Helsinki & Stockholm

11.07.2009

For the full photo gallery for Sweden visit http://www.travellerspoint.com/photos/gallery/users/hazelnutty/countries/Sweden/

9-11 July 2009: Stockholm

The weather was quite wet on some days with a maximum temperature of about 18oC. We took time to explore parts of the town on foot or on bikes, occasionally getting pretty wet! Lloyd and Lynda visited the Nobel museum which was just 3 minutes walk away. On Thursday evening we had a wonderful dinner with Lloyd’s friends Tomas and Petra. On Friday we took a steam boat to Mariefred, which was a 3 hours journey up river. Hils and Lloyd hired bikes (they only had 2!) and and rode through the country for a few hours. Lynda wandered around the pretty town and looked at Gripsholm Castle. See http://www.mariefred.info

5-8 July 2009: Stockholm

Catching the fast train to the city from the airport, the ticket inspector, looking at the tickets we presented, said "I can’t even begin to tell you how many mistakes you made when buying your tickets". He took us to the ticket office at central station and they gave me a new tickets plus a refund of about AU $100. Not bad service.

The hostel is in the old town (Gamla Stan) on its own island. It is quite lovely (if a bit touristy) and there are no cars (except around the edges). Cobbled streets, cream and green and pink and terracotta coloured old buildings, very narrow lane ways. Hostel is in a convenient position – not too bad. Beds are nice and the showers hot and there is good broadband. What more could you want?

Lloyd commutes out to his meetings at Kista each day. Lynda and Hilary have been exploring town on trains, on foot, by bike and even sea kayaks around the archipelago. The weather has been a bit grey and rainy – we have coped.

5 July 2009: Helsinki – we’re not in Russia now.....

After sitting around on the border with Finland for what seemed to be hours, we arrived in Helsinki at 10pm. We wandered around and found our “hostel” (which turned out to be someone’s flat, but that was OK). Got to bed at midnight – it was still light.

Got to the station on Sunday at about 9am and shoved all of our packs into a locker and wandered around town. Everything was neat and clean and orderly (and damn expensive!) – we were not in Russia now...... Went to the main square and visited the Orthordox chruch (Upensky Cathedral) where a service was being held – it was lovely inside and the choir were quite amazing. Took the ferry to Suomenlinna (see Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suomenlinna), came back and looked at the market by the harbour. Gobbled a litre of really good strawberries. By then it was time to catch the bus to the airport.