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Gamla Stan in the sun Even having seen so many pictures of the this island city before it still doesn't prepare you for the stunning view as the train emerges out of the tunnel and crosses the series of bridges that make up the city centre. Sparkling water overlooked by palaces, chuches and graceful old buildings, some high on cliffs others on completely flat islands. Other island with just spires and domes peping out from the treetops. It beats any of the other cities I've seen and is finally a Scandinavian city that feels like a real capital - something of a contentious issue as Stockholm recently started advertising itself as the 'Capital of Scandinavia' much to the chagrin of Oslo and Copenhagen.
Home in Stockholm was on the water - at the Red Boat Malaren hostel. Pleasant if basic and with a great setting directly opposite Gamla Stan, the oldest part of the city with it's close packed medieval houses and warren of lanes. My only source of puzzlement while wandering amongst Gamla Stan's streets on the first afternoon was why on earth the Swede's had stuck a 6 lane motorway (plus railway and subway lines) in the the tiny gap between this peaceful
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Insert horn joke here.... island and its equally beautiful neighbour Riddarholmen - surely they could have put it somewhere else? Walking the waterside of the city took me past the Royal Palace then onto the mainland part of the city and across onto the park-like island of Durgarden and then back by ferry to little Skeppenholm. This island - as with much of the harbour - holds a fabulous array of tall ships, classic yachs and old steamers all in various states of renovation. More signs of a sailing city - halfway round the island shore I looked over my shoulder to find the 60ft trimaran Nokia sliding silently through the harbour. The difficulties of manouvering a yacht that covers an area larger than a tennis court in a narrow harbour were apparent when they ended up stuck head to wind and looked at risk of being run down by a large cruise ship...
Going properly on the tourist trail the next day with the royal apartments in what is the biggest royal palace in the world. More gold than you can shake a stick at though the plainer upper floor looked a bit more liveable. Bizarrest was the room decorated a few
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Nokia sailing down the harbour years ago to celebrate...something or other, I can't remember...as a present from the city to the royal family. According to the blurb it was mean't to show the best of modern Swedish craftsmanship and was based on the theme of 'a Swedish summers day', however it looked more like some bland hotel room - should have 'em all put in the dungeon....
Other highlights were the architecture museum which had some interesting exhibits but seemed to put an improbably positive spin on the 60s modernist towerblocks (the Swedes seem to have embraced this style out of choice rather than due to having their cities re-modelled by the Luftwaffe as is the case in the UK...). One thing I did learn is that the Swedes lead the world on their living area and ownership of domestic appliances per head of population - it explains the complete of absence of any laundrettes, and running out of clean clothes my searching for one was becoming increasingly desperate. However best of all the sights was the Vasa museum - proving that in the 100 or so years after the sinking of the Mary Rose little was learn't about the hazards of putting lots
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Carvings on the stern of the Vasa of big holes close to the waterline of a ship... The Vasa incident was almost identical: King's new flagship, her maiden sail, extra row of cannons near the waterline, a spectating monarch onshore. A gust of wind at the wrong moment and now you see it, now you don't... The big difference from the Mary Rose being that the Vasa sank in fresh water which kept her preserved for the 300 years she sat at the bottom of Stockholm harbour - so rather than just a fragment the whole ship has been restored. It makes for an awesome sight inside the huge dark hangar, covered in intricate carvings of roman emperors, soldiers and wild animals with masts passing through the ceiling. It's always seems that illustrations of ships from this time must be exaggerated to make them look more impressive - but the Vasa shows that they really were such precariously high structures. That the ships could stay upright at rest with just a bilge full of boulders seems improbable, let alone carry the huge cloud of sails that they did - in this case it was evidently a step too far.
I was hoping to get out into
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Riddarsholmen by night... Stockholm's archipelago - an alleged 24,000 islands in total - but the weather just didn't want to play ball. Summer still seems a long time coming and either rain or howling winds meant it never seemed like an attractive option, I guess it just means I'll have to come back...
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