Buffet Dinner at The City Hall, Stockholm

Come on! I have to start getting up to date or I’ll really never start. Okay, so today, we went to the City Hall for dinner. There’s this big hoo haa over the City Hall, because it’s this big hall where the yearly Nobel Prize dinners are held on the 10th of December. Hmm…at least that is what I understood from the speaker’s speech. It’s hard to make out what she is saying when everyone else is talking among themselves. Okay, so the City Hall event was at 6pm, but me, qiang and eric decided to meet at 4.30pm, so that there would still be light and we could take some nice photos of the City hall right? Wrong! It became dark all too fast and our photos didn’t come out the way we planned. Sigh, being the photo freaks we are, we decided to return to the place again on Sunday.

These are the nicer pictures from the bunch we took. Qiang blames it all on my camera. Sigh… maybe it’s time to get a better one... Or maybe we just need some lessons in photography eh?
Most of those that ended up being the better ones are ironically the ones we took with flash, aka those taken by mistake! Flash is supposed to make the background all dark and therefore not good. So usually, when the flash goes off, we’re like, “Shit! Stupid flash went off” Now I’m glad for the mistakes. You need a really steady hand for photos without flash.


Flash is great! That's the Stockholm City Hall behind me.



You can check out the difference between flash and no flash here.


I wanted to take a scandalous photo with Qiang except he pretended not to smile and then Eric took the photo before he could smile. Boo!



These are the best of the no flash lot! And they are still very blur. Sigh. Finally, when we decide its really impossibly dark for photos, we head into the building.

So at about 6pm, they let us into the hall and we have a choice of red wine, white wine or orange juice as we listen to the speech. The food looks so pretty on the tables. There’s probably the exact set up 20 times round the hall. There is smoked salmon, cooked salmon, roast beef, meatballs, pasta, spring rolls, potato salad, some cheesy crepe, some thai-tasting curry, plus some cheese, bread and fruits!


Fruits, Bread and Cheese


The Glorious Food!!


More Food!!


Attracted to the table. See my white wine? I absolutely cannot drink. I drank half of it and I felt hot. Stefan from Germany tells me there was not enough to drink and he has had 5 glasses.

And then the speaker gives the go-ahead for dinner to begin. It’s not exactly such a pretty picture. It’s not as high-class as you imagine it to be, being in the City hall and all. But what the heck, we’re students aren’t we? We don’t waste time with formalities, and so we just clamour round the buffet table, trying to get a go at the food. We have people moving in different directions at the table and people getting pretty much stuck, plus there are arms reaching in blindly, trying to pick up some food.


Our plates end up looking like this. A bit messy but it still tastes good. =) Best meal, probably apart from my birthday, for a long time.

After that we went upstairs to look at the Gold Room. The Gold Room has walls made by thousands of golden mosaic pieces. The designs on the wall, however, don’t look very Swedish to me. I thought it looked Thai at first. Hmm… Check it out.


It's so huge, we can hardly capture the whole picture.


I decide that taking photo with a smaller but more complete-looking part of the mosaic is better.


Starting Left: Alex (Taiwan), Eric (SG), Dom (SG), Qiang (SG), Me (SG), Jenley (Malaysia)


This is the group of exchange students I usually hang out with. Most of us are from EE, Physics and Maths. Starting top left:
Mark (Australia), Stefan1 (Austria), Erkka (Finland), Stefan2 (Germany), Eilin (Norway), Kat (Australia), Yasnick (Greece), Me