Stockholm!

I really love Scandanavia.  All of the countries that I’ve visited (and I count Iceland in there too) are the most familiar foreign places.  I feel very comfortable when I’m there, and I’m never very stressed about getting around (save the first night in Stockholm last time), pick-pockets, or much else.  Just a very pleasant travel experience.

For some reason, our day in Stockholm was somewhat limited time-wise.  We docked at 9:00 (no morning trivia), and had to be back on board by 3:45.  Because we knew that time was limited, Troy and I decided that we would do a hop-on, hop-off boat ride around the islands that Stockholm sits on, get off at Gamla Stan and revisit (for me) the Nobel Museum, walk around Old Town for a while, check out City Hall, and take the rest of the boat tour back to the ship.

That’s pretty much exactly what we did.  The boat tour went very smoothly (boats actually showed up for transport every 15 minutes, as opposed to every half hour or every “whenever we feel like showing up”) and the audio was pretty good.  I did manage to identify the ship-hostel that Amanda and I spent a single night in seven years ago.  Ahh, memories.

The Nobel Museum remains a very cool experience, and I was happy to go back.  I will say that it was smaller than I remember it being, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.  Walking around Gamla Stan was very déjà vu feeling, but fun to do, and we picked up a few souvenirs here and there.  We also picked up some crazy good ice cream in fresh waffle cones (we could smell the cones from probably 2 blocks away) and went into a science fiction store that housed the two board games that we play most often (Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride), a ton of expansions for those, and like 65 other exciting-looking board games.  We’ll definitely be checking out Amazon on our return (because how much fun would Ticket To Ride be with a map of the Nordic Countries?  So much fun).

After crossing the bridge out of Gamla Stan, checking out City Hall (from a distance), and exploring a little more, we headed back to the boat stop to finish the rest of the tour, which included the National Museum, the Vasa Museum (the Vasa is a medieval ship that was created to be the best in the world… a very big deal. On the day that it set sail, the ship made it ~1200 yards into the harbor and sank.  Yay, Hubris!), and the most compact amusement park I’ve ever seen.

We got back on the ship around 2:30, had a late lunch, and kicked around for a while.  Unfortunately, we went to the wrong place for afternoon trivia, and thus missed it.  We sat up on deck for a few hours and watched the ship exit the archipelago (there are hundreds of small Swedish islands, many of which are inhabited), and had a quiet evening.  Tomorrow is our second to last day at sea :(