The first part of my weekend’s visit to Stockholm is here.
Our day 2 started with a visit to Stockholm’s no. 1 museum – Vasa museum. The whole museum is dedicated to Swedish ship, which drowned in the beginning of it’s first journey. Destroyed by a wind gust…
The quided tour is essential in this museum, because there are lots of interesting facts and background stories covering the history of building this ship. The ship was built in XVII century, and almost 95 percent of the ship seen today is original. The ship is massive, that id doesn’t fit in one photo, and it’s decorations are worth a deeper analysis. It’s amazing how a half day can fly by while exploring only one ship.
More attractions on your visit to Stockholm
On our visit Stockholm we went to another aquarium. This aquarium was mostly dedicated to sea horses, with the whole history and process explained about breeding them, and letting them to the sea. Near the aquarium you can spend a whole day enjoying yourselves in the amusement park called Gronalund. I skipped this attraction…
After that we went to I believe the biggest park in Stockholm – Haga park. It was easy to drive there by bus, but we weren’t able to find he bus that should have taken us back to the city. So we walked through the whole park. And it’s massive. There is a “butterfly house” in Haga park. Where butterflies live freely among the plants, like their natural habitat. You can observe here the whole process of how “catterpillars” convert to cocoons and then to butterflies.
In the Haga park we visited an aquarium near or in the “butterfly house”, where among all other rare fish, a great white shark can be observed.
One more thing we wanted to do was to go on top of the Globen Arena. And so we did. In my experience, this was not the best view of the city from above… In fact, I would have been disappointed, if I had to pay money for this attraction (now it was included in Stockholm card). Globen Arena is further from city center, in a bit of industrial district, so there are no cool views of the city, only grey buildings.
Of course, the lift, which is a glass sphere, that lifts up by the edge of the round arena, was a bit scary. It sometimes creates a feeling that you are in the air and there is absolutely no background beneath you.
Places further from the Stockholm’s city center
We wanted to end our journey here, but our friend said, that “you haven’t seen the best of Stockholm, if you haven’t visited The Drottingholm Palace”. So he drove us there by car. Drottingholm Palace is way out of city center, so it would have taken a long time to go there by bus. OK, the palace and the park were truly beautiful, but I’ve missed flowers in the gardens? It was a middle of summer, and the grass and trees were green. I missed more colors there.
So this is what I managed to see and do when I had the chance to visit Stockholm for two days. Ah, we also visited the Nobel museum. But I can’t say a word about it. We just came in, saw that there is only lots of stuff to read, and went out… Not our kind of museum. 🙂 There’s still lots of things left unseen, because Stockholm is huge, and has a great number of islands worth exploring. I left it for the next time(s).
Stockholm is so beautiful. I haven’t been
to Vasa museum but I’ve been to village museum,
Abba and Ekero island..
Yes, it is a great city! If you’ll go there one more time, I’d recommend Vasa museum. There are different opinions about it (“why are Swedes soproud of the ship which sank during the first leave from the harbor), but the uniqueness of it is everything.