Uppsala

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Today was another cruisy day. We caught the train out to Uppsala (third largest city in Sweden) and then bus out to Gamla Upsala (the old part of Uppsala. Well, Uppsala was about the size of Palmerston North (New Zealand) and you'd have to use your imagination in Gamla Uppsala to see an actual town beyond a few scattered farmsteads.

That said, the museum was quite interesting and centres around the very historic nature of the area. Gamla Uppsala has thousands of burial mounds surrounding the site of a old Viking settlement. Some of the mounds are huge. The biggest of which took 100 slaves three months to build. The settlement itself vanished in 900AD, but some important finds remain. Anyway we went for a walk around the mounds and headed back to Stockholm having had a fairly easy day. Oh how slothful!

Tomorrow is a travel day as we clean up here, post off some more souvenirs and board a train to Oslo. I'm glad you all liked the postcards.

Finally, reflecting on Stockholm - not a bad place to visit all in all. There are quite a lot of attractions within 20 minutes walk of the centre of town and a few more if you're prepared to brave the buses - which actually are relatively easy once you find out which route and which side of the road to get on. The only real problem we've had is that the Swedes seem to buy their food from invisible shops. We have still not found a supermarket the whole time we've been traveling. The closest we ever got in Stockholm was a New World Metro-sized one way out in the suburbs, hidden in the middle of some industrial type area. There is literally nothing in the central city. So it's been rather expensive on food. For some reason the fast food here seems to consist of mobile licorice vendors and hotdog stands... which doesn't make for a good diet. Fingers crossed that Norway will have figured out this slight flaw in the plan by the time we get there.

Nigel

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