Leaving Abisko

*Although the title of this post is Leaving Abisko, I actually left Abisko a few weeks ago. But we'll just pretend like this is happening in Real Time anyway.*

So I finished my research and then had a choice to make: Do I stay in Abisko for the rest of my "vacation" time until I need to be back in Stockholm, or do I leave now and make my way back slowly on the Inlandsbanan (a historic/scenic train that goes through the center of Sweden)? I was kind of leaning more towards staying in Abisko, since it's so beautiful and there were still a lot of hikes I wanted to check out.

An example of the beauty in Abisko

But then it snowed one night and I was freezing and decided right then and there I was going south the next day.

We'll pause here for a sec and look at some random pictures from Abisko that didn't fit anywhere else:

At the only store in town: Slippers for your guests to wear

Trenches left over from WWII. They were all over the place. Kind of creepy. 

This word is so long it looks like it should be Finnish. 

Food pictures (my favorite)! This was one of the lunches I got at the Mountain Lodge. I figured I needed to try some real Swedish food. On the right side we have a nice green salad with blue cheese dressing, and a really good chickpea salad with sun-dried tomatoes, parsley, and rosemary. And on the left-hand plate we have the extremely popular crispbread, lingonberry sauce (I can't tell it from cranberry), reindeer pudding, and a piece of smoked ham. 

A close-up of the reindeer black pudding (aka, congealed Rudolf blood). I did eat the whole thing, but I drowned it pretty heavily in lingonberry sauce. 

A Rudolf free breakfast

Yikes!

The inside of a sauna. That's the little copper bucket with a wooden ladle that you use to put water on the stove. Every sauna that I've been in (there haven't been so many in Sweden, but in Finland at least) has been exactly the same. 

A typical shower with a typical giant shower squeegee. With all of the clever Scandinavian designs, I don't know why they haven't figured out that if they just make a little rim around the shower, or the shower floor lower then the rest of the bathroom, you wouldn't have the squeegee the entire bathroom every time you take a shower. Maybe they just think it's fun. 

Note: Being a "medal winner" in a world beer cup does not mean you are good. It is NOT the same as winning a blue ribbon. 

A crevice

Check out this giant pterodactyl nest behind my tent. I'm really glad I didn't notice it until I was packing up.  

Okay, back to the story. To summarize: it had snowed, I was freezing, and decided to leave.

I packed up my cat pee tent and all my stuff, and went to buy my train ticket to Gällivare, which is the southbound starting point for the Inlandsbanan.

All packed up and ready to go. With my leaf press in one hand and my walking stick (to support my-not-even-close-to-being-good-as-new bionic hip) in the other. 

Since there is nowhere to buy tickets at the train station in Abisko (there is just an empty room where you can wait for your train) I went to use the internet and buy them online. I wasn't really sure how I would do this since I didn't have access to a printer, but it turned out there was an option where you could have the ticket sent as an SMS to your cell phone. It then took me (literally) an hour and a half to figure out my new Swedish phone number (and that was with the help of Google). Once I was pretty confident that I had it figured out, I went to purchase my ticket. The website wouldn't take my credit card. Tried another one. Nope. And a third (because yes, I do have that many credit cards), but none of them worked. I then spent the rest of the day trying every possible combination and searching internet forums for advice. It turns out SJ's website has a reputation for being fickle and predigest towards American cards. Since I couldn't get a ticket online, my only other option was to buy it on the train. But you can only pay for a ticket on the train with cash. And I didn't have enough cash. And there is no ATM or bank in Abisko. And the closest ATM is in Norway. I was pretty much having a cow at this point. I will skip over much of my deliberating and vexing and get to the solution I finally arrived at: I was able to come up with enough cash (by actually looking for change in the couch cushions at the Mountain Lodge (thank goodness for European currency and it's high value coins)) to get me to the next station on the line (Kiruna), where there was (I was told) an actual ticket window and I could buy a ticket for the rest of my journey with a card. After I got to Kiruna I would have to wait 5 hours until the next train to Gällivare, and then I would have to spend the night in Gällivare before taking the Inlandsbanan south. And the next train to Kiruna wasn't until tomorrow. So, just because the Swedish railway company's website wouldn't accept my credit card, what should have been a 2 hour journey was now taking 2 days. At least I had some time to spare and this wasn't causing me to miss the beginning of school or something terrible like that. But I'd be darned if I was going to spend another night in my cat pee tent in the snow in Abisko. So I slept on the day bed in the toy room of the hotel.

Preparing to sleep illegally (yet warmly) in the toy room. 

On a positive note, I did go for a lovely walk down to the lake that I wouldn't have done if I had left that day.

It would have been a perfect swimming pool if it wasn't ice cold. 

Hej då, Abisko!