Stockholm on a Saturday night

I started to get lazy after writing my previous post. I'm tired. It's been a long day. Stockholm will be there tomorrow. Then I started talking to some friends back home - go out, drink beer, see the city! They said. So I figured ok, let's see what Stockholm at night has to offer. 

I decided to start off at Monk's Cafe, a brewery that not only brews their beers on the premises but also teaches classes on how to brew beer. It was highly rated and only a block away from the Hostel so I headed there. Yes I'll be seated for dinner and treated myself to mussels and their dark lager. Both were so good. 

But after my beer and mussels and another beer (light lager) I wasn't quite ready to call it a night. That's the second caveat to a hostel with no bar - you have no means of winding down with a drink or two before crawling into bed. So I walked a block south of the hostel to The Flying Dog. It's the only bar I've found that's open til 3am, the rest close at midnight/1am. 

But it still leaves the question on my mind - where is everyone at 10pm on a Saturday night? By now people should be starting to head out. I have this feeling that they're all at a place that I just don't know about. Then again a lot of the people in my hostel are Chinese or Japanese or Korean (who typically don't party) and I overheard the Brits and Aussies saying that they were getting ready to go to a club tonight that was a 20min cab ride away (no thanks). 

I ended up starting a conversation with a Swede at The Flying Dog. We talked about travel and New York (which he had plenty of questions about) and Sweden. It turns out tacos are more popular now then meatballs. A few drinks later I headed to 7-11 for a juice then made my way back to the hostel. There was an inexplicably long line in front of what appeared to be a club but who knows. 

I came back to find some people in the common room in front of my door so I decided this might be my chance to make a friend. Finally people were in the hostel and I was feeling brave enough to talk to them. It was a group from Copenhagen who were shopping for furniture, a boy from Brazil who was moving to Sweden to finish his PhD and a girl from DC (Mary Lou). Later an Australian (very drunk) and an Irish guy joined us after the Danes left. 

We talked about travel and our lives and finally I had found what I was looking for earlier today. When Mary Lou said that she hated drinking alone I told her to find me tomorrow in the hostel and we would go out together. I knew that if I kept putting myself out there that something would find me and sure enough it did. Too bad the hostel worker kicked us out of the common room for making noise. Quiet hours after 11 means that we would have had to move to the cafe, but who wants to rearrange everything at 2am?! So we opted to go our separate ways to bed, hopeful that we'll cross paths again