Saturday in Stockholm

Saturday started off just as pleasant as every other day here. We woke up mid-morning, and checked out of our hostel in Gamla Stan. The next place we are staying is a residence just outside of the downtown area, north of Östermalm. We took the metro over and we were able to check in early. The room was very nice - the top story of an apartment building with balconies, along with a nice kitchen & bathroom. Everything was very modern in design and reminded us of an IKEA catalog.

The weather was beautiful again, so we dropped our backpacks & headed out to explore that area of Stockholm. The first stop was the neighborhood of Östermalm. In this community, there are several museums, including one that Jen was particularly interested in checking out about Viking history and culture. It was an interesting experience to check out this museum because the Swedes are very upfront about the facts of Viking history (specifically, the lack of historical evidence to support the common horn-helmeted image of pirating sea-farers). So we learned a bit about how, up until very recently, the word "viking" was generally used to refer to any person who took long-term voyages by sea. In some, but only rarely documented cases, these Vikings pursued the riches of others. More typically they went out to sea for fishing and trading. The museum primarily covered the typical lifestyle of Scandinavian peoples, who contended with extremely cold temperatures and long months of darkness in the winters. Towards the end of the museum, there was an exhibit where you could try on 18th centurty attire, here's Jen in a wig...

Outside of the museum, we continued our walk south toward Djurgärden (an island of Stockholm just west and south of the main downtown area). There were many great park areas along the way...

The island of Djurgärden features a sort of theme park called Skansen (which the brochures refer to as an "Open Air Musuem", but there are rides and there is a fee to get into). We passed by this and walked through a very pleasant waterside park...

From here, we continued on to Rosendals Trädgard, which featured a huge garden, market, and cafe. The cafe served dishes which were mostly created out of things that had been grown on the garden grounds. Additionally, they had many picnic areas in their orchards and they sold a couple kinds of locally brewed beers. On a tip, we elected to get a piece of carrot cake (yes, fresh carrots from the garden) and a couple of local beers. 

From across the water, we were able to size up our next destination...there is a satellite tower that they've opened up to the public so people can travel up to the top observation deck for 360° views of Stockholm. Here is the tower from about a mile away...

After completing our walk through the park and over the bridge in Djurgärdsbrunn, we found the road up to the tower. Here are our pictures from above:

After getting our fill of views from above, we concluded our walking tour with a stroll back to our room for the night. Not to be excluded from mention was the circus that was in town. Apparently circuses roll in for close to 2 or 3 months at a time during the summers here, so it was a semi-permanent sort of establishment, complete with tents and animals and wildly dressed performers all around the area.

Our last stop for the evening was at the grocery near our room. We decided that we would make good use of the kitchen and prepare a semi-homemade pizza. We picked up a plain cheese pizza along with a handful of local produce to cook down and add on top. Our evening concluded with a little cooking, drinking and blogging while overlooking the great view of a sunset on the balcony - absolutely perfect =)

On to Oslo tomorrow...