Stockholm by day

We were lucky enough to have most of the day in Stockholm. It was a beautiful sunny day, and showed off the city at its best. The sun glinted off the water, which is everywhere (the city is made up of 4 islands).
We had a stroll around and took far too many pictures of nice looking buildings.
Then we decided to visit the architecture museum, which turned out to share its spacious modern building with the modern art gallery, and was really good. Lots of little models of buildings, and I even saw two Mondrian paintings (which I’d missed out on in Amsterdam last weekend).

Speeding to Stockholm

The high speed train journey to Stockholm was incredibly picturesque. Little painted wooden houses nestled by the sides of beautiful tree-lined lakes. We had some Danish Krona left over, and had already bought some lunch, so blew the rest on some beers and a small bottle of wine for later. I did look like a bit of an alcoholic carrying it all back from the buffet car though.

A night and a day in Stockholm

We started to feel a bit like the world was against us during our one night in Stockholm. We wandered around a bit then went to find a vegetarian buffet restaurant recommended in the guide book – when we got there we got extra excited because it had an amazing view over the city. But it had stopped serving an hour before at 9pm (vegetarians!). We eventually found some grub at a cafe, and following that decided to get the tunnelbana into the city centre to visit Stockholm’s Ice Bar (where everything’s made of ice). We arrived to find a sign outside saying it was closed for maintenance for 7 days. Humph. The night was rescued when we found a cool little morrocan style bar near our hotel, and the barman made me a very wonderful mojito – result.

I’ll write about the day in the next entry…

Wonderful wonderful Copenhagen

After a two hour afternoon kip we got our act together and hit Copenhagen. Wandered over to the harbour and found an Italian restaurant (it’s going to be a theme, since we’re both veggie and meat/fish features pretty heavily in Scandinavian cuisine). We found a bar later on in the ‘latin quarter’ which may/may not have been a gay bar – there were lots of guys, and it did seem on further inspection that they were all talking in couples, but whatever, it had amazing red and gold vintage wallpaper and we felt like we’d gone back in time 100 years.

Mission Helsinki

Me and Jane are off on a “work” trip to Helsinki to attend the Informal
European Theatre Meeting taking place there from 9th to 12th November.
Our mission is to get there without flying, and we’ve decided to take a
circular route around the Baltic Sea. We’ll pass through Belgium,
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden on the way out to Finland, and Estonia,
Lativa, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France on the way back.
It’s a bit of a long way round, but it should be quite an adventure.

Bruxelles Rendevous

Jane and I met up at Bruxelles-Midi train station, went straight to Haagen Daas, and got a belgian waffle down us.
We had about five hours to kill before our overnight train to Hamburg, so walked into the city and explored for a while. My geographer genes told me that if we walked up the hill we’d be sure to find something interesting, and we were rewarded with a big cathedral, lovely old narrow streets and courtyards, and a great little Italian restaurant where the owners treated you like family (and I got to do all the ordering in Italian, hooray).
Then it was into the poshest sleeper cabin I’ve ever been in for the train journey to Hamburg, complete with sink and towels in a little cabinet, and breakfast served on our cabin’s table in the morning. How very civilised.