Stockholm
Stockholm is only a one hour train ride away from Uppsala, so we spent one day visiting there. It is a city spread across several islands, with a beautiful old town district and many other things to see. One day really isn't enough to explore everything, but this will still be a long post with many photos. I didn't include all of them, so if you want to see more or want to skip the text and just look at the pictures, you can find them all here.
Once again we were incredibly lucky with the weather – it was a beautiful spring day, warm and sunny, and the flowers and trees now started blooming everywhere.
We started the day by visiting Skansen. Skansen is a open-air museum showcasing building from different regions and time periods of Sweden.
Many houses are "inhabitet" by staff, dressed in clothing appropriate to the house's time period, that will tell you the story of the house and its former inhabitants, or demonstrate the crafts that the houses were used for – for example, in the flatbread bakery two women showed how the traditional flatbread was baked, explained the ingredients and even gave us some fresh bread to try.
The farmsteads in the park have gardens appropriate to the time periods, and some even have animals roaming around, usually rare old breeds. There is also a zoo of northern animals included in the park, where you can see moose, wolves and bears.
Skansen was a great experience and I think this is definitely a thing you should go see, just because it shows such a vast spectrum of Sweden. It is time consuming though, I think we spent a few hours there and still only saw a part of the park.
Next up, we went to the "Vasamuseet", the museum of the warship "Vasa" that sunk in the 1600s on its maiden voyage - and was salvaged almost completely a few years back. The ship is huge and the story around it pretty amazing.
After the museum we were really hungry, so we went to a supermarket and got some food for a picnic. We went to a kind of wooden boardwalk in Södermalm to have our food there, complete with a stunning sight across the water to Stockholm's Islands Kungsholmen and Gamla Stan. We also walked up to the "Gondolen", which also offered a great view over the city.
For the afternoon we decided to just have a walk through Gamla Stan and see the old town and the royal palace.
After a long day we were really tired, and even though there were still many more things to explore, we decided to finish off our day with a visit to a few of Stockholm's "Tunnelbana" Stations – many of them have colorful designs painted all over them.
So, that was our day in Stockholm. Also our last full day in Sweden. I'm sure we'll come back some time though.
#sk
PS: It was amazing to have two "guides" that knew the city already, otherwise we would never have found our way around that fast. Lots of love for that (and their patience) to Helena & Philipp!