Day 13: Childhood Dreaming

Day 13, the 21st of November for those of you playing at home, saw us heading to Junibacken. Junibacken is a storybook house created by Astrid Lindgren, best known for writing Pippi Longstockings. The house features recreated sets from her books and other Swedish children's authors, as well as a story train which lets your travel through the stories with narration in your chosen language. It's a little hard to explain and unfortunately photos were not allowed on the train ride. But, think of a haunted house ride except instead of scary stuff, you are inside children's books. The house is for made for children and we were pretty sure we were the only adults not accompanied by a child. But we had fun so that is all that mattered!

 One of the rooms with different storybook sets

 Sarah becomes part of the story at Junibacken

Upon leaving Junibacken, we walked past a beautiful building called Nordiska Museet, a museum. It was amazing from all angles, but it was not our next stop.

Nordiska Museet

Next came Skansen, an open-air Swedish museum. Being winter, most of the exhibits were closed but we did get to see the main thing we wanted to, Nordic animals! Goats, seals, moose, bears, lynx, grey owls, bison, wolverines, grey wolves and reindeer.

Baby goats!

Seals

A moose, minus his antlers.

As a one-year old male, they grew as spears and so the staff had to cut them down because they were dangerous to the female moose. Apparently next year they will grow back but in the typical antler way.

The brown bears were so cute!

 The reindeer on their way to get food.

Reindeer are so cool :)

A street inside Skansen

One thing that really annoyed me is that it gets dark around 3:30pm. I found this really hard to get used to and we were constantly thinking we should start thinking where we should go for dinner, even though it was only 4pm. We wondered if this was normal because it seemed no matter what time we headed out to dinner (anywhere between 5 and 8), all the restaurants were full. Either people eat dinner at weird times or they have learnt to stagger their eating so they can get a spot in a restaurant!

Anyway, between daylight disappearing and dinner time, we looked through shops and wandered the streets. We found a really cool window display in the shopping complex NK, which from what we could figure out appeared to be a much bigger type of David Jones.

NK window display

NK window display