Spring-time in Stockholm

Stockholm is one third water...

....one third park....



...and one third city.



It is also a hundred percent cute. Here is a public bathroom:

 Here is a phone booth:

And here is a bridge.



When we visited friends in Stockholm a few weeks back, when the city was flooded with spring.The whole world smelled like lilacs.





Our friends live on Kungsholmen, an island brimming with young people. We saw them in full force, running around the island, picnicking by the water, and sunbathing. We have never seen so many buff, happy-looking people in one place.

We expected to find a city -- instead, we often felt as if we were in the middle of a wedding, or a sappy rom com. (Imagine living in the grassy church scene at the end of Funny Face for a week! Only Fred and Audrey were missing.) We couldn't go for a walk without seeing baby birds -- we counted five different kinds. Unfortunately, no good documentation for the goslings, signets, and more obscure sorts of baby duck we encountered. A mallard, and our apologies.












We saw willows weeping, fields of lush dandelions and banks of violets.


We played mini-golf....

....went running, and biked, and even kayaked around the islands, all the while shepherded by our lovely hosts. 

Stockholm is perfect for biking, and we biked everywhere, stopping for fika (the Swedish word for coffee + sweet snack), and enjoying the sunshine. Our hosts were charmed by the warm weather, and we were delighted to be able to move around without breaking a sweat.
 

It was so beautiful out, that we had a hard time going inside. We did make it into the national church, where the royal family has marriages and baptisms. A wonderful impromptu song broke out from other visitors. 

And we had to go in to see the Vasa, a ship which set out on her maiden voyage in 1628, and promptly sank. The Baltic Sea is brackish, and the Vasa remained well-preserved underwater until 1961, when a massive international team managed to pull her up, whole. The ship may not be sea-worthy, but we were impressed anyway.

We didn't expect to enjoy Swedish food as much as we did (Mary Wollstonecraft is far out of date, but she was so damning of the fare that her censure stuck). The tradition of sandwiches for breakfast made us extremely happy, as did other sandwiches: here, skagen, shrimp mixed with caviar and dill on toast, made by our hosts. 

On the sweeter end of the spectrum, we tried chocolate balls and princess torte, and were not in the least disappointed.

Well, Nick was.

But disappointments couldn't linger long. There was so much else to do, and see, and eat, and smell, and chat about. 

 

 

There were cliffs to climb and views to see, grass to loll in and flowers to gaze upon.

 

 

It was a wonderful week of being outside in a beautiful city with dear friends.