(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

On our first day in Stockholm, we had an unforgettable experience at an international soccer game between Sweden and Brazil.  However, we also found a lot of other things to like about Sweden’s capital city.  Today’s post is about our second day in Stockholm.

Stockholm offers a multi-day combination tourist pass called the Stockholm Card that includes all public transit, museums and a host of other attractions.  We easily made it pay for itself, although we raced around at a blistering pace.  We began with a tour of the Royal Palace (Kungliga Slottet), the Postmuseum and a boat tour of the downtown area.    The Palace was appropriately huge and opulent; the Postmuseum included oddities such as a realistic portrait of a Swedish postal director from the early 1900s that was made entirely from postage stamps!  It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen:  kind of like a mosaic but using stamps instead of stones or pieces of glass.

The boat tour turned out to be rather brief (it was free, after all) but it was still nice to see Stockholm from another perspective.  It is built on 14 islands and, as you’ll see from my next blog post, has quite a fascinating naval history.

We worked up quite an appetite navigating the narrow streets of Gamla stan (the oldest part of Stockholm) and had a fun outdoor lunch at one of the local restaurants.  Downtown restaurants generally have a lunch special (called “Dagens rätt“) with a price corresponding to the local “lunch allowance”, so we took the opportunity to have some Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce.  In the afternoon, we went to the Nobel Museum [“Nobelmuseet“].  This was important for us to see but the last “site” of the  day was, to our surprise, even more impressive.

Carl Milles was a sculptor who created most of his enduring works in the first half of the 20th century.  His home overlooked downtown Stockholm and was turned into a museum after his death.  The  home/museum is interesting (it looks as it did during Milles’ lifetime), but almost all of his major works are outside.  The complex is called Millesgården.

While he created all kinds of sculptures, Milles is best known for those that appear to defy gravity and even take flight.  You can see a few of them here, as well as a very small portion of the extensively landscaped grounds overlooking Stockholm.

Millesgården is relatively difficult to find, if you are based in the downtown area, but it is well worth the effort if you would like to have an unconventional art experience.  While I did my best to capture them in my photographs, the sculptures are even more impressive when observed in situ.  It turned out to be one of our favourite stops on our whirlwind cultural tour of Stockholm.

Stay tuned for the highly unusual next day in Stockholm: who would have thought there would be an element of Madagascar to our visit?