Sentimental in Berlin Blog: Easter in Scandinavia

Hei all my Dearest Sentimentals!

I have not been active lately because of university demands, but we have now a month of holiday and let me show you how I spent the Easter weekend in Stockholm! :)

I took so many pictures that I decided to write up a summary trip report for now and later in the week I will add more smaller entries for example about the cool underground, the beautiful waterfronts and what we were eating in Stockholm. :)

I arrived on Saturday early morning to this gorgeous city. Luckily the weather was fantastic, therefore even though I bought the 72-hours travel card, which costed around 23£, I still decided to walk instead of taking the metro to our lovely waterfront Radisson Blu Strand Hotel, which was the hotel in the Swedish crime series Modus.

Radisson Blu Strand Hotel - Our Hotel

So while I was waiting for my friend to join me, I had an initial look in the centre, where the Parliament Building and the Royal Palace is, with the fast paced water flowing under the numerous bridges.

Parliament in Stockholm

Stockholm Royal Palace's waterfront

Changing of the Guards in Swedish Royal Palace

Sweden and Scandinavia in general are famous about their design, be it textile, furniture or houses. Just think about IKEA and its successes, therefor I also went to some shops besides the many souvenir shops lining Drottninggatan. In an upcoming post I will be showing you some shopwindows we found in this cool city.
Although Moomin by Tove Jansson is from Finland, I think the Swedes also rightly think its theirs, since Tove Jansson was born to a Swedish community within Finland and actually Moomin and friends can be found everywhere in the Scandi countries.

Beautiful Swedish Textiles

Swedish magnets from souvenir shops

The famous Moomin and his friends collection in a souvenir shop

We heard that the underground is definitely worth to be checked out! Unfortunately, not all stations are funky and very surprisingly the people we asked, even in the hotel, did not know which ones were the special ones! So we jumped on the metro and played a hop on hop off game to find cool metro stations in Stockholm, which I will show you in another post.

Art in the underground station in Stockholm

Hmm since we walked most of the time, but we had the travel card, we decided to take some routes which I would also advise if you visited Stockholm!
Route bus #2 is called the tourist or sightseeing bus, without being an actual sightseeing bus. It's a normal bus, but it really takes you through almost each and every famous landmark in the central.

For this small city compared to London, their transport is amazing! Not only underground and buses but they also have trams! We have also had a ride on an old tram :) where a completely unexpected thing happened. We were speaking in Hungarian, and yes it is now almost normal that in London we hear Hungarian around, but would not have thought about Stockholm. Well, we were discussing and wondering about Stockholm when a lady in her mid 50s has just answered us in Hungarian, although she has been born there and her parents were refugees from 1956.

The blue old tram in Stockholm is a nice way of travelling

Hop on to the old tram!

And this is me inside

If I remember well, the old tram took us to Kungstradgården. This place is famous for its cherry blossom trees! You must have seen photos on Facebook shared about this place! Well it is in Stockholm and blossoming every year in spring!

Cherry blossom blooming at Kungstradgården

The 72-hour travel card is also valid on boats between the different islands! And if you have it why not use it! :) Thanks to its location, Stockholm lies on many islands and is surrounded by water, providing beautiful waterfront views over churches, palaces and islands!

It is still chilly even though the sun is warm!

Katarina Church

Waterfront view in Stockholm

The boat we jumped on took us to the island: Djurgården. Unfortunately as it was Easter or maybe because we were there on Monday and Sunday, many things were closed. Otherwise this island is full of with things to do!

There is the famous Vasa Museum: the Vasa is the world's biggest and I think one and only intact one-piece ship from the 17th century, that has been brought to the surface!

Vasa

The ABBA Museum can also be found here!

And the Nordic Museum as well, it's like Museum island in Berlin! Everything is together!

Nordic Museum

The Skansen is an outdoor museum and zoo in the middle of the island!

Lastly, there is a massive amusement park: Grona Lund and lots of green space to just sit down and enjoy the sun!

Funky tree in Djurgården

Boats in Djurgården

In these lovely three days, we did not care that food in Stockholm does not come cheap! We wanted to try the taste of Scandinavia which includes fish, mussels and reindeer! Yes read it well, reindeer. We mainly had nice dinners and random coffee and cake on our way, but I will write more about this next time! ;) We spent our first lovely meal in Sture Hof, where the below picture was taken too.