IKEA Spotting, or Day 6 in Copenhagen and Gothenburg, Sweden

We spotted our first IKEA in Sweden on our train ride from Copenhagen to Gothenburg. When we were booking these tickets, the agent told us that Gothenburg was beautiful and one of his favorite cities.

We definitely got to see more of the Swedish countryside on our travels to Gothenburg, and I love it. There were ocean views with kitesurfers and windsurfers. There were cute cottages with stone fences holding horses and cattle. And that was just during the short time I was awake!

We started off for where our hotel was according to the only map that would load on my phone the other day. It was right in the middle of a park, and we started getting a bit suspicious as we approached.

I decided to check at the tourist information center we passed, and was sad to learn that our hotel was a tram ride away. After getting a very cold Alisa from where I left her with the luggage, we bought our 24-hour pass (2 hours longer than we needed it, since we have tickets to Stockholm at noon tomorrow) and hopped on the tram for a 10-minute ride.

We got to the hotel, spent a few minutes strategizing our plan for the day, and quickly hopped a tram back into the central square.

First was a design museum that I wanted to see (and we got in for free because we were under 25!) It had lots of cool, random, designed things. My favorites were the chairs from the '20s to the present, and some of the crazy jewelry and lamps. We actually saw a horse lamp (like a full-size horse with a lampshade over its ears) that I saw later today on a balcony. And as the guidebook said, one of the few museums to display an Absolut vodka bottle.

We walked back to the main square to get a burger and tickets for a boat tour on the Padden boats. ("Padden" is the Swedish word for toad, because they lie low in the water.) But today, with the wind and high tide, they didn't lie quite low enough. They couldn't take their usual tour route  because the bridges on one side were too low, and the route they did take, we had to get down on the floor to avoid getting hit in the head.

We got sprayed with the cold river/harbor water once we got out of the canals. And got to see the once-biggest port in Scandinavia! (And I think it might still be... I forget. Not the part we saw, but up a bit further on a canal, not the river.)

Anyway, we got back, super cold (though super in love with our blonde-haired, soft-spoken guide, Erik... if only ever third guy wasn't named Erik around here.) On our speed tour through Gothenburg, our next stop was the Botanical Gardens.

Alisa took me on quite a hike, up some cliffs in the largest park in northern Europe. We ended up leaving the botanical part, circling around, and re-entering the park to finish up seeing the bamboo, rhododendrons, and rock garden with a majestic (if man-made) waterfall.

After all that walking and wind, we went to a restaurant recommended as cheap and Swedish. It was an adorable coffeehouse-type atmosphere, and the food (which was pasta-based, though mine had a bit of curry flare and hers had some goat cheese or something) was supposedly Swedish. A few desserts later (yum fair trade truffles), we were warmed up enough to head back to the hotel so we could rise early tomorrow. Our last (and only morning) in Gothenburg.