Hi all. We're on the most comfortable 2nd class train we've encountered on the trip so far. It's an express from Stockholm to Malmo where we catch another train to Copenhagen across one of the largest bridges in the world. We had three nights in Stockholm after arriving by boat on Friday morning. The boat turned out to be a bit less of a party than expected. Oh, and I now understand why the cheap cabin we had was cheap - right next to the engines, making for a hot, noisy trip. At least we had beds.

After we dumped our bags at our centrally located hostel, we explored the city centre a bit. We found a long pedestrian street that happened to take us right to a photographic exhibition I'd read about in a brochure on the boat. It was called 'the speed of life' and was a heap of arty photos taken by a Swedish dude at Formula 1 races over the last few years. There were some awesome photos. There was also an exhibition of photos of Gypsies around the world on another floor in the same building. Not as interesting as F1, but interesting by itself.

That night we met up with Lou, one of the Swedish girls we met in Montenegro and travelled to Sarajevo with. She lives just outside Stockholm, and came into the city with her boyfriend and some more friends to have a drink with us. We went to a great outdoor bar up on a hill overlooking the old town. It was really beautiful as the sun slowly set, painting the sky in shades of red and orange. Once that place shut, we headed out to another bar until the locals had to jump on the last metro at around 3AM. By this time the sun was coming up again, and we had to get to bed.

Lou had sent us a list of stuff to look at in Stockholm, so after a walk through the old town we headed to the Djurgarden area on another island. There was a huge open air museum over there, with traditional buildings that had been moved from all over Sweden. There was also a zoo filled with Scandanavian animals. We saw some wild boars, brown bears, bison, elk, reindeer, seals, otters, and wolves. Being early summer as it is over here, many of the animals had had babies in the spring, so we got to see lots of cute little'uns. The wolf cubs won on the cuteness score. The reindeer were amazing, but smaller than we expected. Finding it hard to believe that even twelve of them could pull big fat Santa around. On our walk back to the city, we came across an amazing outdoor photo exhibition of endangered animals from across the globe. It was brilliant - and free!

We had planned to catch a boat and explore the archipelago just outside the city, but the weather was pretty average, and really windy, so we had a bit more of a look around the old town. The royal cathedral was unimpressive from outside, but great inside. There was a life-size sculpture of St. George slaying the dragon, but I think the dragon was a bit small. I picture them to be at least twice the size of this one.

We wandered around the royal palace, the biggest in the world apparently, but didn't splurge for a look inside - we've seen photos.

Swedish food is not renowned for it's brilliance, but we thought we should have a crack at some traditional fare anyway. We found a place where the locals seemed to eat, with a few typical Swedish dishes on the menu. I went for the Swedish meatballs with creamy sauce and Lingenberries, while Zils had the Herring fillets. The meatballs were pretty tasty, and the bright red lingenberries went really well with them. We were expecting the Herring to be quite small, but the fillets turned out to be a lot bigger than expexted. Pretty nice also. A Bowl of great potato mash topped the meal off nicely (as did a pint of local larger).