Stockholm day one

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23 May 2010

The weather took a dramatic turn for the worst overnight and we awoke to wet and cold conditions. We eventually dragged ourselves away from the van and caught the train into central Stockholm where we spent the day dodging the showers and finding as much as we could to do indoors.

Rather like Copenhagen, much of historic central Stockholm is built on a series of islands. Unlike Copenhagen there is a large lake, Lake Malaren, inland from the city (we are camping on the shore of it) and an archipelago of hundreds of small islands off shore in the Baltic Sea.

We started the day in the commercial centre on the mainland. Next we had a tour of the Parliament Building, the Riksdagshuset, when we learnt that Sweden is a constitutional monarchy, has seven political parties and a coalition government of four of them. We then walked around the outside of the Royal Palace, Kungliga Slottet, wandered around Gamla Stan the old town and finished by visiting the interesting Nobel Museum.

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