Day 1: Arrival in Vasteras, Sweden

 I (Jackie) am filling in for Daryl on the blog today. We have just arrived in Vasteras, Sweden (well, about an hour ago) and we are settling in at our hotel. The weather outside is unfortunately quite bleary...it almost looks like Hurricane Irene followed us all of the way across the Atlantic. Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. Let me back up to the beginning.

I said my goodbyes to family on Saturday morning and the van Kampen's drove me, Daryl, and Jacq (who is currently on a plane to Sydney, Australia) to the Toronto Airport. We arrived in good time but quickly discovered that our flight was delayed and that we would miss our connection in Dusseldorf. The next flight we could get on would have us arrive in Stockholm at 7pm Sunday night. Not only would it suck to spend all day in the airport, but we also have a dinner scheduled for this evening with friends and colleagues that we really didn't want to miss. Luckily, Daryl is a Star Alliance Gold Member (thanks to all of his trips to China with Mimio), and we were easily able to switch to a flight through Frankfurt that had us arrive in Stockholm around noon (and upgrade our seats). Here is a picture of us at the "Preferred Guest" counter :)

We shared a smoothie with the van Kampen's and said our goodbyes. Then we hung out in the Priority Lounge until it was go time.

The flight was nice and smooth. We even got a bit of sleep on the plane. Once we deplaned and grabbed our bags, we got our first taste of Scandanavian food prices: $4 for a bottle of water. Ouch. We hope that those prices will not be reflected outside of the airport. Another point of interest was the currency itself. 10 Kroner (which is equivalent to $2-3 USD) is a coin a little larger than a dime, while 5 Kroner is a coin the size of a Toonie. I thought the cashier ripped me off before I more closely inspected the coinage.

Finally, we grabbed the bus to Vasteras, which took about 1.5 hours. The city seems nice, although we haven't really explored too much yet. Hopefully we will get the opportunity to do so in the next day or two. Tonight is dinner and tomorrow is a full day at ABB for meetings about a recent project I worked on at MIT. Then on Tuesday afternoon we are off to Stockholm so that I can attend the Mobile HCI Conference, which runs until Friday. After that, the sky's the limit. Stay tuned.