Östermalm, Skeppsholmen and Home

 We were not sure what to do on our third day in Stockholm.  If the weather had been better, we probably would have gone to Skansen, the first and, according to all reviews, the greatest of all open-air-museums.  However, our one previous open-air-museum experience, at Ballenberg, near Brienz in Switzerland, had been disastrous.  It rained so hard and so continuously that our umbrellas leaked or got blown inside-out and we got soaked.  The possibility of repeating that sort of experience didn't appeal.

What we did end up doing, however, involved just as much time outdoors, if not more, and while the rain was not continous and we didn't get soaked, there were times when we wished we were indoors.  We considered doing a train trip to Uppsala or Sigtuna, but that seemed too involved.   During the Old Town walk the day before, the guide, Sebastian, mentioned that he would be leading an Östermalm walking tour starting at 11 the next day.  We had enjoyed the Gamla Stan tour and since Östermalm was the neighborhood of our hotel, that walk would not be far out of our way, so we took it.

There was some overlap between the two tours, but the Östermalm walk had more about modern Sweden and its culture.  We enjoyed it.  One of the stops was at a plaque in the sidewalk where Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986.  He and his wife (without any bodyguards) were headed to the metro after seeing a movie, when a man shot him in the back and ran off.  The identity and motive of the murderer are still unresolved.

We talked, while walking,with a young Greek couple from the island of Evia.  When Mary Joy said that her maternal grandfather had been from Evia, they insisted that we had to go there to visit his home village.  They tracked it down on Google Maps and pointed out that it was only a little more than an hour's drive from Athens.  They themselves were from the other, southern part of the island, which is the second-largest in Greece (after Crete).

The tour ended at the Hötorget (Haymarket Square), in front of the  Konserthuset (Concert Hall), where a free concert was just finishing.  A quartet of secondary school students ended with "The Parting Cup," an Irish song that the Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem would always sing at the end of their concerts.  It was sung beautifully.  Too bad that we hadn't been able to hear more of the concert.

We went back to Hotel Riddargatan and from there walked up the street, past the Saluhall, to Mom's Kitchen.  We ate out on the covered terrace, I forget exactly what, except that Mary Joy was disappointed that they had run out of Swedish meatballs!  We stopped at the Saluhall on the way back, to scope out sandwich possibilities for our plane ride the next day.  We did pick up dessert there, a couple of pieces of Swedish princess cake.

What to do in the afternoon?  The weather didn't look promising, but Sebastian had mentioned that the best views of Gamla Stan were from the island of Skeppsholmen, which divided the harbor in two between Gamla Stan and Djurgården.  So we walked there, due south of our hotel, took some selfies with the view of the Old Town and decided to go on to Kastellholmen, the islet across a bridge to the south.  Kastellholmen had been a naval base until recent years.  It started to rain heavily, with a strong wind, then the rain stopped.

That evening we had okay pizza and okay salad at Tidemans, an Italian place a few blocks from our hotel.

The next morning, after Hotel Riddargatan's very good buffet breakfast, we went to the Saluhall to see if we could find sandwiches, but didn't succeed.  We walked our luggage back across the new town to the Central Railroad Station, figured out how to get tickets on the express train to the airport, and flew out on the 1:50 Icelandair flight to Reykjavik--which was delayed, so we didn't have a lot of time at Keflavik, just enough to buy some wraps to eat on the plane.

When we arrived at MSP, with Global Entry it took us five minutes to get through immigration.

This was a nice trip, probably much nicer than it would have been to revisit our honeymoon trip to Switzerland and sweltering Italy and Greece, dodging wildfires.  Mary Joy loved western Norway, with its mountains and fjords, but she is still a Mediterranean person at heart, and though we had much better weather, on the whole, than we were expecting, it was still colder and damper than we like.

Gamla Stan and Drottningholm

On Monday, August 7th, our 25th wedding annivesary, we started the day with Hotel Riddargatan's buffet breakfast: the second-best on the trip.  The best was at Fosshotel Lind in Reykjavik, but we had to pay about $20 per person extra for that, while Riddargatan's breakfast was included.

This turned out to be our best weather day in Stockholm, perfect for another "free" walking tour, of Stockholm's Gamla Stan ("Old Town"), with Rainbow Tours.  The tour started in Gustav Adolf Square, a not-too-long walk from the hotel, on the other side of the Kungsträdgården.

At the center of Gustav Adolf Torg (Square) is an equestrian statue of guess who?  King Gustav II Adolf, better known in the U.S. as Gustavus Adolphus.  A college in Minnesota is named after him.  He was the king who made Sweden into a major European power, intervening in the Thirty Years War to prevent the victory of the Catholic Hapsburgs.  He was also the king who had the Vasa built.

By his statue, with a rainbow umbrella, was our guide, Sebastian, a Mexican who had lived in Stockholm for eight years.  He gave us an interesting introduction to Swedish history and culture while leading us on a ramble thrrough the Gamla Stan, the island that is the oldest part of the city,  Stockholm ("Log Island") is where it is because it is where Lake Mälaren empties into the Baltic.  Interestingly, the lake sometimes freezes in the winter, but the sea doesn't, so the western part of Stockholm will have ice and the eastern part won't.

After figuring how to pay Sebastian (online, on the Rainbow Tours website),we went back to our room, then to the Saluhall, an upscale food hall up the street from the hotel.  There, we had some good open-face sandwiches, in a hurry, because we had to catch a boat on the other side of downtown.

As our anniversary treat, we had decided to attend the opera in the 18th-century theater at Drottningholm Palace, on Lake Mälaren, an hour's ferry ride west of downtown.  We had tickets for the 1:30 ferry.  Earlier, from home, I had bought tickets to that night's 7:00 performance of Henry Purcell's The Faery Queen (an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), as well as on a bus afterwards to the Central Bus Station.  We walked across downtown to the boat docks on the lake across from City Hall, arriving in time to see our boat come in.  We went aboard and settled in for the hour cruise along the shore of Lake Mälaren.

Drottningholm means "Queen Island," and it was originally the special property of the queen.  Now, it is where the royal family actually lives, rather than in the Royal Palace in the Gamla Stan, which is more an office building than a residence.  We had a lot of time to kill, so we got a snack at the cafe, then wandered the gardens.  I saw one of he king's robot lawnmowers, apparently with the royal seal on it..  In the salon next to the theater, there was a talk about the opera, an hour before the performance.  That would have been interesting, except that it was in Swedish.  After the talk, people lined up outside the theater and were let in.  Our seats were dead center, about three-quarters of the way back.  The music was glorious, the performance very good.  Later, we had no trouble finding the bus in the parking lot, and after walking (for the second time) from the Bus Station to Hotel Riddargatan, we got in after eleven o'clock.  Hungry (not having managed to have a real dinner) we had some nuts from the minibar.