Skansen

Day 2 in Stockholm was all about learning the history of Sweden and riding around on public transportation some more.  We visited Stockholms Stadhus (Stockholm's city hall) and dropped by the Riksdag (parliament building).  We'll hopefully tour Riksdag tomorrow if we have some time.

For lunch we stopped by the highly rated Östermalms Saluhall (indoor market fro food) and found a reasonably priced delicious meal.

Then we headed to Skansen, the world's first open air museum founded in 1891.  It's located on Djurgården (so we got to take the ferry again!), and is a minipicture of historical Sweden.  Buildings have been transported there to document how Swede's have lived through the centuries.  City houses from the 1800s, Farmsteads from the 1700s, churches, schoolhouses, town halls - all of these now have staff dressed in traditional clothing of the correct time period there to tell you about life as it was years ago.  We also saw traditional arts like furniture making, glass blowing, ceramic throwing, and baking, as it would have been done long ago.  The pastries were delicious.

Part of Skansen is also a zoo dedicated to celebrating and preserving animals that are native to the area.  We saw bison, elk, reindeer, wild boar, foxes, owls.  My favorite to watch were the four young brown bear cubs that were just born recently.  They ran, fought, tumbled, and splashed around in their enclosure while a HUGE momma bear stood nearby.

We spent the whole afternoon there and then decided it was time to find food and rest for a little while before we started seraching for a place to watch the Portugal/Wales game.  We picked up sandwiches at ICA, and then later settled on a little Irish pub called Patric's for the game.  I was pulling for Wales (I like an underdog), so I was a little sad about the outcome.

I was bad about taking pictures today...  Everything was too interesting I suppose.  I'll try to be better :)

Later gator.