Stockholm part 1

We made it to wonderful Stockholm and met my sister Kate at their local underground station. Kate drove us back to their house to see their kids, Ben, Finley and Maja's cousins: Anna and Sarah.

Goodness gracious me what a place! Kate, Stephen, Anna and Sarah live in an absolutely gorgeous part of Stockholm complete with the recent theme of trampoline. Not surprisingly Bjorn from ABBA lives around the corner.

Not only do their live in a simply stunning part of the world, they are a 5 min walk from the water and a little beach. They even have a diving board which we had a bit of fun jumping off. It took a while to convince Ben but he jumped in the end.

 

 

We got back to their house after a bit of of a dip for dinner. All the the cousins were enjoying each other's company which was lovely to see after a year apart. The whole next day the kids spent just playing with each other and another trip down to the beach. All the while Delia and Kate when to the carboot sale of the century. It was so big they only made it half way through after a whole day. They got so completely lost in their shopping they lost each other.

The next day we went to central Stockholm to visit a place called Junibacken. Junibacken and its famous story train (no, I'd never heard of it either) are the home of Astrid Lindgren and other children's authors' stories. We got to sit in this little carriage that moved along, up and down around and about through lots of beautifully designed and sculptured scenes of stories, though curiously not Pippi Longstocking. It was very interesting and some of the stories were not what I expected at all. One in particular was very sombre and Finley told me, “I don't want to read that sad story!” Fair enough, I didn't want to read it either.

 

Junibacken

Story time in Junibacken

After the story train we watched a play in Swedish about some other characters from the story of the Moomins by Tove Jansson and the last Dragon. It was at this point that I realised my Swedish is in fact fairly crap. I had fooled myself into thinking it wasn't too bad after chatting in Swedish to Kate and Stephen's neighbours. They thought I'd lived in Sweden for a year! Alas I think I just nodded at the right times.

We then wandered into town and stumbled across the changing of the guard. Very different to Buckingham Palace, but strolling through the city did remind us what a beautiful city Stockholm is.