Sweden, home of ᗅᗺᗷᗅ, IKEA, creator of MineCraft and this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

We flew into Stockholm from Tromso, Norway and immedietly found Stockholm was very different to Oslo. The city itself seemed much more alive and had lots of old buildings painted in bright colours. There seems to be people everywhere (might possible be due to the Men’s Hockey thing).

We visited the Swedish Royal Palace and Freya got her first taste of the mass tour groups, which I encountered on my last trip to Europe. Lets just say she wasn’t pleased when I told her the 3 groups we saw today, pales in comparison to what we’ll see when we visit Paris and Rome. Apart from this the palace tour was very interesting and reminded me a lot of Versailles in France. The palace itself is also still used today for royal and state affairs and official guest from other countries have stayed in the rooms we were walking through.
After the palace, we visited Stockholm Cathedral which had a lot of bricks used in the interior (see picture below), this was very different to previous churches I’ve been in which have either been marble or whitewashed concrete.

A short stroll away and we were down by the harbour in Sweden’s “Old Town” –

Wandering through these streets reminded me of wandering around Rome, with’s it narrow alleyways and large squares with restaurants around the edge.

Freya and I both agree that Stockholm is a really nice city with lots of green spaces and parks, and we could see ourselves living here. I can certainly see why Stockholm is referred to as the “Venice of the North”.

There is an island about 10mins from Central Stockholm called Djurgården, which is home to forests, grassy fields, walking and cycling tracks, museums and Grona Land (an amusement park).
We visited this island to see the Nordic and Vasa Museums, as well as the newly opened ᗅᗺᗷᗅ museum. A short trip to Grona Land which is celebrating it’s 130th anniversary and has the worlds highest starflyer (it’s a ride with chairs hanging off it that spin around in the air), offered a really good view of Stockholm.
The Nordik Museum was originally built to house all sorts of Nordic items, but now just holds Swedish related exhibitions. It was interesting to see how Swedish culture has progressed through the centuries.
The Vasa Museum, is solely dedicated to the enormous Vasa ship, which was built in the 17th Century. The ship sank only 2kms into it’s maiden voyage and sat on the bottom of Stockholm harbour for over 300 yrs before being salvaged and restored. It’s very impressive to see up close and 98% of what you see is the original ship. I’ve included a picture below but it doesn’t really convey how large this ship actually is. For those who are interested, the ship sank due to poor design making it too top heavy, a gust of wind in the sails caused the ship to tilt to one side, letting water flow in through the lower cannon holes, thus sinking the ship.

No visit to Stockholm would be complete without a visit to the newly opened ᗅᗺᗷᗅ Museum where one can view an assortment of the band’s costume and memorabilia, as well as a number of interactive displays. The museum takes you through from the bands formation to cessation and the audio guide has lots of interesting facts about the band provided by members of the band. I’m still hoping they might do a small performance at the Grand Final on Saturday but we will have to wait and see.

As already mentioned in my previous post, our hotel room was extremely small, but our hotel was centrally located, the room had a decent shower and the Internet was ok, but the lighting needed improvenment as I was showering in semi-darkness. I wouldn’t recommended it unless you were a bit desperate (as we were).

As I’m writing this now, we’re on the train from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and Freya’s managed to eat half the complimentary mint chocolates provided in 1st class (she was feeling a bit sick as the train is travelling quite fast and is a little bit bumpy and she thought the mint would help). The Swedish countryside is really beautiful with lots of lakes, forests and rolling hills.

Can’t wait till Eurovision, so I’ll leave you with this 360 I took from on top of the  TV broadcast tower just outside Central Stockholm (it’s not a perfect 360 as the top of the tower was quite large, but it doesn’t look too bad) –

Adjö

Finally in Sweden, just checked into our hotel in Stockholm, which is about the size of a broom cupboard. There is literally no room to swing a cat. I’ve taken a picture which is below –

Our hotel room in Stockholm

It is exactly as described on the website but was the only place we could find as the Men’s International Ice Hockey Finals are also on here in Stockholm at the same time.

Less than a week till Eurovision, can’t wait.

Adjö

P.S. For those who don’t get the title of this post, click HERE

Just thought I’d post a couple of very useful travel apps I’ve found during my travels so far –

XE Currency – Very useful for converting between currencies to get an idea of prices etc. It also caches the last exchange rates you downloaded on WiFi, so you can use them when you’re not connected to any WiFi.

Google Translate – Very useful for translating from Norwegian or any other language to English. It also holds a record of past translations you’ve done so you can refer back to it when you’re offline.

Trip Advisor City Guide – Very useful for reading up on the next city you’re visiting whilst on the plane. All you need to do is download the city whilst connected to WiFi and then you’re set. It has photos, maps, attractions, restaurants, hotels and other things as well as reviews from the Trip Advisor website, all cached for offline viewing. You can also save/bookmark some attractions in your chosen city so you can easily refer back to them later when you’re online. You can write a trip journal in it, as well as writing reviews on the places you’ve stayed for later uploading.

As well as the above there is the usual Google Maps, the inbuilt Weather app and the all important Temple Run 2 for when you’re board on the palne. My best distance so far is 13.5km.

Ciao

As I sit here now, the weather outside is currently snowing, but the forecast is for sunny weather tomorrow and the rest of the week, unfortunately, we’re flying out of Tromsø tomorrow so will miss the nice weather. This has pretty much been the case for most of our Norway leg of the trip so far, with cloudy/rainy weather in Bergen, overcast and rainy in Oslo and windy/cloudy/snowing/raining in Tromsø.

If you decide to visit Tromsø, make sure you visit during the winter or summer season, as during the shoulder periods (like now) a lot of activities/attractions are closed. eg We wanted to go dog sledding but the winter season finished at the end of April, so now they’re doing the summer activities yet it’s still snowing, the mountains are covered in snow and it’s abut 4*c.

Apart from all the above, I had a good time in Tromsø. It’s my first time inside the Arctic Circle and I would love to come back again in the future, not sure if I’d do the winter or summer season yet.

We visited Polaria (which is an aquarium of polar animals, fish crabs etc) and saw some very playful and intelligent seals, as well as a crab that kept trying to escape from it’s tank.
We payed a visit to the Arctic Cathedral (the name for their local church) and ate some very yummy custard pastries from a local bakery (they were very reasonably priced).

One afternoon we took a short trip to the Tromsø Alpine Botanic Garden which is open all year round, except at this time of the year it was completely covered in snow so everything was pretty much dead. Still I managed to find some deep snowdrifts and got my jeans and shoes completely wet (a visit to our hotel’s laundry was required later that day) and also managed to get some good photos and a 360 below –

It also snowed here in Tromsø and I managed to get a short video of it, plus a couple of pictures (I included one below)

For those who are interested here’s a little bit of info about Tromsø – Tromsø itself is situated on an island with the airport on one side and the city on the other. There is a road tunnel across the island, but halfway through the tunnel there is a roundabout, where four tunnels connect underground. Further on there is another roundabout and to the left is the entrance to Tunnel Parking, where you literally park you car in a tunnel and walk out into the city. It’s not cheap though at 100NOK per day.
Tromsø is located 350kms north of the Arctic Circle but is warmer than most other places located on the same latitude, due to the warming effect of the Gulf Stream. It also has Norway’s only all wooden church and hosts a lot of festivals and concerts during the summer. The city is also home to the world’s most northerly university, and botanical garden.

I’ve also included a picture below (IMG_1176) which is the view outside my hotel window at 11:30pm at night. As you can see it’s still quite light as the sun has only just set, but not to worry cause it will be rising again in a couple of hours time, so it was never really that dark while we were here.

We’re off to Sweden tomorrow and one step closer to Eurovision. Can’t wait…

Farvel

Oslo, capital of Norway, country of only 5 million and the land of expensive food and accommodation. For dinner in Oslo, we’ve had cuppa soup, cuppa couscous and fruit/bread. To eat out would cost between 250 – 500 NOK ($45 – $86AUD) per night whereas I can spend about 300NOK at the supermarket and get food for several days worth of meals.

Oslo has been interesting, it’s quite different to Iceland, London and Australia. It seems that people are late starters here as no-one appears to be up and about before about 9:30 – 10ish. Everyone is really nice and most have good English skills which has been really helpful as I’ve tried pronouncing some Norwegian phrases but they don’t sound right and are difficult to say. Google Translate has been very helpful. Oslo is noticeable different to Bergen and Reykjavik in one main way, anywhere outside the main transport hubs/tourist areas, the city seems very quiet and lonely. Not sure if this is because of the time of year?? Also most of the buildings are quite modern and office-like, where as Bergen/Reykjavik had older style buildings with bright colours and lots of people wandering around.

Anyway, we finally found a place in Oslo that offers Self Service Laundry as we were running out of clean clothes, so spent one morning in here for a couple of hours (There was another family in here whilst we were waiting, Freya suspects they were Irish gypsies, and they used 5 wash machines and 3 dryers all at the same time. It was like they were washing their entire households worth of clothing, towels, tablecloths, sheets, quilts etc and their kids were so noisy.)

We visited the Royal Palace gardens, Akershus Fortress, the Museum of Cultural History and Viking Ship Museum, where there is a complete Viking ship that was excuvated from a viking burial mound and is probably from around 800AD. The ship is enourmous (as you’ll see from the picture) and would have taken weeks to bury (and excuvate).

Akershus Fortress is a medieval castle that was built to protect Oslo and is still used by the Norwegian Military today, as well as for Royal and official state visits/events. It is also where all the Norwegian Royalty are buried. It was an interesting place to wander around and was different to most other castles I’ve seen so far.
Here’s a 360 I took from the castle walls –

Lastly we visited a sculpture park just outside Oslo called Vigeland Sculpture Park which is a park full of sculptures designed by Gustav Vigeland –

There was a funny picture I took of a lady and her dog in this park which copied every move she made. In the picture I’ve included the lady was looking out over the railing, so the dog decided it wanted to do the same thing.

On our last night before flying out to Tromso, we decided to visit the Oslo IceBar, which is a bar made completly of Ice. Yes, even the cups are made of Ice. I’ve included a couple of pictures below.

Farvel

P.S. For those wondering what the picture of Oslo SpareBank is, when we first arrived in Oslo, I saw a sign on a building saying Oslo SpareBank, and I thought – I know the Norwegians have had issues with buildings and fires in the past, but building a ‘spare’ bank is a bit weird. Turns out ‘spare’ in Norwegian translates as ‘save’ which means it’s actually saying “Oslo Savings Bank” 🙂