Back from Stockholm!

Stockholm was brilliant. The food was lovely and the buffet breakfast at our hotel was absolutely brilliant. They had several different types of Sill (pickled herring with dill, peppercorns or onions), cream cheeses, gherkins, salad, a huge assortment of rye breads, crackers, buns and crispbreads, smoked salmon, hard cheeses, bacon, eggs (hard or soft boiled or scrambled), muffins, pancakes, a whole Japanese section with miso soup and pickles (for the Japanese tourists I think), the list goes on and on. Needless to say we ate like total pigs the first morning and couldn't manage anything else until dinner! Other things we ate (as I'm on a food related thread of thought now) were hot dogs from the numerous hot dog stands all over Stockholm... everyone seems to eat these and they're not like our London hot dog vendors who sell greasy frankfurters in over cooked oily onions and a bun and are only bought after a heavy night drinking at 3 am. Oh no... these are frankfurters in bun which is toasted flat and then the end cut off and popped open. They squirt ketchup and mustard inside and then pop the sausage in, squirting more sauce on top. Sweden is SO expensive though! A 30cl of pear cider (which is now my new favourite drink) costs around £5-6! You'd need at least £25 a head for dinner too. We had a traditional Swedish meal at Restaurang Aktiebolaget Kvarnen where we ate picked herring on toast, meatballs in sauce and reindeer with mash. All very nice, but came to just under £40! Ouch... we also found an excellent cafe called Cafe Cronan which was rare value for money. A huge plate of pasta came with complimentary bread and salad from a cart which cost around 100SEK (good value compared to everywhere else!).

The people in Stockholm are so friendly and happy to help tourists when they look lost (even if you don't ask!) but travel is also expensive. A strip of 8 tube journeys costs 180SEK which is just under £18 and single tickets on the tube cost 40SEK. You can alternatively get a 3 day pass for 200SEK. The city seemed really safe and not once did I feel insecure or unsafe. It's also surprisingly cosmopolitan with lots of different races including a lot of Asian/Oriental faces.

Sight-wise, we possibly walked from one end of Stockholm to the other (which is a good thing as we ate so much at breakfast!). The Vasa was the highlight, a 400 year old Swedish war ship which sank on it's maiden voyage and never left the harbour. Gamla Stan was also really good, the old town of Stockholm with really interesting old buildings and cobbled streets. We also visited the Swedish food market, Salluhall in Östermalm. It's an indoor market with counters selling all sorts of food, from butchers counters to fish and cheese. It was SO cold though, with temperatures of -2 degrees and snowing! When we got back we found out it had been snowing here too, but although it's warmer here, that yucky damp chill has seeped into my bones and I just can't get warm! Speaking of chilly, my new coat was fantastic... did the job well. And thank god I took my goonie hat because it was so cold in Sweden.... my ears were toasty warm, but It did mean I spent the entire weekend with flat hat hair. haha. Smelly also found it very amusing that I kept on bouncing around exclaiming I was a goonie all weekend... haha

So overall, Stockholm is brilliant. I'll definitely go back to Sweden, maybe somewhere different next time, but think I need to save up the pennies first!! Photos to follow tomorrow so check back!

Other good news, Dad's home!! He's made an amazingly fast recovery (although he's not 100% yet) and his lymphocyte count is back to normal. We were expecting him to be in hospital for at least another few weeks so really happy he's home. He's lost a lot of weight because he hardly ate while he was in, but Mum said he ate a HUGE plate of rice and sweet and sour the first night he was back so he was obviously just missing Mum's cooking! hehe