EBS en France: Bridges, a rotunda, a mini-cruise, and Finland.

So this has to be somewhat "short" as we are getting up bright and early tomorrow to catch a ferry at 7:30 -- so I'll do my best to recount the highlights of yesterday and today!

Yesterday was our last day in Stockholm and we decided to start it off with a boat trip that took us under the bridges connecting the different islands that make up Stockholm (there are 11 of them I think). It was really interesting, and we got to see many parts of the city that we otherwise wouldn't have seen. The only bad part was that I found myself easily drifting off to sleep....oops. We went through two locks but other than that it was pretty straight forward.

View of Stockholm from the boat.

The streets were sort of crazy because of all of the preparation for the royal wedding that happened yesterday -- but we were able to make it back to our hotel so we could pack up our things. We left our luggage with Steve, the concierge, and walked about 20 minutes in a different direction towards the University of Stockholm. I had heard good things about the library there, and, indeed, the rotunda of the main public library was really cool! It was basically like being completely surrounded with books. I have to say that it was much nicer than Frost (Amherst's library)...but I don't know if that's saying a whole lot.

My wonderful travel buddies as we walked to the library

Rotunda!

And once again....

I am a little ashamed to admit that we actually had lunch at McDonald's.....but our theory still holds that it's always better in other countries. It's also relatively cheap and reliable, which when in a bind, can be very helpful. We got back to the hotel and took a cab to the harbor where we checked in and got on our overnight "cruise" to Helsinki. I think it's safe to say that I never have the desire to go on any sort of long term cruise after just spending the night. It was perfectly pleasant for the night -- we had a great dinner right by the window so we could watch as we passed the Swedish archipelago and it was, overall, pretty comfortable. But being constantly surrounded by people and crowds is not my idea of a great vacation.

View out the window from dinner

We arrived in Helsinki around 10am this morning where we got on a bus so that we could do a generic sightseeing tour. Again, not my favorite way of sightseeing, but it definitely helped to give us an idea of what's actually in Helsinki and a way to see some of the sights that are farther than walking distance -- like the Olympic venues from when they hosted the games in 1952, the monument to Jean Sibelius, and what's called the "Church of the Rock" or Temppeliaukio Church (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temppeliaukio_Church) -- all very cool stuff!

Sibelius Monument

Church of the Rock

After the tour concluded, the bus driver actually offered to drop us at our hotel -- an offer that we gratefully accepted -- and we put our feet up for just a bit. The afternoon was consumed by walking around the main part of the city -- seeing the cathedral, wandering through the market down by the water, etc. For dinner, we had asked the guy working at the hotel's front desk where he would go for dinner on a night off, and he told us to go to a restaurant called Juttutupa, which was just a 5 minute walk from the hotel. It was pretty good food -- we ordered a couple of pizzas to share (probably not typical Finnish food, I know), and then to our surprise, they had a guy playing live guitar and singing -- who was fantastic. It definitely had an American vibe to it -- the music and the bar, but it was really cool and we definitely enjoyed ourselves.