After refreshing a bit in the hostel we went for a free guided city tour. For about 1,5 hour a nice guide showed us around central Stockholm and told us about the history of each place and also provided a lot of quite interesting trivia. You know Swedish semlas? It is a kind of very sweet desert, buns with almond paste and whipped cream. So, yeah, a swedish king Adolf Frederick ate 14 of these and died.

We were shown around a bit of Gamla Stan (the old town), The Parliment House, The Opera house, Royal Swedish Academy, Royal Palace, some nice parks and much more.











 











Esspresso house was our second house there, it's a swedish coffee house brand with delicious coffee and lunches. I do reccomend.

 


Then we walked down the Strandvagen street by the yacht harbour to reach the Djurgarden - a very green island on which there are located numerous museums, skansen and parks. It used to be the royal hunting grounds before. The weather was truly beautiful, warm and pleasent we enjoyed every ray of sun we got.



 








   
Oh, the Vasa museum was something worth mentioning. It is about a spectacular battleship Vasa from the early 1600s, which sank just 20 minutes after it departed. It laid in the depths of the Baltic Sea for 333 years, before it was dragged back to the land. Now it is has its own museum. What is amazing, that the ship is in 98% original, only 2% of the ship displayed is reconstructed. This ship was gigantic and really impressive. I had an impression that Davy Jones and his men would pop out of the wreck any minute...


And there we were back to casual walking around the harbour and northern-central part of the city.


 


 

















 
The next day we kicked off with an idea od visiting the art gallery, but it turned out that it was closed. Instead, we went to the museum of photography, which for me was one of the best I have ever attended to. With an impressive display of works by P. Demanchelier, Weegee and a few others it was a feast for a photography enthusiast like me. Located on the southern island from Gamla Stan, we walked there having a brilliant view on the old town and yacht harbour from the opposite side.





The weather was so nice we spent a little too much time chilling on the grass in the Berzelii Park. Not a single regret. It is funny, though, that since coming to Denmark the prettiest day I have experienced in... Sweden. More precisely - 500km north from Horsens. Oh well.



Next we hopped on a hop-on-hop-off cruise boat and cruised around for a bit.












Then we got a proper walk around the old town, Gamla Stan. I really loved it.

To be perfectly honest, the architecture reminded me of Warsaw's old town, but bigger and prettier. The style, the colours and character of the narrow streets seemed familiar. I was expecting a more hanseatic style recognisable in Gdańsk, Toruń, Amsterdam or Copenhagen, so I was a little bit surprised with this varsavian association.























  





Last, but not least, we climbed to a viewpoint (Gondolen restaurant) in order to admire a dashing sunset burning the skies over the panorama of Stockholm's islands. It was one if these sunsets that you remember for a lifetime.