For memory’s sake

A weird experience, not worth the money though.
Day 1: board 16-hour train, the train is rather comfortable. Play cards, truth or dare, level dropping (not sure the real name) and sleeping of course.

Day 2: reach Kiruna, COLD! Regardless of layers of clothes and 6 heatpacks, still freezing. The nice old man picked us up as he explained the agenda of the trip, not forget to mention about -23 celsius degree, which was expected to be -35 the following day. Nevermind, it was expected to be like that.

Reached the terminal to transfer to snow mobile and get equipped with specialised clothes and shoes. From there on, I’m no longer able to feel my toes and fingers, the 20 of them were painfully frozen.

Thanks to my years of riding motorbike, I could manage the snow mobile easily.

Only one thing to say, unique and beautiful scenery.


Stopped by the huskies’ area to get used to them since they’ll be sledging us the day after. There were 15 of them, all were shivering, sitting on three legs instead of four to minimize the exposure to snow. Feel pity for them.

Make our way to the camp site which has no proper toilet (no flushing, no water, only stinky smell), no proper food (only sausage and reindeer meat) and -27 celsius degree weather (the temperature varies throughout the day). Got to play with miss friendly black dog and take a look at the reindeer.


Longing for Northern Light but it was no where in sight, anyway the sky was extremely beautiful with never-ever-seen-before amount of stars.
Slept in a 6-person room with 9 persons squeezed inside due to security reason.
Day 3: dog sledging, of course I ride the dogs. As opposed to what I thought, they were very eager to sledge, maybe because they were born to do so.

Back to Kiruna, check in hostel. Omg, heaven is here with proper TOILET.
First time experienced sauna, hot and dizzy, I don’t like it.
Waiting for Northern Light, still only road light.
Day 4: Ice hotel, ironically, inside the hotel was warmer than outside, must be due to non-wind condition.


Back to the train, heading towards Stockholm, I couldn’t wait going back to talk to a certain someone and have a proper SHOWER!

There’re lots of stuff to record down, just for future reference.

Starting with stupidity fee, the first and I vowed it would be the only time I spend 33sek (approx 6sgd) on printing 2 pages. No thanks to my laziness and minded absence not printing flight ticket before hand for FREE in school.

Life goes on, I boarded flygbussana headed towards Skavsta airport. One interesting note, I love traffic system in both Stockholm and Berlin, smooth and efficient highways, lots of high and big bridges and multi-layers roads (for this, a certain someone would become excited seeing these).

First time in my taking-flight life, I experienced early-arrived flightS, provided by Ryanair, which claims to be the most on time airway in Europe with 90% flights not late, but 30mins early is very significant. Maybe this is just a trick, telling your parents that you’ll be going out for 4 hours while the party is only 2 hours and you come back after 3 hours to show how good kid you are. Anyway, better early than late.

My first day in Berlin is rather mild with minimum activities, just a walk around nearby neighborhood to see the lake and a little 100-year-old bridge (could be older than that). That is a peaceful area with lots of swans and ducks, which  made me very excited, if only…

A traditional British phone box in Berlin with typical Berliner vandalism.

The walking day is followed by car ride around the city. We stopped by Brandenburger Tor, symbol of a reunified Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall , though it is the mark between East and West Berlin.

A photo taken from the East view.

The nearby Reichstag is very impressive (of course since this is where the German Parliament seats), a huge structure big typical grand Europe decoration. The long queue waiting in front to go up the glass dome put me off from getting a bird view from there.

The following day is a truely tiring day, seeing me walking around Kurfürstendamm, the main boulevard in Berlin. Too bad my trip was conducted at night, hence I couldn’t take nice photos. Anyway, the main point is to see and feel.

My first ride on Berlin U-Bahn where you have to manually open the train; according to a local, this is to prevent unnecessary cold from outside when noone needed to board/alight the train.