Thanks for visiting! Since my most recent post in date order (Disneyland) I have also finished off Lisbon in February 2022 and Milan in April 2022. You can view that by using the menu above, or scrolling down (for like, forever) if you’re on the homepage.
Overview
Stockholm is the largest and capital city of Sweden, one of a group of countries that make up Scandinavia. Although a member of the EU they keep their own Krona (SEK) currency.
A cool stat early on is that the Stockholm area (archipelago) includes an incredible 24,000 individual islands! The main city area itself has 14 islands of varying sizes so you are never far away from water or a bridge!
What is Sweden famous for? Having given this zero thought, off the top of my head I’m going with IKEA, ABBA, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Vikings. Sweden also ranks amongst the happiest places to live in the world. A fun fact that regularly pops up on my Duolingo lessons is that the most common language learnt by people in Sweden is actually Swedish, mainly because of the amount of refugees taken in. 90 percent of Swedes can speak English.
Stockholm is only a 2-3 hour flight from the UK and also on popular European ferry routes. It borders Finland and Norway. Like these countries, Sweden is sparsely populated in difficult terrain especially in winter. Around 10% of the 10 million population lives in the capital.
ANOTHER fun fact (fucking hell three already) is that although Denmark doesn’t have a land border with Sweden, you can reach it by a road bridge! Where else can you say that? Let’s make a start else your heads going to explode with all this overwhelming information.
Ok just one more… Depending on when you visit will greatly affect not just the weather but also the amount of sunshine. Visiting in May meant we had sun from 4am to 10pm and even overnight it was never completely dark. In contrast, winter has very little time before sunrise and sunset, although it’s a little far south to miss out on sunlight altogether, unlike northern parts of Scandinavia. Luckily for our week, the sun was shining every day without any rain, but it does get breezy by the waterfront.
Flights and Accommodation
We flew from Birmingham with RyanAir that was incredibly cheap at £67 return. We did have a bit of a balls-up with the luggage that added a few quid on but that was our fault and not RyanAir squeezing every possible penny out of you after buying the airfare as per.
For the first time we booked an apartment instead of a hotel. We will definitely consider it again! The “ApartDirect Hammarby” was a great introduction getting used to the extra space.
The rooms were supplied with bed, kitchenette, living area (all in one room) with a separate bathroom including a washing machine. We booked the apartment first before considering the potential savings on breakfast. Our luck was in as there is a Lidl within a four minute walk.
This saved us money every day for breakfast that we would easily pay £20 per day in a hotel. We spent about £70 at the supermarket in total, although this included two Strawberry punnets at £7 each… Oops my currency conversation was not strong in that instance!
Getting Around
Bus, tram, metro, train and boat are all provided by SL and included in a travel card. For 7 days this cost us just £30, a bargain!
Transport is frequent, on time, safe, clean and easy to understand. Google maps worked really well integrating timetables. Boats are less frequent, like one every 30 minutes. We only caught one for novelty value, other times we never considered them to be time saving.
There are several ways to get to the airport. It was sad to know on arrival that the Express train was not in service due to it derailing, I think only two were injured which sounded like a miracle.
In addition to the express train, you can also catch the normal train, several coaches or obviously a taxi. We decided to use a Flixbus and cost just £10 arriving and £6 on the way back. Flixbus are kinda’ the European version of National Express, they have recently started operating in the UK too.
It took 30-40 minutes on the coach from airport to the central bus station, also part of the central train station. The coach was to eventually end up in Hamburg, Germany, so try not to nod off…
Costs
Our trip went from Sunday evening to late Friday evening. Flights were only £67 per person return and the apartment came in at £320 for 5 nights. We struggled to find a decent hotel for this price and considering we had kitchen facilities, and how nice the room and area was, I consider it very good value.
Travel costs covered above for public transport. The only Uber we caught was £8 for a 6.5km trip at midnight, so that wasn’t bad. When we travelled out of Stockholm, to Uppsala, we needed to buy an add-on to our travel pass that was £8 each.
Food will be expensive unless you stick to street vendors and fast food like we did (outside our apartment). A McDonald’s meal is around £7-9. We did enjoy a Max Burgers, similar to McDonald’s. One night we did have a Chinese in a restaurant. Two dishes, two drinks and a spring roll came to £32. There are a lot of Asian cuisine places that do an all you can eat buffet for around £25 each so that could be an option of you need filling. I didn’t have a beer but prices seems to be cheaper than expected, £6 in the hotspots, £4-5 elsewhere.
Hmmm what else… A bottle of coke will set you back around £2.50, bread £2, milk £1.50… in general grocery shopping is more expensive than in the UK. We didn’t buy too much else.
The museums and attractions we visited were priced between £10 to £25 per person. I didn’t have a problem with that.
We spent roughly £700 whilst there, meaning the trip total was around £1,150 for two people. This could have been trimmed a bit without luggage fees and sensible supermarket purchases, or eating at the apartment more instead of fast food.
What we didn’t do…
Early on in the trip I was worried about how big this section would be, as the size of Stockholm can be a bit overwhelming. Thankfully I write this without any regrets of missing out. I would have liked to have caught an ice hockey game, but no dice. And by dice, I mean fixtures.
Stockholm has a plethora of museums, so of course we didn’t visit them all, the thought alone fucking terrifies me. The ones that stick out (we missed) are the Nordic History Museum, Fotografiska photography museum and Skansen that is a outdoor museum similar to St Fagans in Wales. We visited the other good ones I hope!
There are bloody loads of churches to visit is that’s your thing. There are lots of boat tours where you can explore the city from a different viewpoint, you can even kayak! I would have liked to explore the Djurgarden island in more detail, this area is where the museums and theme park is but the rest of it looks like a huge park.
Additional day trips could be made to Birka, Sigtuna or Vaxholm. I’d be surprised if these would be better than our visit to Uppsala.
Our hotel was also over the road from a ski centre. Although it operates as a grass slope in summer I’m sure it would be better to go in winter.
Itinerary
Day One – Gamla Stan, Royal Palace & Avicii Arena
Technically our journey started on Sunday afternoon so we’ll call that day zero. We arrived at the airport at 10pm and got to our apartment around midnight after our FlixBus and Uber combo.
Waking up a little later than planned on the Monday, we first popped to Lidl to pick up some breakfast for the week. Once packed away and cereal consumed, we headed out.
Not really knowing where to go first, we decided to go to the tourist central, an island called Gamla Stan. The ‘old town’ was fascinating and similar to other European cities with its narrow cobbled streets, quirky boutiques and countless cafe’s.
On the tram here we figured that the Royal Palace in Gamla Stan had their daily changing of the guard at 12:15pm, so that was really good timing. We enjoyed the parade for about 20 minutes in the sunshine. I say enjoy, without wanting to offend, it does all seem a bit daft to me. However, it attracted a big crowd who I’m sure enjoyed the pompousness of it.
It was a short walk from here past an obelisk tribute to King Gustav III and down to the waterfront. You could walk for eternity around the circumference of land with the aid of the odd bridge. We will visit Gamla Stan again later on.
Although we didn’t have a set plan for the week, we did want to do things as soon as we could, just to be safe as we’d expect to find loads of other things we would want to explore whilst here. Therefore, our next stop was slightly south of the centre to a large entertainment complex. This area includes restaurants, a shopping centre, the 30,000 seater Tele2 Arena and the Avicii arena formally known the Stockholm Globe Area prior to the musicians untimely death in 2018.
The Avicii Arena is cool as its the world’s biggest spherical building! It can house a multitude of events such as concerts and is home to two ice hockey teams. For us though, we were interested in the ‘SkyView’ lift that would take us up the outside of the building for the best views over Stockholm.
I appreciated how the platform was able to go scale the curved shape whilst still keeping the walking platform flat. This remains an enigma now. It wasn’t something I achieved whilst playing with Lego.
From the top you had a view of the main centre albeit not really suitable for good photos. I did take the opportunity to have a photo with the football stadium in the background (Sweden v Wales would be a great trip if you have deep pockets).
From here we continued to have a brief look closer to the stadium before getting the tram back to the hotel for some lunch and I’d be lying if I didn’t say a quick snooze.
We really didn’t do a lot else on the first day. I did spend some time trying to organise the rest of the week, which meant booking a few things. We had a nice stroll around the local neighbourhood before going for a Chinese nearby and an early night.
Day Two – Boat tour, Djurgarden & Vasa Ship Museum
I think one of the must do’s in Stockholm would be to take a boat tour to explore the archipelago. There are a few day trips worthy but the most popular one seemed to be a three hour cruise to Vaxholm and straight back.
The tour, provided by Strommer was £30 each and left at 10:30am. This gave us plenty of time to find out where it left (harder than it sounds with hundreds of boats waterside!). We got there early, so I was a bit miffed when I noticed I’d been in the wrong queue. Thankfully, we found a seat outside to get the best out of the view. Half an hour in to the trip we had 3 blankets between us so dress warmly for this. The folk inside who didn’t brave the breeze, either had a posh meal (with limited view of the whole point of going on the boat??) or downstairs looking through small windows.
The tour provided running commentary of sights on the way, such as museums, the theme park, several embassy’s of other countries, the worlds most efficient water sewerage system (y’know, the usual) which was less frequent the further we sailed. Still, it was pleasant to see all of the summer houses on small islands that looked like something from a Disney movie. Many of these houses are only used in the summer due to their lack of insulation and access issues as the narrower areas can freeze over.
Just after an hour we arrived at Vaxholm to drop a few passengers off who were locals or wanted to stay for a few hours. There didn’t seem much to see there apart from the Vaxholm Fortress. The fortress didn’t really get a good review. Built to provide a defence for attacking ships, over time enemies weaponry became more powerful and easily penetrated the building. That, and the gap became too small for a lot of vessels and they just chose another route instead! I agree that it is better served as a house for the museum as it currently is today.
Once back in Stockholm, we visited Djurgaden , a large island of mainly park, woodland and the aforementioned theme park, museums and embassy’s.
Museum-wise, you really are spoilt for choice here. Vasa ship museum, Nordic (cultral history) museum, Viking history museum, Skansen open air museum, the ABBA museum, an alcohol museum, the ‘museum of wrecks’, a diving museum, Liljevechs art exhibition… and probably more but I’m fed up of listing them now.
We did try (note: try) to have an e-scoot around the island first but as a lot of the cycle paths ran alongside roads I don’t think Mikayla got over 2kmph before we gave it up as bad idea.
Instead we chose a museum over an ice-cream lunch, which was an effort for me as I am hard to please with these things (museums not ice cream) – and decided on the Vasa Museum which topped a lot of lists we reviewed.
The Vasa Museum is dedicated to the Vasa warship that was built in 1928, only to sink just 1.3 kilometers in to her maiden voyage. What is deserving of the ship to have such a museum, is that the ship was raised after 333 years, the biggest effort to lift such a large vessel and bloody hell is it well preserved.
The museum spans four floors and only at the bottom can you truly get a grasp of how big the bloody thing is. I thought the museum gave easy to understand information about it’s subject, but I was confused by the fact that there is no real direction to follow.
That was enough for us for day two, apart from tea at a Max Burger joint – better than McDonald’s I must say!
It came to me before bed that night… We spent the day visiting a castle that couldn’t defend itself and a ship that couldn’t float! A win for celebrating disappointment!
Day Three – Uppsala, City Hall and Sunset
We do like a day trip somewhere when going somewhere for 3+ days and on this occasion, we chose Uppsala. I cannot get my head around that it’s the fourth biggest city in Sweden (Gothenburg and Malmo are 2 and 3) as it appeared very small, especially the centre, yet Wikipedia tells me there are over 177,000 people living there.
Uppsala was very quiet and peaceful when we visited. It is located 70km north of Stockholm, so about a 40-minute train ride.
There were a few sights we wanted to see on our short trip, which started off with Uppsala castle. We didn’t want to investigate this too much but it provided a good view of the area and had some nice gardens surrounding the area.
Uppsala University, more specifically the Carolina Rediviva library up next, practically next door to the castle. The university itself is the oldest centre of higher education in Scandinavia. The library was rather modern inside and busy with students. I don’t know why but I was thinking of something like the Trinity College in Dublin!
The library did have a small exhibition though. The centrepiece of this was definitely The Codex Argenteus or ‘silver bible’, originally containing 4th-century translation of the Christian Bible in Gothic language. Quite fascinating.
Next and our final stop before lunch was the Uppsala Cathedral, again a short walk away. Apparently, the style of the church is French Gothic. I’m going to put my own style on the building and call it ‘nice’. I liked the look of the brick and the symmetry of the building, that did look domineering with its two spires. The cathedral is the tallest church building in Scandinavia.
You should already be aware I am not the slightest bit interested in most religious aspects of religious buildings, although it was hard not to appreciate the architecture inside.
Lunch was rudely interrupted by a flock of birds swiping a portion of my fries…. But I’ve told myself not to return to that tragic event. By the time we got back to Stockholm we had time to enjoy a few hours walking around by the central station and City Hall.
For the sunset, we travelled slightly off the beaten track to a place called Skinnarviksberget. I found out about here on a small travel blog I’ve since been unable to relocate. On top of the rocks that we’re tricky and a bit unsafe to ascend we enjoyed the sunset at 9:45.
The photo below with the air balloon in the background is a personal favourite of the trip! Now experts on the buses and metro we were home in no time to watch most of the Europa League final on the tele (i.e. Kay went to bed).
Day Four – Nobel Prize museum, Abba museum and Grona Lund
Another sunny morning for our last full day around Stockholm. We did initially consider a £70pp boat trip to a place called Birka, where you can experience the ‘old way of life’ in Sweden, but with costs starting to be of slight concern and time we decided to look at alternatives on our doorstep.
One thing Mikayla fancied was the Nobel Prize Museum, so with nothing better to do we headed back to Gamla Stan.
The museum is located in a popular square yet there was very little queue for the 10am opening. We paid for our admission and was offered a free audio guide starting at 10:15am. The below photo shows a track featuring all previous winners, hundreds of them, that slowly circle the room of the museum. I found this a little pointless as you cannot read the text and it would take hours to complete a full cycle. Luckily the screens dotted around are much more convenient.
The audio guide was really good, presented by a gentlemen that obviously knew what he was talking about and shown interest in the subject. The guide was only 30 minutes long, which I appreciated, and covered the history of Alfred Nobel, the six prize categories, how you get nominated for a prize and the award ceremony.
The exhibits were limited due to the size of the museum – again I didn’t mind this! – but did show a few designs that were well-known or fascinating if not both.
The tour ended letting us browse through the computerised registers with some displays such as the transistor radio, the first form of penicillin, a piece of the berlin wall, an armband from the Red Cross in WW1, as well as more sensitive items such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, the Euro (plus the EU itself) and invention of plastic.
I did think of how I could one day win the prize. Apart from services to alcohol consumption on Wales away games I couldn’t think of much, even then I’m not sure if that would fit in to a category of Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Economic Services or Peace…
Leaving the museum we had some time to kill as our tickets to a theme park were not until 4pm in the afternoon. We took a pleasant walk from Gamla Stan to a small island housing Parliament (Riksdagshuset) to a garden Kungsträdgården before going underground to go back to our apartment for lunch, a £3 ready meal from Lidl!
Something else I should pick up on here that populated a few ‘things to do’ lists I came across, was simply to visit multiple tube stations as so many have artistic interiors and could be seen as art galleries in their own right. Personally we didn’t seek these, but the ones we came by including the above in the Kungsträdgården metro station was a lot more pleasing than the usual theatre posters and endless tiling.
Our break for lunch was short and sweet as we finally decided to visit the ABBA museum before the theme park, primarily to take some photos to show the mother as the band has been around or a large part of her life. I’ve also bagged a few birthday gifts for her from the shop so I hope she’ll miss this sentence when she is forced to read it!
A bit pricey at £25 each but just about good value. As with many other museums the exhibits were neatly organised in a small area and you couldn’t go anywhere without songs playing, supporting their motto “come in walking, leave dancing”.
I’m not the biggest fan of ABBA myself, so I was happy to learn about the formation from the band, their rise to stardom singing Waterloo to win the 1974 Eurovision song contest, their many years of fame and ultimate separation.
One piece that did stand out was the below picture providing the words for Chiquitita. Before paying attention to the lyrics and accompanying text from Bjorn, I never noticed how powerful the message is contained in the song. Already one of my favourite ABBA tracks, I think this escalated it to the top and get’s Chrissy’s coveted ‘banger’ label.
Right then, let’s get to the theme park stuff!
I’ll say from the start I’m trying not to over-write about this place. “Gröna Lund” is a theme park in the same area as the collection of museums including ABBA so it was only a few minutes walk here. I think the park only opened for summer maybe the week before so it was very busy with adolescents giddy and hyper on sweets (or weed and cheap cider, who knows).
What I found most fascinating about the park was that it is in SUCH a small perimeter, guessing the size of six football pitches? And in this small space, you have loads of rides, stalls, food outlets. The picture above shows FOUR rides that all were very good. The rollercoasters intertwined that well, it would make the wires at the back of your TV jealous.
For £25 an adult, the park allows entry, unlimited rides and two ‘fast-passes’. We didn’t spend a krona above the entry fee, but did notice the prices were very reasonable for refreshments (relate back to my shit €16 pizza in Disney).
I’m also going to sound over-excited about the quality of the rides. Although I only went on five, had I had free reign or be arsed to queue a little there were at least 10 rides I would have enjoyed. After much deliberation I honestly can’t think of ten at Disneyland.
First up was ‘JetLine’ using my pass, a good coaster without any loops but very pleasing for starters. With people still piling in to the park I decided to join a short queue for the “big-fucking-swingy-thing” ride called Eclipse. I’ve been on these types of rides before in Chessington and Prata Wien (Vienna) but this was the tallest. Cue questionable looks at the four thin chains that was going to support me.
No. I wasn’t allowed to have my phone on me during the ride.
Yes. I was willing to sacrifice the phone, other peoples safety and a potential telling off to provide you with the best possible coverage of my trips.
Weeeeeeee…
Back down to Earth (device in hand) I next tried the “fucking-weird-looking-spinny-thing” coaster called Insane.
Now rides rarely properly ‘scare’ me, I’m not exactly gonna die am I? But jeez this one took it out of me! Simply following the track would be an ordeal itself, but you’re actually going along the track in a spinning bloody ninja shuriken. That and the fact I had to remove my hoodie just to fit on the the ride, I wobbled off just happy I hadn’t given birth to my intestines. Bravo. I haven’t been on millions of rides, but I think that’s my favourite for uniqueness.
The penultimate ride was the “fucking-high-free-fall-droppy-pole-thing” called Ikaros, seen on the right of picture. By the time I got fastened in (just about) and going up, I was just getting over the last ride. Once at the top of this, the ride was considerate enough not just to drop you down, but to first place you flat facing the ground. And go. People my size really shouldn’t be plummeting towards ground level at 90kmph, glorified seatbelt or not.
The final ride, “the-one-with-fucking-loads-of-twisty-loopy-bits” called Monster, I think is quite new and probably the fan favourite. Using our last fastpass I waited no more than five minutes. Not much in the way of photos of that, sorry I was too busy enjoying myself. A list of all rides can be found here.
We could have stayed for a few more hours, had dinner, queued up for other rides but I was more than satisfied. I did intend that night to make a start on this blog but blame Harry Potter being put on Netflix. We did however catch the public SL boat on the way home…. really wasn’t very time saving, but its a boat, on holiday.
Day Five – Wandering before home
Our flight home wasn’t actually until 11pm today so we did have a full day had we needed it. The luggage was a bit of a pain…. we could either leave it in the hotel, unsecured, away from the centre or pay up to £30 to store it at the central station. I wasn’t pay the equivalent of ten pints for that.
As luck would have it today was the earliest and freshest I had awoken, and given our disastrous attempt at getting Kay on a scooter earlier in the trip, I decided to leave her be and go for a ride for an hour.
We didn’t really do much on the Sodermalm island throughout the week so I followed the cycle paths along the waterways to Fotografiska, a place with several art exhibitions that is included on a lot of to-do lists, but not for us.
I was up two of those bloody plinths 12 hours prior….
Choosing a different route back, it did confirm what a pleasant area Stockholm is. Many places have a serious lack of affordable housing but I noticed the City is particularly difficult to reside in for work or study without rich Mummy and Daddy.
Bags packed, homemade beans on toast for breakfast and confirming we had checked out, we caught the tram for what felt like the 50th time in to the centre with no real plan.
After picking up our souvenir (Christmas tree decoration as is common practice for us) in Gamla Stan we headed back to the Royal Palace on to the Nobel museum, simply to take a photo of two buildings that appear to be ‘the photo you have to take’. Expensive cafe’s? OK. Done though.
Another walk past the parliament building, we found this small restaurant called “McDonald’s” for lunch* and headed to our last minute thing to do, the Swedish History Museum.
*The only reason we had McDonald’s was because we hadn’t had one already, like it may be some form of achievement or world record in years to come! The spicy nuggets with Korean BBQ sauce though! Delish.
Anyway, the museum. It was OK. It had areas for the prehistories, Viking era, a timeline of Swedish history, medieval art and a ‘gold room’.
By now, I’ll be honest and say I was a bit museum-ed out. Thankfully the tour came with a free audio guide so I was able to slowly wander around and listen rather than read every little plaque.
The gold room was the thing I was looking forward to the most so we left that room until last. I can tell you that it housed 52 kilograms of gold and 200kg of silver, but a lot of that was jewellery, coins and scraps (this is why I’ll never get a job as a museum guide folks).
A journey allllll the way back to the apartment to collect our bags, then allllll the way back to the centre to catch our FlixBus, before we knew it we were through security waiting for our plane. Worth noting the airport shops etc shut around 8pm. You’re left with a toilet and a water fountain, not to be confused with each other.
Thanks for reading!
How Not 2 Life 