Stockholm……continued (by Renee)

Today we explored Stockholm by foot…starting (as we always do) with a walking tour of the City.  

We learned lots about Swedish history (for instance…did you know that the Swedish nobility had King Gustav the Fourth declared insane and went to France and got a French general working under Napoleon to come be the King of Sweden.  Seriously…today’s royal family isn’t even Swedish – they are French!

We also saw the bank where the term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined…and heard the story including that after the bank robber/hostage taker served his 10 year sentence he moved to Thailand.  Two of the hostages attended his wedding in Thailand…clearly the experience made them life-long friends!

Our tasting tour of ice cream continues (did you know that Alex and I think a great new business idea would be to important Norwegian/Danish softis (very creamy soft serve, just like Mr Whippy in London) to the USA!)

We went on a mission to find really good Swedish meatballs for lunch…the first recommended place was not serving meatballs today, and the second was closed for vacation but gave a referral to a third place.  Overall we walked 1.5 miles to find “Nytore 6” … and had possibly the best meal we’ve had in months.  The meatballs were amazing, the homemade bread was so good…unfortunately Alex and I think that we might not really like IKEA meatballs anymore now that we have tasted what really good Swedish meatballs should be like.

This morning we got a surprise when what we THOUGHT was yogurt was not. It is crazy how you are in the grocery store and everything has letters you can identify – but you don’t really know what things are. When Google Translate fails…you end up with rice pudding for breakfast. (Which was just fine for Alex… Anna’s not a fan). (By the way, if you haven’t tried Google Translate yet, it is usually amazing…you just hold your cell phone camera over an item and the English translation shows up super-imposed over the text, right on the screen)

The forecast says our string of unbelievably nice, warm, dry days is over…so tomorrow we are doing lots of museums including the ABBA museum!  So excited!