Day 10

We went on a bus tour today and got to see the Palace where the King and Queen live.  The princess just got married a week ago, so that was big news here.  We saw the church where that happened and some of the decorations are still up.  We saw where Tiger Woods has a flat for when he and Elin (sp?) stay here.  There are 86,000 lakes in Sweden, so that's why Swedish people like to live in Minnesota too. =)

Stockholm has 2 million people.  They were voted the greenest city in Europe for all of their recent green efforts.  Most people here do not drive cars.  They have vowed to be petroleum free in 20 years.  All of their public busses use biodeisel (that's the clean stuff, right?)  Most people use public transportion or they ride bikes.  There are bike lanes everywhere.

Sweden's biggest holiday was the Friday that we got here.  It was mid-summer's holiday.  It's like Christmas, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July all in one.  It's a big family holiday where no one works.  Everything is closed and people are out in the parks celebrating the longest day of the year.  We have 18 hours of sunlight, but even when the sun officially sets, it's still light out.  We woke up at 3am two nights ago and it felt like 9am.  It was hard to get back to sleep.  The darkest part of the day is around 1am, but it still looks like dawn a bit.

We watched Canada play Sweden last night and neither team looks great.  Canada won 12-6.  Today is a day off, but we're watching film for a couple of hours and then have a walk through before dinner.  Tomorrow we'll watch Austria vs Finland and Germany vs Sweden.  We play Finland on Thursday and then probably Germany on Sunday for the gold medal.