Day 15: While the sun was sleeping

Day 15. Friday 23rd November. 2:30am. Alarm goes off.

Today we flew back to Belgium. Our 80 minute bus ride to the airport left Stockholm at 3:30am so it turned out to be a very long day.

 Sunrise

Once back in Belgium, Niels picked us up (bringing croissants) around 9am and then we had the 1.5 hour drive back to Lokeren. The question is, are the cheap flights worth all the extra travelling time to the small airports?

Anyway, we spent the rest of the day not doing much. We did washing and sorted through our souvenirs and I caught up on a couple of blog posts since at this point I was behind by six days. We then hung out on the couch for a while before bed, too tired to really do anything.

Day 14: Swedish Rain

Our last day in Sweden saw us trying to get a bunch of stuff done. So we whittled our list down to the place we really wanted to check out and attempted to cover them all. First we went to the area known as Sodermalm. We looked at a few boutique and quirky stores we had heard about and Katerina Kyrka (I have just realised that I think 'Kyrka' means church).

 Katerina Kyrka

We then headed to the cemetery of Skogskyrkogarden, which Lonely Planet recommended to us. It was peaceful and quite pretty but we also now assume they meant it was a sight to see in summer.

 Skogskyrkogarden cemetery

After leaving Skogskyrgogarden, we made a detour back to Gamla Stan as Sarah had discovered a rubber stamp store online that she wanted to check out. It turned out to be a success since we both bought some things.

Gamla Stan, now with added Christmas lights

Finally, we went in search of a few more shops but unfortunately many of the ones we went looking for throughout the day turned out to be a let down or not even there at all. But oh well, what can you do... We also checked out the train stations of the blue line metro because we had been told it had some pretty cool art painted on the walls. This confused us a bit as it just looked like we were underground in caves, which we were...

The blue metro line is surprise surprise, a cave...

With the day feeling a lot like a waste, we finished by getting some touristy souvenirs before heading back to our room to try and pack up all our purchases for our flight the next day. Oh it also ended up raining all day :(

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

Day 12: Old Town

The island of Gamla Stan is Stockholm's 'Old Town' and it is where we chose to spend Tuesday 20th November.

Gamla Stan

Storkyrkan Church and Cathedral

Tyska Kyrkan.

There was no way to get a proper photo of this church as it was 'boxed in' by other buildings.

 Marten Trotzigs Grand is Stockholm's narrowest lane-way at 90cm

Riddarhuset
This was used by the Swedish parliament in the 16th century.

Riddarholmskyrkan

Gamla Stan appeared to be full of churches and I loved the architecture of them (ironic perhaps for someone who does not like religion?). Mostly we wandered the cobblestone streets, peering into windows and occasionally buying something. 

Gamla Stan streets

Kungliga Slottet is a palace with 608 rooms

After finishing up on Gamla Stan, we wandered back through 'our' neighbourhood, searching for stores that had been recommended to us. We also came across St. Jakobs Kyrka and a large ice-skating rink which had people setting up Christmas Markets around it (although unfortunately the markets were not due to open until 2 days after we left Stockholm). For dinner, we decided we would find something on our very long street. This proved harder than we first thought as there either wasn't vegetarian options, the menu's were in Swedish and we couldn't figure out if they were vegetarian, or they were too expensive. Finally after walking the whole street (it spans a large part of our 'island'), we settled on an Asian restaurant back towards our hotel. We were originally judgemental because of it's name but it was really very yummy. It's hard to take a restaurant seriously when it is named Ping Pong.

  St. Jakobs Kyrka. Love the colour!

Day 11: Stockholm Bound

Today was one of those days where the entire day is wasted no matter what you do. We checked out of our hotel at 9am and then went to the airport for our flight to Stockholm.

On our way to Sweden

We didn't arrive in Sweden until after 2pm and then we had an 80minute bus ride to Stockholm (we passed the time by watching tv-shows on our Apple products). 

 On the bus to Stockholm

Once in Stockholm, it took us a little while to find our hotel as we were walking from the bus terminal in the city centre, at peak hour, and I was lugging a massively heavy bag. I'm not quite sure how I managed to forget my promise to myself that I would only ever travel with a suitcase after backpacking for three months 5 years ago (I decided to leave my big suitcase in Belgium and take a smaller bag so that I wouldn't fill up my big one and then have to pay a Ryanair fee for going over 15kg!).

We finally found our 'hotel'; a bunch of rooms and en-suites in the basement of a coffee shop on the main shopping strip of Stockholm. It was a bit odd as the coffee shop staff seemed to run it and while the location was excellent, the rooms, while clean, were far smaller than any of their, or my, pictures let on.

 The extent of our 'hotel' room