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Yesterday was the premier event of this trip. Also the last event we booked on this trip. Last night the three of is went to the Eurovision Grand Final. Of course by now you all know that as we have been talking about it for 6 months. Well the big night has come and it was worth the wait. What a fantastic night we had. And as promised, a blog entry. But we did spend our day in Stockholm so this entry will be focused on the day and I will write a blog for Eurovision later.
We spent the morning learning once again that Stockholm does not have a single available computer and downloading photos in this city is never going to happen. So after walking to the Lidingö town centre to find the library closed we continued onto the centre of Stockholm. We did buy some very nice jam cookies from a very enthusiastic parent babbling at us in rapid Swedish without taking a breath long enough to recognise our facial expressions screamed.......huh we don't speak your language. But after she gave us an equally excitable spiel in English we bought some biscuits.
At the bus stop while waiting for the bus to Ropsten station we observed a dog training class where the humans were jumping, bobbing and side stepping around while the dogs were, I think, expected to ignore their behaviour. Some of the dogs appeared to want to avoid their behaviour with incredible Swedish efficiency.
With equal efficiency, the bus arrived and we hopped on for the 10 mins run off the island to the metro station at Ropsten on the main island of Stockholm. Everything geographical in Stockholm needs an island reference as there are hundreds of them and the city itself is build across 28 of various sizes. Anyway, I digress, but you love it. Off the train at Gamla Stan station and up to a cold and windy Stockholm street. The sunshine we have been enjoying for the last week or so has definitely b*****ed off for a bit. Therefore a quick decision to head for the palace and enjoy the warmth of the last 2 sections of the tour tickets we bought on Friday. This was worth it, not only for being in the warm, the Palace Fire exhibition was about the original royal palace which burnt down in the late 1600s.
Stockholm had a beautiful medieval palace on the hill of Gamla Stan. By the 1600s the Swedes had obviously seen enough building fires spread so had incorporated a degree of house fire preventative measure. The castle had staff to specifically monitor the fires burning throughout the palace building. On one day on the late 1600s, the staff must have been taking a break as a fire took control of a lower room of the castle and spread through the timber floors, walls and stairs with such ferocity that the palace and all its antiques, art and furniture were destroyed. As a result the fire warden for the night was charged and punished with walking the gauntlet 7 times. The Gauntlet being all the soldiers in two rows with batons beating you as you ran from one end of there line to the other and back. But this was probably the birth place of Swedish efficiency to safety and pat downs at events. This I will come to later as I had 2. We enjoyed the museum covering the history of this palace and looking at the small amount of surviving art and the basement levels of the original palace that fill with debris and ash, but did ultimately survive the fire.
After this we had another quick walk outside and an even quicker photo stop as the weather was still a pleasant 7 degrees, windy and overcast in a way only the Nordic countries can understand, and entered the Antiquities Museum. This is not a uniquely Swedish exhibition but much more an art exhibition of the Swedish collection of stolen Greek and Roman statues. But doesn't every country have the odd piece of stolen art lying around their galleries. It was a small but interesting exhibition and again some things are very European. So after a very cold morning, which the bowl of hot chocolate in Gamla Stan accompanied by a cinnamon scroll could not ward off, we decided to head back to the hotel for lunch and a snooze before Eurovision tonight.
Written by Rod
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