Sweden Road Trip 2006- Day 10

If my description of the hostel last night seemed a little harsh, today I am going to stand by it. The bedroom was clean, but the rest of the house was gross dirty. M cleaned this morning again for about 30 minutes extra cleaning other people’s mess. I am totally in favor of leaving a place better then when you arrived, but there is a limit to the madness. So once again, if you are ever in Åsa Sweden, do not stay at the Åsa Youth Hostel.

Today was our most different day of the trip. Pretty much the entire trip has been planned for outdoor activities. With the only exception to that rule is today. Today was our Gothenburg day. Since one of our first visits to Gothenburg, I have wanted to go to the Universeum. It is a kind of science center/zoo/aquarium all indoors. It is located next door to the World Heritage Museum (talk about that in a minute) and next to Liseberg (a Swedish amusement park).

It has five floors. The top floor is the Swedish nature area. It has what is in the Swedish lakes and rivers. So they have pikes and perch, along with a couple of birds and amphibians. I was hoping that N would be interested in the fish in the aquariums, but she was more interested in the people walking by. She is such a people person. After the lakes and rivers, you walk to the Swedish west coast. It has the fish that are in the Swedish west coast (the west coast is every Swede’s dream summer house. I must admit that I can understand the appeal of it. I do not see us ever having one, but all the same). One type of fish that they had was the flat fish and that actually swims horizontal. I had seen them being sold by the fish mongrels, but had never seen one swim. That lead perfectly to the ocean section- namely the sharks. Sharks are just amazing to look at. One of them looked so mean, all three rows of teeth. My favorite was the saw fish. He was way cool. I am like a little kid when it comes to animals. Once we were out of the sea, you walk into the rainforest. You get hit by the difference in temperature. They have set it up where you walk the rainforest out. They have lots of birds just flying around, but also lizards, snakes, monkeys and crocodiles (some in cages and others roaming freely). The final little bit had parrots, tortoises and a large anaconda.

The other section of Universeum was the hands on activity centre for kids. M and I did some one them on the first floor. It was how the human body worked and physics. For example, they had a (fake) human intestine stretched out that you could run a ping pong ball through. It also did a measurement of height using radar. The other floor looked like the more fun floor, but it also had way too many kids on it (imagine that, kids at a place like that). It was the sports floor, where one did running, virtual soccer, rock climbing and even kayaking. I have to mention the shop, where amazingly enough we did not buy a single thing. Lots of cool stuff in there that I wanted, I am sure that kids would have really wanted. N liked the stuffed animals, like she usually does.

One last thing about Universeum, and it has to do with pee. When we first arrived, I went to the restroom. They had the interesting toilets where the toilet was divided into two sections- the back section for poop and the front section for just liquids. The signs for this type of toilet always make me laugh. Anyway, they recycle the pee in the different toilets and use it for the water in the rainforest. In fact, you can actually see the process at the very start of the rainforest. One is a little torn when you hear it, but also when you see the process. It is cool, but also a little gross.

We mentioned the World Heritage Museum earlier. M and I have been there before and today we took our fika there. This is a new museum in Sweden, it opened in 2005. It is supposed to capture the spirit and the individuality of different cultures. It is very modern and I love the way some of the items are displayed, especially the items in the Africa display. The one thing that they have done, which is a big no no in museums, is to use some stereotypes of African women and South American Amazonian women. Both of them are shown as bare breasted. This is a very bad stereotype which should be avoided, but they seem to play on it in different sections. Otherwise this is an excellent museum that has a great program for kids and a nice café.

The hostel tonight is in Trollhättan. It is fine, nothing spectacular; we knew it would be when we booked it. We are just using it as a resting stop. We may be here a little longer though. We just got a call to advise us that a blizzard is going to hit tonight. What luck we have; first the hurricane and now a blizzard. Maybe we will have an earthquake before we get back to Uppsala. I guess if we got stuck here, we can find something to do. The Göta Canal runs through the town and it is known as the Hollywood of Sweden. If Nicole Kidman can stay here for three months, we can an extra night.