Trek!

Our house is right on the boundary of a forest (of sorts). Trekking up, it opens out to a neatly concealed Lake. We went during the day, but it should be awesome at night.

Jönköping

This is our town. A sleepy little place called Jönköping. Its very scenic, as is most of Sweden, very quiet and pleasant. Initially we were really put off by the fact that no one..NO ONE walked the streets! It seemed like a ghost town.
But then we caught the crowds in the peak of their cyclicality, not many but there is some sort of a crowd here.

Me and Girish spent the initial coupl-a days roaming about town trying to finish off with the formalities and some other stuff. We got totally raped in the bus fare! Its 20 Kronors one-way minimum..thats 120 Rs! Then we did some grocery shopping because the restaurant prices were just bloody expensive, not that supermarkets were cheap, but rather cheaper. Now we cook: all sorts of egg, Guhan tried pasta sometime back, girish tried maggi (which was a disaster), soup was good, ready-to-eat pizza (which we burnt).. and im sure we'll add more to the list of disasters soon enough. We are planning to learn how to cook Indian non-veg stuff soon :)

Yesterday afte a week of hunting, we finally found cycles. Second-hand cycles that is, for around 300 Kr a piece. Brand new ones costs approx. 3000 Kr! and believe me they are the same uncle-aunty cycles we see back home.



















Now this is for the extremely lukkha.
If you have google earth, enter in the co-ordinates (57.7606228615, 14.1307130676) in the search toolbar to get a view of our house!
I love Google.

if you zoom out a little, you'll see this lake on the top-left of your screen. Our house is on the edge of a forest, if you trek through it you come to this hidden lake. Its really cool.

The Journey:

Finally in Sweden. The journey has been long and on the whole pretty uninteresting. Slept through most of the flight to Milan. The Air-hostesses weren't all that great and the flight had no Personal Entertainment Systems. Fair enough for the prices we paid :)

The stop-over at Milan could have been more exciting, but we were in the Transit Area and they don't have too many shops. We just had breakfast there. After a 4-hour transit we boarded the flight to Stockholm.

Arlanda airport is so far out of the city, its probably illegal for Stockholm to claim it is a Stockholm airport. Its a good 45 km outside the city! after taking a shuttle to Stockholm, we faced another long and final jouney of 5 hours to Jonkoping.

After almost 22 hours of travel we finally reach the sleepy little town of Jonkoping. Fortunately we had someone receive us at the Centrum with the keys to our apartment, else we would have had to spend the night at a youth hostel or something...

note: always declare you are a student (and prove it) while travelling, else you will miss out on discounts...