Welcome back to more travel posts from me!!! Yay!!! Just in case you’re not up-to-date, this is part 3 of my series on my European Capitals cruise, and you can check out the other posts on the links here below!

Part 2: Aarhus and Copenhagen Denmark

Part 1: Honfleur, France & Hamburg, Germany

In this post I’m going to be covering Gothenburg, Sweden, and Oslo, Norway.

These were 2 countries that I had not been to ever before, and I was particularly interested in the Scandinavian countries. Scandinavia interests me because of it’s Viking history, and I was really glad to go to the Viking museum in Copenhagen. But Oslo and Sweden were slightly different, and it was really cool!

Sailing into Sweden, we got off the boat bright and early. Throughout the entire day, we visited the Haga Neighbourhood, took the Hop On Hop Off bus tour, and went to the Volvo Museum.

The Haga Neighborhood is one of Gothenburg’s most picturesque neighborhoods for tourists to come and visit, and rightfully so. It was built in the mid 17th century by one of the Queens, and it was originally a working class area. Haga is home to it’s wooden houses that are well preserved from the late 19th to early 20th century. There is one main street, the Haga Nygata, and I think this is the street that you can see me walking on here in all of my pictures :]. Despite it being a street, there aren’t many cars in the area, and this is nice. Walking in Haga is very picturesque, quite cold considering the time of year we went there at, haha. I really liked this part because I would love to live somewhere pretty like Haga. I think everyone has that kind of desire, but it’s still fun to think about what life could look living in a pretty picturesque town.

In Haga, the main thing to do is walk around. It was a bit cold, since we were visiting in the fall, so we stopped by a cafe for a bite to eat. Haga is famous for their cinnamon rolls! My family and I love cinnamon rolls, and that’s a good thing, because these ones were GIANT. I think they’re called “Hagabullen”, and they are about 10 inches in diameter. The cinnamon roll looks almost like pretzel dough, and has a lot of sugar. I don’t recall these cinnamon rolls being quite suited to my taste, I think I prefer smaller ones! Along with the cinnamon rolls, my dad likes licorice so he wanted to try licorice ice cream. I don’t think we had seen licorice ice cream anywhere else before, so he wanted to try it. It’s safe to say that he didn’t really like it. The food in Haga as far as we tried was okay? It’s a very distinct style of cinnamon roll, I feel like it’s the kind of thing that’s an acquired taste. I would recommend trying it for yourself though, but maybe one of the smaller ones if you’re not planning on splitting it with your entire family. The Hagabullen is a great snack to have over some tea or coffee on a cold autumn day.

Haga has a lot of shops, I would say that’s the main thing in Haga. We took a look around, and we did go into some shops to get warm, haha. The store are local people selling things they’ve made, rather than brand name stores. It’s really nice, and I like how even the stores add to the overall vibe. It’s definitely worth walking around, as Haga is a tourist spot in Gothenburg!

We also took the Hop On Hop Off Bus, but this was mainly just a means of getting around the city. We saw a lot of Gothenburg’s more iconic cites though, as seen in the photos below :]

Our day in Sweden was completed after a trip to the Volvo museum. Car museums are always very cool because you can see the concept cars and designs, as well as the cars through the years. I really enjoyed looking at the more futuristic designs that were never produced, and I really liked the Lego car!

One night later, we docked in Oslo Norway. My most anticipated location on this trip! It was also my favourite. Hehe. Oslo’s port was very beautiful and modern, it was not only a cruise port, but a marina for small boats as well. There were boats docked right outside of buildings/apartments. I saw it as a really clever use of space. I really liked how a lot of things were walkable.

Our first tour that we booked was a Fjord cruise. This is really all that we ended up doing in Norway, while we waited for the tour to start, we walked around the shops. There were a lot of trolls. Trolls are cute because they popped up everywhere on the street. It would be interesting to go to a non-tourist area though! I would be interested to see if the trolls were still popular elsewhere.

The fjord cruise was very peaceful, but it was also a bit cold. I retreated inside the ship for a bit while we got out to sail more. They have blankets and hot chocolate though! It’s much like a whale watching boat, and it’s very neat to see the fjords and have a tour. I would recommend dressing warmly!

The photos above are from the fort, the fjord cruise, and our walk around the city. From the port, if you take a nice walk you can see the Nobel Peace Center, where they hold the ceremony for Nobel Peace Prizes! You can see me posing in front of the building with the yellow banners there.

There is also a fort called Akershus, and it’s free to go in and explore. I believe this was a prison back in the 17th century.

Overall, Sweden and Norway were countries that I would like to visit again and see more of. Norway was somewhere I had been wanting to go for a while, and I’m glad I finally got to go there! I would like to go again and familiarize myself with more of the history, because that’s really what interests me the most.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post!