Do you know where Stockholm is? Hopefully you do by my lovely blog post title now. I’m going to be honest though, before I booked the trip to Stockholm, I wasn’t sure if it was in Sweden or Switzerland. But now that I am practically a swedish native, I could never be mistaken again. Stockholm is a city made up of islands: almost 30,000 islands. It is connected through a series of bridges with both car lanes, bike lanes, and walking lanes. I couldn’t help but compare Stockholm to Copenhagen in my head (see my last post). Stockholm was much bigger and not as english friendly, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were eight of us in total on this trip. It is a lot harder to travel with eight people, then say, four people. No one really wanted to make an executive decision and it was a lot harder to balance out what everyone wanted to do. Therefore, we ended up doing a lot of walking around. Like fourteen miles worth of walking on the first day alone. We explored back alleyways and found beautiful fountains (image 1). I actually loved all of the walking, that’s the best way to find things! We walked all through Old Town, Gamla Stan, and found the royal castle along with the changing of the guards (image 2). From almost everywhere on Gamla Stan you can see water and the views are breathtaking. My favorite view though was from the island next to Gamla Stan, Södermalm (image 3). We had to climb up a rocky hill a relatively steep incline to obtain that great picture at sunset. After this view my second favorite thing was eating the Swedish Meatballs at the restaurant Pelikan. They were so yummy and they came with a fantastic brown sauce and mashed potatoes (image 4). Thankfully my friend Allison loves food as much as me so we split Swedish Apple Pie afterwards. Now I can officially say I ate the food of Sweden. Even though the majority of our time we spent walking or eating, we did manage to squeeze in a canal tour of all the bridges. It was just about a two hour tour of us going under at least fourteen bridges and learning about the history of Stockholm, as well as seeing many amazing sites. For example, I never knew that the water surrounding Stockholm was the Baltic Sea meeting Lake Mälaren. I never saw myself going to a place like Stockholm while I was abroad, but I am so glad I went! It was beautiful and different from any other city I’ve been to!
The food looks great! How was it having to negotiate yet another currency?
It actually wasn’t that hard! It was similar to the Danish Kroner. However, all the prices are in much higher numbers so I needed to brush up on my six multiples haha because the price divided by 6 is the roughly equivalent US dollar price.