Stockholm Weekend (Day 1)

I was off to Stockholm this weekend for a well deserved vacation, after working hard to get all of my school work down before Friday. Of course, I only had two and a half days to enjoy Stockholm and Malmö. After a near miss Friday morning, Laura and I made it to Malmö airport Friday morning and landed at Arlanda airport outside of Stockholm around noon. For those of you that don't know, I'm about a quarter Swedish.

It would be a couple of hours before we could check into our hostel on Gamla Stan ("The Old City"), right in the heart of Copenhagen. Stockholm is apparently known as the "Venice of the North," although so are a about five other cities so I guess it's kind of an empty title. Either way you can see how someone would come up with that, especially on Gamla Stan. Much more so than Copenhagen, you always feel like you are surrounded by water when you are in the center of Stockholm, since the city is basically bisected by the water that flows between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea. Between the canals, the narrow streets, the cafes, and the Renaissance architecture, Gamla Stan in particular feels very Venetian. Not that I've ever been to Italy but I'm just saying.

Our initial journey mainly would through the area north of Gamla Stan called Norrmalm, through some shopping areas, Sergels Torg, past some well-known statues, buildings, and churches to one of the Stockholm tourism offices where we purchased a Stockholm card which for around $60 gives you free or discounted access to a number of tours and museums as well a unlimited public transportation for 48 hours (for any of you traveling to Stockholm or probably any major city for that matter you can get them for 24 or 72 hours as well). Then it was down to Gamla Stan for lunch at the Martha-recommended (and now Peter-recommended) Cafe Cronan which has a ton of delicious menu items. Then we checked into our hostel, the "cozy" 2Kroner Hostel which by cozy I mean cramped but it was pretty clean, cheap (about $35 a night in the dorm), and had a prime location.

After dumping most of our stuff off at the hostel we set out again. We roamed around Gamla Stan and checked out the Riddarholmskyrkan, one of the oldest buildings in Stockholm dating back to the 13th century. A number of Swedish monarchs are buried here, most notably Karl Knutson Bonde, and if you're a heraldry buff it will probably be on your "must see" list (but no photos allowed). We also roamed around the Storkrykan (St. Nicolaus Church), Riksdaghuset (Parliament), the Riddarhuset (Swedish House of Lords), and the Kungliga Slottet (Royal Palace).

We were running out of time before the museums and such closed, so we trucked over to the Vasamuseet, a maritime museum that houses a remarkably maintained 17th-century Swedish warship, the Vasa. As Mindy can and has repeatedly attested to, it is quite difficult to take a photo of the Vasa because the museum is dark and the Vasa is both dark and pretty huge (I took the photo on the right off the web). We happened on the last tour of the day and got to hear the history of the Vasa, which was quite short because the boat sank a couple hundred meters into its maiden voyage. The Vasa might have been easier to photograph if it still had its original paint which from the samples I saw would have been some horrible combination that would have made it look like some kind of hideous floating gingerbread house.

Then we trekked to the Kaknästornet, a large TV tower that is rumored to have some of the best views of the city. You could see for quite some distance from the top deck, although the tower is kind of far away so most things are pretty hard to see and glare from the sun on the (dirty) windows made it pretty hard to take photos. After we got our share of the view we took a walk through the forest on Djurgården where we unsuccessfully looked for a monument to Gustav something or other and a cool old tower (Bredablick Tower), we did manage to find Rosendals Slott before making our way to Stockholm's Tivoli. The Gröna Lund Tivoli lacked the ambiance and character of Copenhagen's Tivoli and seemed a lot more directed towards kids. Still it was free to get in with the Stockholm Card and we took a look around. Laura went on some ride called the Fritt Fall, which I'm assuming means Free Fall, which basically takes you really high and then you just drop. After eating way too much popcorn we were off to the hostel to get some well deserved rest.