This post might be 'violating' the timeliness structure because I'm supposed to post about my Europe trip in 2024 first, but oh well.. I think I need to write as soon as possible to catch all the emotion in its freshest stage.
After being amazed that in 2024 I finally made it to the European mainland, I never thought that I would do it again so soon. I just returned from my very short 5-day getaway in Stockholm, Sweden. The visit was so short but never intended to be so. I was supposed to pass by Sweden for like 3 days, and then leave for Italy and France with my parents. Sadly, my parents' visa got rejected. I already got my flight ticket to Europe, so might as well just extend them longer. I always wanted to go for a laid-back visit anyways and get myself really immersed with a city. This accident kinda gave me the perfect excuse for me to delve around Stockholm!
I did not have any specific itinerary or wishlist in Stockholm. It even didn't really occur to me that I will be in Stockholm, just that I will be visiting Leona in Sweden.
I flew from Dubai at 2 am on 7 August 2025. It was a red-eye flight. Few hours before my flight, I was still going to the office, playing badminton, had Kyochon dinner, and then pack at around 9 pm. A very brief preparation indeed! Then I did some administrative stuff and at 11.30 pm, I took my cab to DXB Terminal 1.
It was my first time as well going with Turkish Airlines, I got it from my flight redemption! Food was not the best, but flight experience was alright. I was lucky because in my flight to Istanbul, there was no one on the middle seat (I sat in the aisle), so it was a very comfortable flight experience. Someone sitting in the window seemed eager to start a conversation with me. Sorry girl, if it was sometime during the day I would gladly respond, but it's a red-eye flight so I need to get my sleep :') I managed to wake up and eat, I suppose I should since I didn't plan on eating at the airport.
When I arrived at Istanbul Airport, I was also surprised by how big it is! As expected from the hub of one of the biggest airlines in the world. The airport looks nice and modern. I looove how digitally savvy the environment is. They provided free wifi by scanning your passport. They also provided me with updates of my flight from WhatsApp!
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| Flight updates I got from the airport after putting in my flight information |
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| The boarding area in Istanbul Airport |
The transit was only 2 hours, and then I continued my flight to Arlanda, Stockholm! It was around 7 am Istanbul time, or 6 am Stockholm time. Leona was already awake! I already felt excited that we're going to meet in a few hours!
My second flight from IST to ARN also goes smoothly. I was luckily seated in the window seat and can look at the beautiful skyview sceneries. I saw the estuaries!
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| View of the Sweden estuaries I got from my window seat |
In Arlanda airport, my encounter from the immigration officer turned out to be a new experience as well. It was my first time being questioned a looot of details by the immigration officer! I have noo idea whether this was just random sampling or what. But what happened was they asked me for my itinerary, to which I said I wanted to visit a friend. Then they asked me of that friend's detail. I was, "Oh, you can search for her? Sure." (later this part has a twist). Then the office asked me of this question: "Do you know if she's born somewhere else?" "Yeah, XXXX." "Oh, alright I found here. You know where she lives?" AS IF she wanted to show me direction! And then she let me go 😂😂😂 Lucky that I already had a trip with Leona before and seen what her birthplace is! (XXXX is the name of the city, not Indonesia haha I will try to guard her identity eventhough the Swedish government does not 😂).
Then my first day started!
It's always nice to be in a walkable city with functioning public transportation and I already feel that with Stockholm. Their public transportation is integrated with SL, so I just need to purchase my SL ticket for a few days. I was pondering whether to buy the 3-day or 7-day (given I will be there for 5), but then decided that I should have saved if I just bought the 7-day. Even if I don't the difference is minimal (..I started counting in dirhams LOL).
I arrived in Leona's metro station. The great weather with blue sky adorned with clouds greeted me! I felt so happy and refreshed, despite my tired body. Mind you, my latest meal was around 6 hours prior in the Turkish Airlines flight!
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| My first view out of the metro station |
And I finally met Leona!!!
She brought me to her place to store my belongings. It was her lunch time and she came just to fetch me! As she had to go back to the office, I decided to just follow her. I wanted to see how the PMI office in Stockholm looked like. The place was nice and looks like it's di luar negeri, but what shocked me was that the building number is 108. Sampoerna's lucky number 9!
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| PMI's building number |
I was not there for long. After seeing Leona's in a meeting (she looked so cool!) and stole her eggs & juice, I continued my journey to aim for my 2 pm walking tour. I had booked myself a free walking tour for Sodermalm & view points without even knowing what that is. That was what's available that date and the description looks cool so I signed myself up.
I was late for 6 minutes but thankfully still managed to catch the group! Overall, as my first walking tour, my tour guide was very exceptional. I once joined a walking tour in Kyoto, but I felt different as that time, I joined Kyoto while already being familiar with Japan and its culture. In this tour, I was not at all acknowledged with what Stockholm and its culture is.
Several notable things:
- It really just occured to me that Thor does come from a 'real' Norse mythology. I saw its statue!
- Sweden has quite a big public bath culture, but still not as big as Finland.
- We visited the view point in Södermalm, which later I found out is an district/island. From there, we can see the Stockholm city hall where the dinner celebration for the Nobel laurettes is. At this moment, I honestly felt shivers in my skin. I was at the place where Sheldon got his Nobel with Amy..
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| Stockholm City Hall |
- We visited an elevator. Yes, an elevator! I think what was important is that the elevator was built in 1885 to help people movement from the lower seashore to the city. What an advanced culture, and that was when Sweden was still poor!
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| Maria Hissen |
- We also saw a building that's been home to several notable artists in Stockholm. I found it weird that someone's home can be a fun fact, shouldn't that be someone's privacy? Later I would find out that privacy is a non-existent thing in the Swedish society!
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| The allegedly building of famous people's home. Name I cannot even pronounce nor type! |
- We saw this sculpture that's inspired by the painting called "Foolish's Boat", which is basically critique to the Swedish church for not siding with the people during the gentrification time of Södermalm. The poor people were chased out of their homes and soon Södermalm would rise to become the #4 most expensive area like it is today.
- One of the Swedish Church building, the Saint Maria Magdalena Churhc. At first I found it weird that the altar does not have a cross.. Later I read that in the 18th century there was a trend to avoid the usual depiction of Jesus on the cross, so they would rather put a painting to depict Jesus on his other life stages. (Later on they would be fine with the bare cross, sometimes with the wrap draped).
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| This altar showed depiction of baby Jesus instead of Jesus on the cross. This confirmes one of the things I hear is the difference between Protestant (non-Catholics Christian) and Catholics, where the Catholics has stronger attachment to the Passion of Christ in their faith. DON'T QUOTE ME ON THIS! |
- The Sisters statue in front of the theatres that still hold events like mini concerts or stand-up comedy. How I love to be there!
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| The Sisters |
After finishing the tour and giving the 220kr tip that I kinda regret (HAHA jk not because it was bad but because it was maybe too much!), I went back to Leona's house. I was veryyyyy low on battery so needed to meet her somewhere safe where I can not get lost. Retrieved my powerbank and then off we went to a place called RiRi!
It's a cute little place with few menu selection. But when the food came, we can feel that the menu is chicly curated and prepared meticuluously. The chanterelle is still one of the food that became my highlight during my visit there. I wanted to buy the chanterelle and bring them home, but I had my second chanterelle which didn't taste as good so I concluded.. it needed skill to process that mushroom and I probably don't have that as I still messed up my champignon!
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The chanterelle, Kantareller
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| Their home-made Rio cola. It tasted like Coca Cola |
Too bad I didn't take a picture of the menu because we both found the menu to be very funny. Leona tried to read the Swedish menu and found it hard.. but honestly the English menu wasn't really helping either because it was very hard to read.. They were using too complex vocab I felt like suddenly I couldn't English!
After that early dinner, me and Leona took a stroll around. It was a really improptu walk, we didn't even know where we were headed but somehow we found interesting places. I never had this kind of improptu thing so it really felt nice. You DO find something amazing if only you go out of your bedroom and of course, have the luxury of time! I also think it's still much better for me to have a friend to share the experience with, because if I was alone, I definitely wouldn't want to go out on my own like that.
We managed to find the Langholmen beach that Leona's friends been meaning to tell her, kayaking rental places (Leona mentioned this, but we didn't know that this is so accessible in Stockholm!), the sunset viewing place that I knew of from my walking tour, walking alongside the river/sea inlet/lake/Baltic sea (honestly don't know, too complicated! This would be my nighttime Wikipedia read lol).
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| 2nd round dinner! |
That night too, we slept at 1.30 am because Leona was making reels HAHA.
The second day, Leona had to go to work! I decided to spend the day in Vasa Museum and see the ship that my tour guide has been mentioning. Leona also had been there!
It was quite an interesting sight to see. In 1628, a big warship was about to go on her maiden voyage when shortly, it sank.. The ship sank because it's too narrow with too little stone balancer put on her base. Sadly, around 30 people were reported to lost their life, mostly because they didn't manage to escape in time from the lower decks.
In 1960-ish, the place where it sank was discovered, and somehow they managed to pull the ship back to the surface! They pulled them up by putting some strong steel cables around its body, at the time where proper diving suit has not yet been developed. After they managed to pull the ship up, they also replaced the rotting nails and ensure the ship can sail again for awhile to the shore. The condition of the ship was very well preserved with 98% original we still see today. Seeing the miniature of how the ship originally looked like, it was a beautiful ship. It was a huge scandal back then, but thanks to that now we can study on life back in 1628!
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| Kungstradgarden station |
THE NEXT DAY, finally Leona can join us for the whole day because it's officially the weekend! We started the day by having some cute brunch. I tried my first cinnamon bun and it's superb! Honestly, I don't know which part is cinnamon but it tasted good sooo haha I didn't question more.
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| Cinnamon bun! |
Then we went to the kayaking place, with us planning to part with Metta since we were kinda failing in persuading her to join us! Well, coincidentally turns out we needed to book or else not every hour is available for booking. And that day we see that numerous people are at the rental place. So we decided to detour, rather than do the kayaking on Saturday, we will just be enjoying the day with Metta. I say "enjoying the day" but hopefully that was also what Metta wanted to do, by having the day with us T_T
We ended up doing our strolling in the Södermalm area (again!). We discovered thrift stores, cute book shops where I ended up buying two books!!! I really love indie book shops but never got the chance to find one, and I am really glad that the book stores are really good with amazing English book selection. I think I wrote in my previous post that since my time is limited, I really want to enjoy it with reading good books. These, however, are the books that I'm pretty sure I can give them a chance!
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| The cute book shop |
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| French Cooking for One! I am enticed by 'for one' because it means it's accessible. I also feel affirmed by the foreword because the book is not only for cooking but those who enjoy reading about food. I also immediately remember of Julie & Julia, one movies about cooking from a cookbook. |
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| Second book is the short stories that win the 2024 Brick Lane Book Shop award! |
Then for lunch, we managed to find the Kajsas Fisk restaurant that we didn't manage to get the previous day. For the fish soup! Turns out it's located inside a Hotorgshallen, some sort of food court I would say? Food inside is interesting though, they god Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and then this Swedish seafood restaurant. We get to taste their fish soup which is different from the one I know in Norway, but nevertheless very fresh (because of the tomato-base thing). We also tried crayfish to commemorate the crayfish party day in the beginning of August in Sweden.. which was not very nice so we're glad that we didn't spend 950kr per pax for this thing HAHA. It was interesting though because despite looking like lobster, the shell is quite soft and breakable by hand. One cute thing: we asked for plastic gloves to the waitress but they were like, "Oh but it's actually cleaner with your hand, because of you know, the microplastics. I can give you the wet napkins instead?" OMG so this is what it feels like surrounded by people who care!
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| Crayfish |
After that, we went to Fotografiska. It's a museum about photography showcasing several artists. We found out about Anton Corbijn who turns out is quite big, we saw his music videos from the 1998 which already looked in a very good quality. I particularly also liked the 'On Being Family' segment, where Hannah Modigh shows her journey in
Searching for Sivagami. It's very amazing to me that this woman managed to find her Indian nanny from years ago in India (based from memory and prayer that this woman does not go far from where she was!) and managed to find her. And when she found Sivagami, she also showed that she still held the memory of taking care of the babies dearly.
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| One of the exhibition in the museum |
We spent 2.5 hours in the museum. This tells a lot about what you can do with the luxury of timee! After the museum, we decided to try Gastabud. This is a Swedish food place in Gamla Stan where queueing is the norm. The place is humble with only few seats inside, but we managed to get a seat just after 9 pm. Enough for their closing time at 10 pm.
We ordered fish soup (againn! haha), butter-fried salmon, and meatballs. All the dishes are lovely! We might prefer the fish soup in the food court, but the fish soup from Gastabud came differently with the clear broth and lots lots of salmon bits inside. The meatballs came in bigger so I might like the Meatballs for the People's better for its crispier outside, but they're still nice. The salmon is da bomb since we can feel the butter and aioli in every salmon layer!
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| Gastabud! |
Unfortunately the night came in too soon and we had to part with Metta.. It was very fun though spending the day just the three of us in Stockholm!
We were preparing for bedtime when we suddenly realized.. the moon shone so brightly! Turns out the slight of light I saw the other day wasn't the 'sun' from the midnight sun that we see in most-northern part of the Earth, but it's the moonnnn!!! Legit this is how our room looked like, all the light came directed from the moon!
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| This is our moonlit roomm! |
And what's funny was that Leona somehow found out that we would see the rainshower of meteros around that day peaking in Aug 12.. so we set up our alarm and woke up at 3 am to see! Haha. We didn't end up seeing the rainshower, unfortunately. The sky was either cloudy or filled with the shine from the moon that it's hard to see the stars. However it still felt funny to me that we woke up at 3 am, just 2 hours after for the stargazing hahaha.
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| The star-adorned sky! |
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| At 3 am, we saw Jupiter and Venus though! Leona found this app called Skyguide |
Anddd we had to start our Sunday at 9 am. Or 9.30 am. Hahaha we had to go for a walking tour of Gamla Stan at 10 am. We made it late by 10 am, but again we managed to catch out tour guide!
It was another very fruitful walking tour! Several fun facts that we knew because of the tour, eventhough honesty I cannot remember the order haha:
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| Cardamum bun in a random cafe in Gamla Stan |
Then we also eat some fried herring hahaha in this food truck! Thank you Leona for finding this, I wouldn't look for it myself honestly. But the fried fish tasted quite nice as well! The place also look quite packed, I waited for sometime before Leona came with the food.
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| Fried herring |
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| The 'food truck' |
After filling our tummy, then the next big thing is here.. We are going kayaking!!! HAHA. If I have to describe, then this activity is one of those that I feel excited doing it, but also at the same time anxious?? Luckily we had a bit of common sense therefore we are booking the 2-persons kayak instead of the individual ones. Nevertheless, it was still daunting when we had to be in the kayak and then the guide would tell us what to do if we fell to the water. Wdym.. we.. can.. fall down?.. ðŸ˜
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| Kayaking with Leonaa!!! |
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| Aakk! |
It was to be honest verryyyy scary at first! Haha little movement would make us jumpy and the boat wobbly. We were afraid to row at first because we worry it would make the unnecessary movement. But we managed to do it!
Leona took video that recorded almost I think 60% of our session? I watched it during my flight back to Dubai (hehe Sharjah, actually) and IT WAS SO FUNNY! I laughed a lot of times when watching that video. It captured us being very scared, learning how to make the boat turn, communicating with each other and making sense with the law of physics (anjay) to prevent the boat from being capsized, hating big ships or jetskis for the turbulences they created for us, to later finding our pace and being overproud (calling ourselves waterbender LOL) hahaha. We later managed to find out momentum and made the boat moved ahead very very fast! I swear I would find the time to upload these videos later hahaha.
What I didn't think we will manage to do is.. we managed to go round the big island and then have the Stockholm skyline, complete with the city hall and church as our photo backdrop! On my first day, the body of water looks sooooo wide and I'm afraid that I would feel very small, but turned out when you were on that boat, it just felt.. reachable and not as scary, if that makes sense!
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| Look at our gorgeous backdrop! |
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| Me and Leona! |
After that, we made another turn to the small sea inlet and then had a chill time eating our chips (finally!). What a moment, just 30 mins before we felt like we couldn't enjoy the time over being too stressed with staying afloat hahaha.
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| Chilling with our parmesan flavored chips |
Now it already occured to you that we felt like we are master kayak navigator right??? So.. since we still had a little bit of time, we wanted to go round the smaller island before we gave back our kayak. We asked for permission from the guides which let us to do so, and off we went!
The journey to go round the smaller island was cute at the beginning. We were already enjoying our trip so I played ABBA song as well on full speaker from my phone. It felt amazing! Then big ships came in creating big waves for us.. and then we had our first water in the kayak hahaha! We failed to do it 100% dry, but worry not, we kept on rowing following the shores to go round it! We were like, heyy it's a cool restaurant area! Wow, some swimming place with diving boards, a sauna!
Sometimes questions would pop in. If this was the smaller island, then why does it feel like it's much longer than the bigger island we had rounded before?.. I watched the video, we were asking this question like 3-4 times before we decided to check google maps. And HAHAHA we were indeed lost!!! It's not the small island, it's the MUCH BIGGER Södermalm (this again!) island which the rental map said will took us 2-hour non-stop kayaking to finish! 😂😂😂
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| Managed to screenshot. Island 1 is the big island we managed to round, small island we WANTED to round is the island 2.. and we were at the blue dot T_T |
We were laughing our asses off, and of course I felt HUGE ANXIETY creeping it like fuck fuck fuckkkkk hahaha we're lost quite by a far rowing! Can we even go back???? When we turned our kayak, it the wave was veryy strong I was about to give up. Can we even row against this strong current!?
Thankfully.. only turning the kayak was hard, rowing against the current was not very hard as long as we had our momentum. And we did! We did it so quick that Leona said we made it back to our original point in mere 17 minutes! I watched the video, and we did row like our life depended on it (it did though HAHA). We met several kayakers (?) on the way back home and can't help but think to ourself: THEY MUST BE LOSTTTT no sane person would want to kayak around Södermalm at 7.30 pm!! 🤣
Anyways.. We managed to get back again without no further water incident, changed our clothes out in the open with the help of our jacket hahaha, randomly found a padel court and a jail-inspired hotel (cheap price but I wouldn't stay there honestly hhaha), and made it back to the city. We decided that an Italian place justify our rowing exercise! The food took some time to come in though, it was good but probably the combination was too cheesy and creamy to our taste.
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| The urban Italian resto (with light decor that reminded us of Metta's shady Oslo Airbnb hahah) |
We went back to Leona's house at around 10 pm. It was a quick cleaning up and preparation before bed as Leona would need to fly the next day at 5 am leaving me alone in the apartment :((
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| Last night mingling with Leona in her cozy IKEA chair! |
We had a brief stargazing as well as the sky was clear. Too bad she had a flight to catch! :(
The next morning, I woke up feeling surprisingly not as sad. I mean, I had an experience of being left alone in a friend's apartment because she had a class to catch (back in uni) and that feeling of alone-ness was not nice at all, it's almost traumatic to me. It's not loneliness per se, but it's being alone in some strange space and you wanted to escape so bad. Surprisingly that was not how I felt the morning I was alone in Leona's place. It was a structured "ok get ready and then we make sure we don't leave anything behind" feeling. I washed up and then after a few lingering, I left the place at 9 am.
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| :( |
I went to the Stadion station and took my last metro station hunting picture. I went to the post station and sent several post cards back home, both to Dubai and Jakarta. Let's see if Indonesia's post office would disappoint me again since now I have the UAE as the control! And then I had a quick lunch at Max Burger, Leona's McD replacement. It tasted good with the thick meat, me likey! However I already went to my non-explorative state as I'm alone, so I opted for the junior-sized burger.
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| At the PostNord |
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| The Classic Cheeseburger Jr |
I went to Arlanda, took quite a time finding the correct terminal for my flight. Met an illogical security officer who decided that my sardines with 75% oil as "liquid" and confiscated them, I was already whatever but dude, human is literally 70% water and all of us are here boarding the planes??? (EDIT: I JUST SAW THE COMPOSITION IN THE PICTURE, IT WAS 75% FISH nOT 75% WATER!!! I hate that guy).
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| THE SARDINES IS 75% FISH BROO |
In Arlanda, I bought yet another book by Han Gang. It's in a pocketable size so I bought it. But turns out this was not the book that won Han Gang the 2024 Nobel prize hahaha so yeah, I will buy The Vegetarian next time I see it.
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| My 3rd book this trip |
The flight was nice. I read a bit of the Greek Lessons and then slept my way to SAW (Sabiha Gokjen, the airport I would be transitting in). It's a considerably much much smaller airport compared to IST. I was hungry so I ate something there. There it occured to me again the hyperinflation happening in Turkiye as I found TGI Fridays listed their prices in Euro, but I experienced how shitty they were in Abu Dhabi airport so I opted for The Big Chefs. Menus are newly printed as per 1 August 2025, most likely to reflect inflation prices :( The food was good though!
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| Price valid as of 1 August! |
I was a bit nyantai in the restaurant before I noticed I only had 10 minutes before boarding. I quickly paid and then went to the boarding gate. There was a line, and fuckk I didn't notice an officer there weighing people's bags 😂 He saw me with my backpack and cabin luggage that was so apparently mine. He weighed it and somehow I made it! I was quite confused myself because I knew the limit was 7kg for the cabin luggage. Googled it and probably it was 8kg + 4kg of handcarry. Anyways! Made it without extra charge!
In the flight back to Sharjah, I managed to also finish Greek Lessons. Book was so so, I can understand this does not win any award but gOODD if the Vegetarian is also like this, I don't know anymore what base they are using to award the Literature Nobel. Still going to find that book though.
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| Sharjah! Not Dubai, but neighbor of Dubai! |
Andddd I made it back! Flight was scheduled to land 1.55 am, but I think they landed earlier. What I knew is 2 am I already made it inside a taxi driven by a woman. I am so glad I got this taxi because the woman before me somehow got referred to a common taxi driven by a man. Sharjah is muchhh more convenient indeed than Abu Dhabi (which is >100 km away from Dubai, while Sharjah is only 38 km away). Arrived back home at 2.30 am and I'm sooo happy to be back home! (Not as happy for the work, but I am glad too that I can catch-up with work, if that makes sensee haha)
It was one of a trip to remember. I am honestly not really good with being away from home for too long, and I feel like this trip is the balanced kind of vacation. I explored and got a fuller picture of a city, is a city-exploring kind of trip, tried new experience, and done in a perfect amount of time!
NB. LMAO I've been writing for full 4 hours :D After yeaarsss of not writing anything in a blog, turns out really what you need is writing it before it expires from your brain and when the memory is still fresh! But maybe next time I will do it in like 1-week gap, it becomes too detailed now haha. Let's see what I wrote next for my Kazakshtan and Oman trip!
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