From Stockholm with Love

Hello everyone, I am so glad you are all enjoying this blog idea. I love hearing from you all. The only thing is if you add a comment through this site I am not able to respond to you unless you leave your email address. Sorry I havent kept it up but we have crammed a lot in to the last couple of days. Yesterday Josh and I were up at around five am because we had slept so much the day before so we decided to get an early start on our day. We went and got early breakfast at our favorite place; 7-eleven. I know it sounds terrible but the 7-11's here are gorgeous, clean and they sell really healthy food. So for us it is like a mini grocery store that sells items we can sometimes reconize. I love the Swedish, although the have a completly different language we are sometimes able to understand what signs or literature says. In many case take the english version mash it together, replace the vowels with other vowels, or add some t's or k's then you have the swedish version. For example turistinformation or my favorite place we visited the Arkitekturmuseet. After our gourmet breakfast we went walking with our little maps from the hostel. First we went to Gamlastan or also known as the Old Town where the most beautiful old buildings are.
All the streets here are cobblestone which is very quaint but with my coordination I am lucky to report no injuries. And no Denise and Amina, I have not been running but of course it is only because of the cobblestone
Stockholm itself, is made up of 24 islands. We found out quite quickly that all were within a reasonable walking distance of each other. From Josh you might here a different perspective of how MUCH walking we did that day but he is aging and out of shape...
Next stop was a walk to a small island that had my two very favorite places on it, The Modern Museum of Art and the Museum of Architecture, or in Swedish; Moderna museet & Arkitekturmuseet. The art muesum was amazing, we got to see original Picassos, Salvador Dahli, Kadinsky, and Andy Warhol just to name a few. Of course no pictures were allowed to be taken. The exhibits we really interesting and different, I conside myself extremly open to new ideas and different things but some pieces here were really weird for lack of a better word. The mueseum of Architecture was small but really good to see. It showed the changes in Swedish architecutre from the very beginnings to present. And considering Swedish design which is very innovative and modern this exibit was soooo cool and inspiring! After the mueseums we walked to find a bus stop, got on one and just went for the ride. The bus routes here were extremly confusing so we just decided to hop on see where it took us. Not any where special as it turns out. We got off at the KatarinaHissen a huge lift where you can see a view over the city. Here is a picture we took

This night we decided to splurge and we went to the CentralBatagen a beautiful spa inside a fancy hotel.
Inside was a jungle like bar with a hot tub, warm pool and a normal pool surronding it. The hot tub was what we really went for and it turns out they have a different idea of what is relaxing. There was a maximim of 12 people supposed to be in the hot tub and there always was if not more. But the tub was designed so that you have to lay back and stretch out your feet, so needless to say it was really nice rubbing feet with large, hairy men. The water was warm if not lukewarm and it was hurled into your face by the jets. So for next time maybe we will avoid the " hot tub". We met two of the funniest guys from our room, two Austrailian boys now residing in Scotland. They both work at a hostel bar in Edinburgh so all they wanted to do was drink.

Tonight we were talked into it and we went to the 3rd bar we found that I was allowed in, a large jazz club. You have to be 23 to enter most posher bars. The songs played were classic jazz tunes, not my style and the crowd was older then all of us by lets say half a century. It was boring but we paid 100 kourona to get in so we stayed for a bit. Liquior is severly taxed in Sweden, and only a handful of places actually sell liquior!! You can only imagine what this is like for someone coming from Red Deer. In this particular bar a single shot of bar liquor is 64 kornoa which is 10 dollars canadian!! Again imagine coming from a place where you can pay 50 cents per shot. So then an amazing thing happenend the band got off and the crowd began to change, a younger democraphic was taking over. Turns out one of the hottest reggae djs in Europe was going to be here at 1 am. So we stayed and the placed was packed along with at least one hundred people lined up outside. The best music was played all night and we had a blast.... I love Stockholm.