Hannah's grandparents invited us to their home about 20 minutes outside of Karlskoga for the day, so we headed out there around noon after shopping in the downtown area a bit. They have a beautiful old home in the countryside which they gave us a tour of before we went out for a picnic in the woods nearby. Just down the road from there was a national heritage site where they have plays and concerts in the summer. We looked inside the 18th century farmhouse on the...

Our first stop today was Bofors Hotel in Karlskoga where Hannah's mom works to say hi. Then we drove to Karlstad (an hour west of Karlskoga) to see Hannah's high school, stopping along the way to have ice cream at a little town on Värnen, Sweden's biggest lake. Her high school is a private school with around 300 students that focuses on farming and animal sciences. She gave us a tour around the campus which included barns filled with cows and horses and sheep in...

So it turns out National Day in Sweden is a joke. There's none of the patriotism like back in the States on 4th of July, no big crazy parties and no fireworks. National Day is actually very recent here so the idea of being a "proud Swede" is nonexistant. Today was very laidback, which is a pretty accurate representative of the Swedish mentality. It was a beautiful day so we went for a 2 1/2 bike ride around town, stopping at Möcken (the lake by Karlsko...

Today we're leaving for Karlskoga where my uncle David lives but first we visited Hannah's school in Uppsala. She's going to Svenka Lantbruks Universitet, which translates to Swedish Agricultural University, where she's studying to become an animal police officer. There was no one there since it was Sunday so she just gave us a tour around the campus. Since we're in Sweden we had to go to IKEA! We walked through the whole store and the entire time I was planning ...

We started the day early and had breakfast at Hannah's before catching a train from Uppsala to Stockholm (I got to use my Eurail Pass for the first time today!). Hannah and David took us to the part of the city called Old Town. We spent some time just strolling through the streets, windowshopping and snapping pictures of the buildings. Stockholm is built on 14 islands, so everywhere you go you can find water. The part of the city we were in was beautiful and surp...