apurva I love traveling & meeting people, design, art, the Internet, music, and dance. Follow me: @apurva_p

We reached Sweden yesterday and we are currently in Gothenburg. It’s a pretty good city, sort of like a university town. There are a lot of shopping places and cafes and bars so it’s a pretty relaxed environment. We have 3 days here and 2 of them are over. Today is our last day and night and tomorrow we’ll be driving to Oslo. 
Although we don’t really have much planned for these cities, it’s still a lot of fun to just take a map and go walking around the streets. So many of the buildings are made from red bricks with bronze roofs that have turned green. Even the most ordinary buildings look beautiful to us and we keep taking a lot of pictures - just like typical tourists. 
I’m still mesmerized by the weather here though. Sometimes it’s so freezing cold that i can’t wait to go inside. But other times the strong wind is so refreshing that i just stand for a while taking it all in. Even the sunlight is different somehow. Just the fact that we can be walking around the streets with the sun still in the sky at 8:00pm is funny and exciting. In singapore it’s dark and all the street lights are on. Here it’s bright but most of the shops are closed. 
Today we might be going to tour the archipelago around the city. I’ll tell you how it goes after that.
Oh and if you are gonna call me can you call at like 7:30 or 8:00 am your time. I think that will be about 5:30 or 6:00 am for me and that’s when i usually wake up here. Also, let me know the day before when you are going to call so i’ll keep an eye on my phone.

Here is the letter i wrote to my family about my travels in Scandinavia so far:

We landed in Copenhagen yesterday and immediately got on a bus to go to a city called Billund in Denmark where the Lego headquarters are. It was a pretty long bus ride (about 3 hours) and pretty tiring after about 13 hours on the plane.

It was really fantastic to just step outside into the open air after such a long time indoors. The weather here is quite unlike what i’ve experienced so far. During the day time, when the sun is shining it’s pretty pleasant and you don’t really feel the cold of the temperature which is about 10 or so. (I’m not even sure actually). But when it rains or is cloudy or windy, the cold air really hits you and you feel cold no matter how many layers you have on.

We got a taste of that when we got to Billund the first thing we did was go to Legoland which is the Lego themed amusement park. It was loads of fun and a strange but good way to get acclimatized and shake off the stiffness from the plane. We spent about 6 hours there, doing all the rides and taking pictures with all of the miniature lego ‘towns’ that have been built there. It was a little odd because we were the only non-children in the place who were having so much fun on the rides. But halfway through our time there it started to rain and because we were still going on the rides we did get wet and cold. Still, it was good fun and we warmed up when we got to the hotel.

I tried to compare the weather here to maybe Delhi or Ooty or even Pune which are the only places i have experienced cold weather but it’s a little different here because the cold is a little more intenst. Anyway we are all quite prepared because of all the layers we are wearing under our clothes.

Another interesting thing here is that they are very environmentally conscious. The first thing we saw on the plane when were were landing in Copenhagen was wind turbines floating on the ocean. It was quite an impressive thing to see and we’ll be going to visit one of the companies that makes these wind turbines tomorrow. Also, while we were driving from Copenhagen to Billund, we often saw a number of huge farms growing the conolla flower (for the oil) but apparently it will be used for bio-fuel. They are so bright and shining yellow and in contrast to the lush green grass of the neighbouring grass farms it really looks very cheerful.

Denmark at least is rather flat with no mountains so we’ve seen a lot of farms so far while driving on the bus. Also, since this region is very much in the nothern hemisphere, the sun shines untl very late at night. Just today we were walking in the town (Aarhus) at about 10pm and it seemed like broad daylight. The only thing is that the shops close at about 7pm so we need to get used to that.

This morning we drove from Billund to Aarhus and when we got here we took a tour of the concert hall. it was fairly relaxed. Tomorrow we have 2 company visits and then we travel back to Copenhagen in the evening.