Monday, August 06, 2012

We sailed into Stockholm under overcast skies …. Just like our “June gloom” at home.  We decided to take the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour since we only had 5 hours before sailing again.  Stockholm is built on 14 islands and the architecture is more “minimal” than what we saw in Germany and Russia.  Lots of buildings joined to the one next to it, sharing a common front wall. Everyone lives in apartments in these European cities.

Typical building in Stockholm

 The income tax for the citizens like us is 34%, while the wealthy pay up to 54% !  The entire country became Protestant because the Pope wanted to make a Dane the archbishop and the Swedish King didn’t want a Dane.  The Pope wouldn’t listen to the King, so they converted and confiscated all of the possessions of the Pope.  Not smart of the Pope, huh?

About 800,000 people live in Stockholm and there are about 200,000 boats.  There is ferry service to Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Denmark.  It’s interesting that the only place we have had to show our passport is Russia !

Public employees

Stockholm has a lot of beautiful parks and a lot of water.  We could envision living here, if we could speak the language or stand the cold.  We stayed on the bus and headed back to port but didn’t realize that we had to press the stop button in order to get off.  I had taken my small laptop and was on the free internet on the bus, which was better than we could get on the ship !   

Alandsbaken --- bank

One of the many statues

So, we got off the bus at the next stop.  This was in “Old Town” Stockholm, so we wandered around a bit.  I had to have some of the renowned Swedish coffee, and it was really quite good.  We then stopped at a little café and selected a ham-and-cheese quiche and raspberry cake.   

Cafe Nova

Raspberry cake and shy shop girl

We also had to use their restroom, of course.

Telephone Booth

We then took the bus back to the ship.  The ship sailed at 2 PM and had to exit through 54 miles of the archipelago with many, many small islands.  It was very beautiful and we picked out several islands we could claim as our own …..

Leaving Stockholm

Tonight is the Formal Night and lobster dinner, so we rested a while.  Then we got all dressed up, had our pictures taken, and went in to dinner.  I had lobster and large tiger shrimp while Craig had short ribs, since he had scallops the night before.

We always sit with other people and some of them have been very interesting.  Last night we dined with a couple from Scotland with whom we had dined two night before …. they were delightful !  There are also a lot of people from California on this cruise.