Stockholm tour
June 27, 2019
The bus picked us up on Thursday morning for our city tour. Prior to learning about this trip, I had vague plans about a trip to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. I had some specifics in mind, mainly a few days around Copenhagen, then a flight to Bergen, spending a few days around there, maybe a boat ride to fjords. The train trip from Bergen to Oslo was to be the highlight of the trip. As sort of an afterthought, I'd get to Stockholm. I decided to do the choir tour instead, and decided not to stick around to do the Norway trip, so that is left for another summer.
So I still had not given a lot of thought to Stockholm before I got there. I had just read a short section on it in a guidebook covering all of Scandinavia. So I didn't have much in the way of preconceptions or personal agenda, other than Vasa. Everybody who has been or has thought about going said I should see Vasa. That was already on our agenda for the day, so I wasn't concerned about how to do that. Pictures are on the next page.
Stockholm has been called the Venice of the North, but then so has St. Petersburg. Maybe after I visit the Venice of the South this fall, I can decide which is the more accurate analogy. (I suspect St. Petersburg.) In any event, there is water everywhere. You can't walk too far without crossing a bridge.
Stockholm is farther north than anywhere I have been in Alaska. I was in Helsinki in 2000, and it is a bit farther north, being the only place I've been that was north of 60º latitude, but that was in August, so the days were not nearly so long. In Stockholm the sun rose about 3:30am and set about 10pm. "Rose" and "set" seem a bit of an exaggeration, since it never got dark. Evening twilight just merged into the morning twilight. I didn't venture out around one am to see just how dark it might get, but in a big city, it would never have looked that dark anyway.
The old town is on the central island called Gamla Stan. I'm tempted to tell people I went to Gamla Stan so they will think I visited an exotic former Soviet republic. The island is to the north of where we stayed. Pictures from early in our tour view it from across the water. I didn't take a lot of pictures during the tour. Here are a few:
This is the tiniest theater in Sweden or in the world, or something. The playwright does one-woman shows.
We drove around in an area with fancy homes and foreign embassies. Is that an eagle?
Stockholm has a great system of public transportation. Once I got the hang of it that afternoon, I rode the metro, buses, and streetcars.
After the main bus tour, we then were ready to see Vasa.