I can be a little bit superstitious at times and let me just say – if there’s a superstition saying that your year will be as organized as the last day of the last year was – then I’m worried. Because our New Year’s eve was far from well planned. I guess you can say it wasn’t planned at all.
I didn’t want to make any big plans for New Year’s because I knew that no matter what I planned, Brian wouldn’t be very excited. Not many things can compare with our New Year’s celebrations in Vilanculos for the past three years, they’ve been quite awesome. And as I checked around with our friends it turned out they all had plans and were leaving town, so we were on our own. And with everything coming up towards Christmas we just kind of left it at that. No plans for New Year’s.
So come yesterday, we had no dinner reservation, no champagne and no friends to dance with. It felt a bit melancholic but we felt fine about it and knew we just had to make the best out of it. We woke up to a nice, clear, frosty day and decided to go for a walk down to the lake. But by the time we had had a chilled morning, tried finding a restaurant to go to and gotten ready we remembered we didn’t have any bubbly for 12 o’clock and the liquor store was closing in 20 minutes. So we jumped into our clothes, ran down to the parking lot, scraped the ice off the car’s windows faster than ever before, drove to the shopping mall a few kilometers south – watching the beautiful orange winter sunset in the car, panting like cheetahs after a chase, instead of enjoying it down by the lake after a nice walk. But we made it there, and we got some bubbly for the evening. We then went on our delayed walk and even though it was now almost dark, it was nice seeing the frost glimmer on trees and branches and a few scattered early fireworks.
We then got ready and dressed up all nice and headed into town. On the way we decided to aim for the Old town since there are restaurants in every corner and the area most visited by tourists, who can’t always make reservations in advance, so we figured that’s where we had the best chance of getting a table without having booked. And we did! After walking around for a while we passed one of those characteristic narrow pathways of the Old town and there was a sign pointing towards a restaurant in there. The street was so narrow we could hardly walk next to each other and the door was so small we had to bow down to walk inside. It was a proper medieaval dungeon, now turned into a cosy restaurant. Not the best in the Old town, maybe, but we had a decent meal and enjoyed ourselves – especially knowing we could just as well have had to be satisfied with a hamburger at a corner grill bar on New Year’s eve.
After eating we headed out to Slussen and watched the live music scene there for a short while. In a few minutes the entire evening was complete and all worth it when we got to watch a guy singing Lady Gaga wearing a down jacket. Just so wrong, somehow, and so funny. We walked up the road to where you have a gorgeous view of southern Stockholm by the sea and the soon to come fireworks at 12 o’clock. Standing there shivering with cold it turned out a lot of people started firing early and there wasn’t nearly as much people as we had expected so it was really nice. Towards new year’s there was more people and the fireworks increased and by turning 00:00 the sky just exploded with fireworks everywhere and everybody screamed and the big cruise ship in front of us honked its horn and it was just awesome. Brian and I poured our bubbly and said Happy New Year with a big smile on our faces.
As with most crowds you get a few hooligans and some youngsters were self assigned entertainers, shooting fire works 10-15 meters behind us. Quite cool when they covered the sky right above us, less cool when you realise people could get hurt quite easily when there are no safety measures around fireworks. A few minutes later I turned around to film a firework standing on the ground firing fireballs straight up into the sky, but the next thing I saw was one of those fireballs coming straight at me, when that thing had tipped over. It hit me right on the arm and then bounced onto Brian’s leg and all of us standing there just ducked down and there was just fire and smoke everywhere as it exploded. But it wasn’t as bad as it may have seemed, I got properly shook up and my arm hurt so bad I thought it was broken at first and I have a juicy bruise to prove it, but we were still lucky. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I was hit in the face instead!
Shortly after that we headed down the street back to the tube station and went one station south. Along the way we met an Icelandic guy teaching us how to say Happy new year in Icelandic, who was just looking for a beautiful woman, we got a long lecture about the Germans’ influence in Africa by a Tanzanian guy and we helped a girl who wasn’t feeling to good (not from drinking though as far as we understood). By then we had also found out that the night club we were aiming for charged 300 SEK for us to get in and there was quite a queue, the bars we walked to as an option weren’t even open and we really needed to pee so we ended up at McDonalds. After a nighttime meal there we concluded that this New Year’s eve in Stockholm didn’t have much more to offer and we happily went home.
So – is this New Year’s eve going to be the prophecy for our 2012? Seemingly unorganized at first but turning out pretty good in the end?
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