The Most Epic Night In Europe

This weekend as you know from the Stockholm post that I published a few days ago, that we went to Stockholm, Sweden.  The trip was just Matt, Gabe, and myself, and we experienced the most epic series of events ever! If you have not read the Stockholm post click here first, as a basis for everything I am about to say. CLICK HERE!

Ok, so let me start from the beginning so that I don't miss anything (even the part where we woke up with 3 beautiful German girls in our hostel room).

Saturday morning we woke up to 3 beautiful German girls in our hostel room with us. (if you have ever stayed in a hostel you know this is like the ultimate). Normally you get smelly fat men or sometimes women from England who smell like alcohol, whose clothes smell like alcohol, and eventually YOU smell like alcohol. This is a perfect example:

Maybe them 30 years younger though.

After talking to the German girls we went to a cafe for breakfast. As it is only light in Sweden from 8:30/9:00am - 4:00/5:00pm, you have to utilize all of your time (we slept till 10:30)!! Also, let me mention how expensive food is in Sweden. The only thing we ate for 3 days, besides Gabe because he refused, was hotdogs from street vendors at 150 SEK each (1 euro or 657 dollars). However, because we got a discount for staying at the hostel, we had a full breakfast for 450 SEK!

So after breakfast we went to the changing to the guards at the Royal Palace. Where we got to see the army march like this for almost an hour! PS - this is actually my Youtube video!!

After that we explored the city squares and conducted the rest of our very touristy activities such as buying scarves to look more European! At 4:30pm it was dark, and to be honest we started running out of things to do for the rest of the evening, so we decided to go to the Stockholm Ice Bar. I of course was the idiot that when the man started handing me the parka for the bar. He promptly stated "No, you will want to keep that on. It is freezing in there!"

As we were walking in he stopped us one more time to ask us if we liked American Baseball.

I responded with a very quick "Of course!"

In which he responded in saying "Well, do you know Derek Jeter... (pronounce more like Gabe DeJong than Derek Jeter) He is in the bar right now." Obviously we gave him that stop messing with us, we don't believe you look, and he definitely knew it because he opened the door and his last words to us were "Go see for yourselves." If you don't know who Derek Jeter is, you should be ashamed of yourself, but even if you do, and mostly for the women reading this, here is another photo of Mr. Jeter;

Some say he is dreamy, others say he is an uglier me...

So of course being smarter than this guy we ordered our drinks and were just hanging out for a while until Gabe looked around the corner of one of the ice sculptures and literally gave us this look;

This is Gabe (not really, but this was Gabe)

All he did was follow this face up with "Derek Jeter is definitely over there!"

So as stupid American tourists would do, we instantly started walking towards good old Derek. Only to be stopped by a man that was his "Financial Consultant". We talked to him for a few minutes, and recognized that Derek was actually leaving the bar, so of course we said hello very quickly and got a nice wave back and out of site he disappeared. We finished our drinks and talked about how we really thought that was the coolest thing that had happened to us since we had been in Europe.

After the Ice Bar we had run out of money and went to an ATM. All weekend we had seen walls of posters like this one and Friday night we literally spent 30 minutes looking at all of these posters and wishing that one of the artists would be there when we were without any luck. HOWEVER when we were taking out money we had a moment of amazingness.

Wall of posters, my favorite one: Poetry Gang Bang (check my Facebook if you don't believe me.)

Dear Mom and Lucie: I want my beard to look like his!

Meet My Morning Jacket (look to the right). They are one of Gabe's favorite bands. There poster was directly above the ATM that we used. We were in such shock after meeting Derek Jeter that we knew this couldn't just be a coincidence, but rather we were meant to go to this show. Obviously we ripped the poster off the wall and started walking around trying to find where to go. We walked into a really cool bar we went to the night before and they pointed us in the right direction. Once we got to the venue we were surprised to see people already sitting outside and the doors didn't open for another 2 hours (bare in mind that Sweden is closer to the north pole than my middle name being Michael... maybe not that close, but it was cold!!) We discovered that the concert was more than just "sold out", but rather that people had flown from all over Europe to see MMJ's last show on their European tour.

We ended up making friends with a bus driver, and after us standing outside of the bus for an hour and a half (warming up at a local bar for a beer halfway through), he introduced us to their tour manager. After we talked to him and told him our story of being Americans, having him and Gabe call us crooks for being in business, and Gabe explaining that he was at the concert in Iowa City when Jim broke his leg, he told us we were in!!! It felt something like this... actually

After a celebratory beer we went to what ended up being potentially the greatest concert I have ever been to. The venue was at most 1,500 people (the reason why it was super sold out and not just sold out, the opening act The Head and the Heart was the best opening act I have ever seen at the concert, and we were second row the whole night!

Myself and Gabe before the concert started

The Head and the Heart performing

My Morning Jacket

Stockholm, Sweden is officially one of my favorite cities in Europe (Paris, France being the other one), and I must say that if you ever travel to Europe it should definitely be on your list!