothenburg’s main large park called Trädgårdsresan. Autumn was in full bloom this day and it felt like a movie walking through all the brown leaves under the warm sun and also seeings lots of leaves fall from the trees. The gardens had a rose garden, a lake and even a large green house you could go inside and look at palm trees and other plants. We sat on a bench for a while and both read our books before walking through the whole park. From there we made our way to a suburb called Haga which is the oldest suburb in Gothenburg, it was first built in 1648! It was cobble-stoned streets that were very busy and filled with cafes, shops, souvenirs and antiques. We had our first proper “Fika”! We shared a Hagabullen which is famous on that street (just a gigantic cinnamon scroll), we couldn’t even finish it between the two of us because it was so sweet. For dinner we had booked a table at Unity Jazz Club which is a cute and classy bar in the city where they play live jazz each night. We sat and had a yummy dinner of baked cauliflower and cheese with wine whilst listening to a live jazz vocalist and her band. They were so good- singing in both English and Swedish. At first Ethan couldn’t tell when she was scatting and when she was singing actual Swedish words but he got the hang of it fairly quickly. We found it interesting that scatting noises aren’t universal so her Swedish scatting was making very different sounds to English scatting. We had the nicest night here and was way better than spending our Saturday night at a nightclub or something like that. We then walked home and shared tea and biscuits on our balcony.Read more