Stockholm in Summary (and Pictures)

So there are some things that just do every time you go to Stockholm and visiting the old town, Gamla Stan, is one of them. Generally we just sneer at the tourist tat shops, read menus and I look at the clothes in the windows of the shops and regret all over again that I'm not a size 12 any more. All of which we did this time, with two additions; we bought the poppy bowl and we went for coffee and cake at Sundborg's - apparently Stockholm's oldest café.

 

You know that thing where you go into a cake shop, order something that looks fantastic and then get disappointed when it comes. Well see this? every it as delicious as it looks! 

We did a lot of walking in Stockholm, which was just as well considering how many calories there must have been in those cakes.

We went back to the hotel on Skeppsholmen where we had stayed last time an it was as warm and welcoming and calm as before. Skeppsholmen is an island and we spent most of one day on it. In the  morning we visited the Modern art Museum which  is only a hop, skip and a jump from the hotel. The art was very much hit and miss for us but we knew it would be and I think it's good to be challenged now and again, Some of this took challenging to a whole new level to be honest, but some of it was fantastic. They have quite a few pictures by Edvard Munch which were good and I even bought a little book about him in the extremely well stocked shop. They have a café too

 

We chose to sit outside as it was a sunny day and as we were a bit caked out we contented ourselves with a bowl of soup. It was potato and something, I assume leek. Delicious anyway.

In the afternoon we walked round the island which we hadn't had time to do in December, daylight being in short supply. There's a castle

 

sadly that's horribly out of focus, too much zoom

 

and the three masted sailing ship Tre Kronor (The Three Crowns) which is berthed here. It looked like you might be able to hire her for trips but it may be that that's a future aspiration rather than a current fact. My Swedish is too rusty for me to be sure.

 

And there's this interesting building that looked like it should have been a railway station but obviously wasn't.

 

I also managed a fairly successful picture of  sunset which isn't something that happens often - that's the Royal Palace by the way. It's a bit of a solid block, isn't it?

 

Other things we did; a revisit to the Historical Museum's  Viking section, a trip to the gift shop at the Vasa Museum for family presents for upcoming birthdays, the boat trip which kept us out of the shopping street when the lorry driver ran amok ( I was soooooooooo cold that day! the boat didn't have a lot of inside seats so we spent more than half the time outside. Tactical error. Although the hot chocolate we had in the café when we finally bowed to the inevitable and went inside was delicious.) We found a new museum, the medieval museum,  which was fantastic. No idea why we've never heard of it before because it's been open for donkey's years. It's underground, contains a little bit of the original city wall, and is a bit like Jorvik, the Viking museum in York except that you can walk round it rather than having to ride round it on a time travelling truck. Don't get me wrong, I love Jorvik, but this was better in many ways.

 

And then there was the opera which was just brilliant. The production was the same one of Jenufa that we saw  in Glasgow last year , which we didn't know when we bought the tickets. That's probably a good thing because if we had known I would possibly have said Oh let's not bother then, which would have been a mistake. We'd  really liked that production anyway, but this was so brilliantly sung and played, it was quite overwhelming. I was definitely a bit damp eyed at the end.