Hereby the second post about our 'surprise' city trip to Stockholm. As you can read in my previous post, my wife and children gave me a city trip to Stockholm as a surprise for my 50th birthday. A great gift and great to experience that with my family. My wife said she was debating between Dublin, because of Guinness, Whiskey and history, or Stockholm, because of ABBA. It has become Stockholm, and I must say a super choice.
She had read up well and told me that Stockholm consists of 14 islands that are all connected by bridges. That is special in itself, you live on an island but still in a world city 😊. To be honest, I knew that the Abba museum is in Stockholm and that Stockholm is the capital of Sweden, but that's where it stops for me. Now, after we are back from this beautiful trip, I know a lot more, also about the history. It is a beautiful city.
We had thought that we would first take a ride with the Hop-on-Hop-off bus to get a bit of an idea of the various sights and the places where they are. That turned out to be a good idea 😊 At one point we passed the royal palace, it turns out that there are traditional guards standing guard at the palace. A bit like the guards at Buckingham palace in London. So I wanted to go there in the coming days anyway to see it up close.
In Djurgarden, a district on an island, there are a number of attractions including the ABBA museum, the Viking musuem and Skansen. Skansen is the oldest open-air museum in the world. Here you can see Sweden in miniature and they also have a zoo with Scandinavian animals. When we came by bus there was a long queue for the ABBA musuem, we had tickets for Friday (the next day).
Scandinavia has the Vikings as an important history. So of course we also went to the Viking museum. Upon entering, a 'real' Viking sat in an original Viking boat and welcomed everyone. If you didn't know any better, he looked like he stepped right out of a movie.
In the museum there were many items that have been excavated or found and are attributed to the Viking age. What struck me is that the items were beautifully highlighted in the display cases, they had really paid attention to that.
The museum was not really very big but gave a nice representation of the Viking age and what it must have been like.
There was also a 'replica' of a Viking Age man reconstructed from his skull. The film of this was also shown, of the process of how the man came about. Very interesting.
After visiting the Viking museum we went into the harbor for a while, then back on the boat to the boarding point. We were quite tired and then went to the hotel, we took an Uber for this, very easy transportation. There were also scooters throughout the city that you could also grab with the Uber app. My youngest and I had already planned to try it out the next day.
in the evening we went to the Hardrock Cafe stockholm for dinner. Nice restaurant with nice things to see.
We just ordered too much food haha. At the end of the evening we walked to the hotel anyway to lower the food, we almost exploded :)
All in all a great first day in a great city.
