Flowers, water, and beautiful buildings – that’s Stockholm. Oh, and the grey skies and intermittent rain.
Our fourth stop in Sweden was Stockholm. We’ve been here once before, way back in 2010, and loved the city but still only scheduled a short three-night stop here. As the largest of the Nordic cities and the heart of Sweden, there’s lots to do here. But, we were in a hurry to get to our friends’ place up in the mountain for the weekend and then move on to Eastern Europe, so we cut our stay there pretty short.
That’s a shame because Stockholm is a beautiful city with lots to do. We love just walking around admiring the great architecture, but there are great museums as well, most of which we haven’t been to (including the Museum of Modern Art, which used to be run by our friend Lars). We did manage one important museum, though, the ABBA Museum, an homage to the pop music group of the 1970s. It was fun and not nearly at kitschy as it might have been, but definitely something you only need to see once.
Mark is kind of an ABBA fan
And then there was that museum you don’t need to see even once. We got to Stockholm late in the afternoon after taking a boat and bus from Gotland. Mark headed out while I just hung out in the room; it was cool and slightly rainy and I didn’t feel like braving the weather. He ended up going into the Nobel Museum – the Nobel Prizes are a Swedish thing – and, as he put it to me, “That’s $15 and 15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”
Besides the ABBA Museum the other fun thing we did in Stockholm was to just hang out with friends. We’ve been planning on meeting our friends Marc & David down in Dubrovnik next week. They’d written a couple of months ago that they had a wedding to attend in Italy and wondered where we’d be in late August. “Bosnia,” we told them and they might be the only people in the world who would say “OK, let’s go to Bosnia.”
A serendipitous afternoon – on an unusually beautiful afternoon – with David & Marc
Just a couple days ago, though, Mark was on Facebook and saw David’s post “We’re off to Stockholm!” Huh? Turns out there were crazy cheap flights from Boston to Stockholm and so that’s where they started their little European vacation from. And we overlapped for an afternoon, so we had lunch and then hung out in a park for the rest of the day. Very fun and serendipitous.
So that was our short stay in Stockholm. One of these days we have to come back when we have more time; I’d love to get to know the city better and actually get to some of the real museums here. For now, though, we’re heading way north up into the mountains.
OK, humor us for a moment as we enjoy the ABBA Museum. Here’s Mark posing with the four of them on a park bench.
And Mark posing in the helicopter that was featured on the cover of their album “Arrival,” seen on the left. He had that album and after all these years now he’s in the helicopter.
ABBA’s crazy attire was a key part of their show. Here are their costumes from the album “Waterloo.”
Along with the costumes from the original London performance of “Mamma Mia”
The view of Stockholm from our hotel (after the first night when our “view” was an interior courtyard)
Beautiful buildings in Stockholm
Us!