Stockholm, Day Two

We took a ferry out to Gallno, an island in the archipelago that's relatively untouched by modernity, with 30 permanent residents, a small store, a hostel, some hiking trails, and some rowboats.

The ferry ride was about 2 hours long, and we passed some odd statue of a guy spitting water from his mouth along the way. We got there and walked to a store to get some bread. We'd brought along some peanut butter and jelly (lingonberry jelly -- quite tasty, actually). I got a yogurt too, which was actually a rice pudding I thought was a yogurt when I bought it. It was okay. I should have read the package more carefully though.

We walked around the island for a few hours, passing lots of colorful wild mushrooms and wild berries. Blueberries, and some red and orange ones. I wish I would have brought a little tiny realistic looking action figure man to put next to the mushroom and take a picture making it look like a giant man-eating mushroom. Why I have thoughts like these, I'm not quite sure.

[At this point in my notes, I've written down "Google Earth" to remind me that one of my friends said it was cool and I should go download it. ... ... ... ... I just wasted an hour playing around with Google Earth. It's a map. A really big map. Wow.]

Anyway, on the island we picked up a map of the other islands, and it turns out Sweden uses a handicapped wheelchair icon much more active than ours. Ours is sort of stationary man; theirs implies some sort of fast forward motion. There's an island in the archipelago designed just for the handicapped to visit. Speaking of this, why do we use a wheelchair icon to denote all handicaps? Do people with other handicaps feel disenfranchised by it? Should there be a mentally handicapped icon too? And if so, what should it look like? A man with a question mark above his head?

We also picked up a tour brochure to Kabul.

Kabul is a place to visit in Barcelona.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

We got in a little rowboat on the island and explored another neighboring island, and then went back to our island. We had brought bathing trunks and were going to go swimming. I kinda chickened out because the water was freezing and I wasn't really into leaping off a cliff into water, but it was fun anyway.

Then we took the ferry back. Fun day. Nice to get out of the city. Most people -- and I mean "me" -- plan vacations centered around cities, but sometimes the highlights aren't the cities as much as the non-city parts. Or at least it's nice to have a mix of city stuff and more outdoorsy non-city stuff.