Our Scandinavia Adventure: Day Eight (7 August)

I wanted to see the inside of the beautiful National Theatre, but full access was only allowed by guided tour, and so we lingered around the lobby and outside and even thought about visiting the great terrace restaurant (but again, huge breakfast=not able to eat or drink for a while!), but just went on our way.

The Music Museum is in a great building, which used to house a bakery--that's a lot of bread!
We took this cute ferry
over to Djurgården to visit the Vasa Museum, which houses the Vasa, a ship that sank not far from shore on its first voyage in 1628, as well as all of its contents. The museum was built around the ship, whose masts are visible from outside,
and as much as I'm not usually impressed by maritime museums, the ship was definitely incredible, although for sheer artistry, I still prefer Oslo's Viking Ship Museum.



Some figures had been painted to show the way the ship might have looked at the time it sunk; exact colours are still being researched. With the size of the ship, such vibrant colours would have made for a spectacular sight! Next up was one of my favourite places in Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, a sublime gallery space whose current exhibit was simply wonderful.
Equally sublime was the neighbouring Blå Porten, which we stumbled on, only to read later that it was "Stockholm's most romantic café," an assessment with which I wholeheartedly agree.
A beautiful garden
(notice the small tree laden with birds),
and a tempting array of bread
and desserts

meant that we ending up returning here for dinner! For now, we enjoyed coffees on the movie-inspired trays

while I played with my free souvenir from the Liljevalchs Konsthall exhibition.
The next few modes of transportation we took were very different; first there was the cute, retro trolleycar (better than anything San Francisco ever showed us)

and then another subway trip--from one incredible station

to another

and another.

Not only are the Stockholm subways filled with art, they are also cool and comfortable (something which London tube stations definitely aren't), even to the point of the rock walls being cold and wet to the touch. Natural air conditioning, perhaps? Back on the surface, we walked past some interesting seating,
great shops,
and this window display, which Bob found very amusing. "Even in Sweden, Canada's winning and all the Swedish players have fallen down!" Bob said when we passed by this game in progress.

More walking
meant we earned a nice bakery break, and Blooms Bakery was a perfect place for a quick sandwich, some cold drinks, and a nice flip through Swedish Elle Decor!
We passed by a few nice courtyard restaurants,
but already had our heart set on Blå Porten, so we took another ferry back that way, during which I took this photo of us in the sunshine.
We passed by Stockholm's tivoli (amusement park), which seemed to be as immensely popular as Copenhagen's tivoli was, although we didn't visit either place.

Back to Blå Porten, which was even nicer in the warm evening!
After we got some help decoding the menu, Bob had lamb
and I had some kind of fish, which I later found out is "pike-perch":
Both were incredible, as was the bread, and as I've already said, the restaurant's setting really can't be beat. With evening quickly growing dark, we decided to use our Stockholm cards to peek into massive Skansen,
where a flock of cute geese were having their own dinner by the ticket booths. Although the complex is open until 10:00 P.M., the building interiors closed earlier in the day, so we just walked off some of our dinner and took in some of the sights, like this rune stone
and this I-have-no-idea-what-it-is totem, which I instantly liked.
Scandinavian animals, you say? Well, alright!
We saw goats,

a lynx,
a great grey owl,
bears,
moose,
a horned owl,

and reindeer!
Oh and "horses."
Even though we couldn't go into the buildings, it was still great to see so many characterful buildings in one relatively small place. We passed by the soldier's cottage,
a milestone from 1666,
a belfry from the 1730s,

and a 1750 windmill to which additions were made in 1828.
As the sun set, Skansen felt even more like a fairy-tale place
until we met up with the crowds who had come to participate in a Skansen singalong that was broadcast on TV (when we entered the park, the woman warned us that the buildings were closed and that most people were here for the Swedish singalong, just to make sure that we knew what we were in for),
but even then, the picnicked-out crowd made their mellow way to the exits and we enjoyed walking with them, as if we too had just sung our Swedish hearts out on national TV.