Hello again, our dear readers. We just came back from a fantastic 2 week trip to Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. We are going to start the blog with Stockholm as the photos from Iceland still need some post-processing work. Here we go!!

We took a very early flight from Reykjavik to Stockholm that arrived around 2 pm. From the airplane, we could see  some of the 30,000 islands from the  Stockholm archipelago! The land area of Sweden is the 4th largest in Europe.

From the airport, we took a local train to the city center. This was the cheapest option even though it takes about 15 minutes more.  We (especially Sarah) were glad to be in a little warmer weather.

If you haven’t heard, Scandinavian Countries are ridiculously expensive,  this hostel room cost $110 USD.  Pretty shitty, but we rather spend our money in attractions than in the hotel. Also, we have slept in way worse places (looking at you India!)

Tired but eager, we started to explore the city, we were staying in an area called Sodermalm, which is south of the city center. This area is where all the young Swedish hipsters live and supposedly is the nightlife center.

We were starving so we looked at Trip Advisor for a good nearby place. We found a Turkish place that was amaaaaazing. It was so good that we didn’t even feel bad about how un-local this meal was.

We walked past the beautiful Katarina Kyrka. Several famous Swedes are buried in the cemetery surrounding the church, most notably the assassinated Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.

Our next stop was the Fotografiska Museum (Photography Museum). We didn’t really know what to expect, but this museum blew our minds.

The museum currently has a women photography exhibit. It was basically soft porn as we counted dozens of exposed boobs. Pretty fun!

The next exhibit was from Christian Tagliavini called Voyages Extraordinaires. This was absolutely breathtaking. The artistic quality of these photographs inspired by Jules Verne: ‘A Journey to the Center of the Earth’ blew me away.

The other exhibit was from Hans Strand. The landscape photographer chooses to direct his camera towards landscapes where nature has completely given way to human interference – landscapes more manmade than natural.

The photographs are from the poisoned Rio Tinto River in Spain, which is the most polluted river in the world due to its proximity to ore mines.

The museum’s rooftop cafe was beautiful as well; we got a couple of local beers while looking at the panoramic window.

We could see the Grona Lund amusement park (we didn’t visit it), and several other islands that we will be visiting the next day.

We were walking towards the city center when we found an amazing open bar overlooking the Old City.

We could not waste the opportunity to mingle with the locals while trying a Swedish IPA. Disclaimer, they are still years behind the quality of craft beers from the U.S.A.

Nice view, nice company, nice city.

We started our walk back to our hotel area, there is a lot of art on the streets.

The streets are so charming.

There is a beautiful viewpoint area overlooking the city that everybody recommends to visit during sunset. We truly enjoyed the view and the nice walk around it.

The view of the Gamla Stan (Old Town) is beautiful, we would be visiting this area in a couple of days (Blog post to come).

The city, with about 2 million habitants, is full of parks and trees. They also plant a bunch of nice tulips everywhere.

Sarita enjoying a break from walking!

We went out for dinner a little bit late. I took us a while to find a place to eat due to places being closed already and the prices on the menus were not very inviting. We ended up eating at a restaurant/bar on the main plaza. We got the world famous Swedish meatballs with dingleberry sauce that was delicious. IKEA ones are not even close as good as these ones.

Interesting fact of the day: The main official language of Sweden is Swedish (svenska), but the country also has 5 other official languages – Finnish, Yiddish, Sami, Meänkieli and Romani.  The minority languages have been legally recognized to protect the cultural and historical heritage of their respective speech communities. These communities are given certain rights on that basis, such as school education in their language, and its use in dealing with governmental agencies.