I got myself a gift today, so there’s that. Real talk though, we had a great time so it was literally a Sunday fun day in Gothenburg. We walked around Haga, Nordstand, and Iron Square. Everyone planned on putting dents in their gift lists, but the store hours of operation here made that very difficult. Most of the cool and icon stores are closed on Sundays and even the ones that were open close fairly early. The average time we saw for most stores was 10am till about 3 or 5PM. On top of all of that, most of the places are closed on Mondays! We have been striking out left and right.
The first stop was Haga, I’ve spoken about this district before but that’s where I got my personal gift for myself. I am a huge soccer and I thought what better thing to get myself than a Swedish international jersey! I got the classic yellow one and I was eyeing one ever since we arrived. Only 4 more gifts to go and the weight will be lifted off of my chest!
After getting the jersey we made our way over to the Nordstand area looking for something to eat. The pictures above are deceiving, we actually went too McDonalds. We went too McDonalds simply to see the differences among the American and Swedish menus. If you look at my food page I took a picture of one of their food items. The packaging for the food is even nicer than America’s. It was overall good experience but one part of it that I didn’t like was having to pay to use the bathroom apparently??? I don’t know if that is across all European McDonald’s but it was definitely an inconvenience.
We made our way towards Iron Square for the tram back to the hostel. We hovered around some shops but never really walked into any that peaked our interest. We were only there for about twenty to thirty minutes before the tram came, but when it arrived we felt that it was time for fika. We normally go to Tin Tin’s, a nearby coffee shop, but this time we tried somewhere new. We called this the dog house because there was that French Bulldog that roams around the coffee shop. The couple that owns the shop were very nice and spoke very good English! The Frenchie’s name is Bentley by the way.
To polish this post off, I’m going to leave you guys with a few pictures of this little guy. Bentley also fell asleep in Lauren’s arms minutes after this picture was taken. We had an overall great day. We tried to shop till we drop but had little success there but found a really nice coffee shop closer to home base with the cutest dog on its staff. Exploration, shopping, and dogs, what more could you ask for? We will see what my last company visits will bring for tomorrow, until then!
Today’s Takeaway’s:
- You have to pay to use the McDonald’s bathroom in Gothenburg
- Dogs make for great hostesses
- Swedes apparently take Mondays off
- Gothenburg schools do not sell apparel
- I tried pickled herring and didn’t completely hate it
Matt's Sweden Blog 