Thu, 14 Aug 2003

author Tim	location St. Pauli, Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 11:15 CEST 21/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Sverige/Sverige 2 ( all photos )

Stockholm ( 54 photos )
(Continued from Finland)
We awoke in a new country - ok, we had been to this one before, but not this part of the country - the capital Stockholm.
Driving off the ferry, our first task was what to do with the van so we could have a look around the city. For this we have typically two options - either find a central and usually expensive caravan park, or park in a parking lot somewhere.
First attempt was stopping at an "i", which we managed to find in Centralstationen, but which was next to useless.
Next option, we pulled out one of our many caravan park guides, and located a very central "Autocamper" park. This is different to a normal caravan park in that it is effectively a big parking lot with a mobile toilet/shower block dumped on the side. In this case, the receptionist even wore a shirt with the name of the parking company - obviously they worked out they could get a bit more money from a not-quite-central car park by turning it into an Autocamper.
It was located under a bridge on one of the 24,000 or so islands which make up Stockholm, Långholmen. As you can imagine, that many islands leaves plenty of room for bridges, and plenty of stress when you miss the turn-offs and can't turn around again for several kilometres. Stockholm easily gets the award so far for Most Difficult City to Navigate via Vehicle.
After a quick chat with the helpful attendant, we got out the GPS and started the first of what turned out to be around twenty kilometres of walking that day, heading towards the Old Town of Gamla Stan.
This part is located on its own island (there's plenty of them to go around), and is the oldest part of the city. We had lunch in a nice café along the main touristy yet attractive narrow cobbled street, Västerlånggatan. This runs almost the length of Gamla Stan, and from it various interesting narrow side streets run, creating a confusing tangle of cute little places.
After a look through some of the shops, we found ourselves at Kungliga Slottet, the 'new' royal palace. In terms of number of rooms (608), it is the largest in the world. We had no real intention of going in there, but happend to be in the right place at the right time to see the highly ceremonious changing of the guard. This consisted of plenty of horseback instrumentalists playing standard pomp music and lots of yelled military commands of the type you don't even expect to understand when they are in English, let alone Swedish.
Wandering a little further, we stumbled across the base of the visible-from-everywhere Tyska kyrkan (German church). It was closed for restoration, but it added fuel to the fire in our minds attempting to understand yet another language!
After not managing to be in northern Sweden at the right time of year (winter) to see the Ice Hotel, we decided that a stop into the summer showroom of the place, the Ice Gallery was worth it. The Hotel is just what it sounds like - an entire hotel built solely out of ice, including bar, cups, beds, everything. They can only keep it going in winter, so we didn't bother taking a side-trip to see it when we were up that way. The gallery attempts to give you a taste of it, with a bar, cups and some general carvings inside what is basically a big fridge (-7 deg C). They provide furry warm coat things which were quite happy to wear, although the room was much smaller than we expected. It completed its task, however, of making us want to go the hotel should we ever make it back at the right time of the year.
From there the rain started tumbling down, so what else to do other than duck into a bar and watch people outside get wet.
After it died down, we wandered across Vasabron bridge into the new part of town, the only part on the mainland (ie. not an island). We found our way to the hideously ugly Sergels Torg (central square - most of the locals hate it too), where there were plenty of people. Most were young kids on school holidays partaking in skating demonstrations with loud music, etc.
Here, we went up to the eleventh floor of one of the buildings (good view!) where the Australian Embassy is located. There we found out some more details about my requirement for a Schengen Visa, and chatted to a girl who had just moved to the city from Sydney to be with her boyfriend. She didn't speak the language much, and we were all happy to hear each other's accents for a change! She had joined a club for the apparently two thousand Aussies and Kiwis who live in the city, centred around the Dancin' Dingo Aussie Pub.
Next to the tourist office to find about internet cafés, but it was next to useless and full of loud-talking Americans, so we gave that a swerve. The internet café near there wouldn't let us plug the laptop in, but pointed us one Metro stop north to Hötorget, where we found a dark and dingy place lit only with uv-lighting which was more than happy to take our money and let us plug in.
We spent an hour or so updating the journal, sending emails and chatting to various people from home. I also got in contact with the only person I "know" in the city, Jonas Salling of Salling Software, whos piece of software Clicker has won many awards and I have helped out testing with a little. We carried our converstation on in sms.
Next target was Djurgården, a couple of islands to the east which we had read about in various places (Bill Bryson and Lonely Planet) and wanted to see. Basically entirely given over to parklands, museums and a zoo, we walked there along the waterfront Strandvägen past some amazing monuments which used real-time information on everything from wind speed to air pollution and pollutants in the water to display huge colourful graphs.
The island was great with lots of pretty gardens and the like, and our random wanderings eventually found us at Skansen. This was the world's first open-air museum with old houses and the like, but we had only one thing we wanted to see. When buying our tickets, we asked the guy "Do you have any moose?". We were damned if we were going to leave Scandinavia without seeing one. He said "Is that all you want to see?". We answered basically yes, and he laughed and sold us some tickets.
The enclosures here were amazing - so much space, all interesting shapes and sizes, and the animals were actually mostly visible! We saw bears and foxes in the same enclosure, the bear digging around his den while the foxes got as close as they dared. Fascinating watching just that, could have done so all day. But, we had to find this Moose.
And find we did - a big, huge thing much bigger than we had expected, with huge fuzzy horns. Didn't move much but it was nice to finally see one after all the trouble we had been, and driving close to 10,000km with signs for at least half that distance saying "Watch our for moose"!
On the other side of the enclosure was the female and two babies asleep. She was quite interested in Liz, and the babies were cute enough to want to take one home. Until they grow to eight feet tall, that is. Also notable were the funny boars play-fighting and wolves doing very little.
Finally satisfied, we needed to address our rumbling stomachs. This was done at Djurgårdsbrons Sjöcafé, on a pontoon floating on the river under the bridge joining to Djurgården. We had some great meals and a glass of wine, feeding the inquisitive ducks right next to us what we couldn't fit in ourselves.
Wandering all the way back through town and out the other side at Kungsholmen, it was time for Liz and I to part. From here, Liz wandered back to the Autocamper across Västerbron bridge, only getting a bit lost in the rain and darkness.
I met up with Jonas, and spent a nerdy few hours discussing various bits and pieces over a few beers (had to buy him something for the great software he has written which he basically gives away for nothing). He has gone from writing things on the side to being able to support himself off it, which is amazing for any independent software developer these days.
We went back to his office, where he showed me the next secret version of his software on his massive monitors (a prize from Apple) and pre-release Ericsson phones. Gadgets galore!
From there, I followed Liz's path back to the van, a little darker and rainer, and a lot longer than it had looked on the map. Still, there we were, safe, sound and thoroughly exhausted, but feeling we had seen Stockholm plenty well enough.

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