Gullmarsplan and Djugården vs HV71

Hey :)

Shortly after Christmas, Mattias and Maria went to Venezuela (South America) for a three week vacation. And guess what?... They were nice enough to offer us (Elisabet and I) to live in their apartment in Gullmarsplan while they were vacationing. I realize that this might not seem like a big deal to you guys but allow me to explain further about the benefits of living here.

It's only 4-5 minutes ride on the subway to the downtown, less than 1 minute subway ride to where Elisabet and I work. Compared to the 17-19 minutes subway ride to the downtown and 25-30 minutes to where I work from Bredäng (Elisabet's parents place). Alas, I realize that we're not going to be here forever, but a good three weeks here is better than nothing! :)

It's small but a nice single bedroom apartment with all of the necessary amenities :) The walk to the subway station takes just a minute, in fact you can see the station when you get out of the apartment building and the view from the apartment, you can see the downtown area. Since living here, Elisabet has became envious of this great location and now the thoughts of purchasing an apartment in the city is coming up more often now :p

Yup, like Bezaire (the dude from "dude, the where's my frog??"), Elisabet and I went to see Sweden Elite League hockey match during the holidays (Dec 27, the day after we moved into Gullmarsplan). The teams; HV71 and Djugårdens. Djugårdens has been Elisabet's favorite team ever since she was little, Mats Sundin and many NHL greats have came from Djugårdens. Unfortunately this year the team sucks, near the bottom of the standing. Djugårdens were facing the visiting Jönköping/Huskvarna HV71s. I have no idea why they are called HV71 (I believed I also mentioned that in one of my blogs in September or about that time). The HV71 is the best team in the Elite League, they have either won the championship or been at least in the Finals several times in the past few years and this year they are in first place with only 3 losses afte 30 games. I assumed that it would be somewhat unbalanced game with HV71 destroying Djugårdens.

But it turned out that Djugårdens had the game of their year! They matched Hv71s on every move, the goaltenders on the both sides were AMAZING, first two goals were just fluke goals making it a 1-1 game... after 2 periods it was 2-2, then Djugårdens made a great slapshot from the board near the blueline through the traffic into the net, the Goaltender never knew where the puck were. The jubliant-filled crowd went crazy, with a minute to go, Djugårdens scored an empty netter to insure their win with the final score of 4-2 for Djugårdens. The announced attendance was almost 11,000 people, the record for this year :)

The game was played in the Globen, one of Stockholm's architectural masterpiece, while searching for information about the Globen, some of the information said that it was designed with the idea of creating a perfect acoustics environment. I had seen the outside of Globen so many times (its beside the Deaf House, near where I work, and near where I am currently living in now, theres also a mall beside it) but I never had seen the inside. Now I can cross off one more thing from my "things to-do" list.

Here is what Globen looks on the outside...


Yup here are pictures of the game inside the Globe :)...

Ok that's all for now, keep your eyes open for the NYE blog coming up in few days then I will be finally "caught" up on blogging :p

bg0ur3