Stockholm, Sweden

25-28 July 2009

After two 12 hour plane trips and a couple of other smaller ones I finally arrived in Stockholm. It was about 38 hours of travelling and I really didn't sleep well. And, the first long flight didn't allow you to start the films at your discretion, so it was pretty boring.

My fabulous host Sofus picked me up from the airport. I like it that all freedivers seem to wear freediving shirts so you can find them in airports, train stations and the like. It was about mid-day, so rather than give in to the fatigue we instead walked around the Stockholm city centre for about 4 hours. It was great to have a guided tour. We visited the town hall, parliament and Gamla Stan (the old town). I discovered that the sun does not set until after 10pm and I think I have awoken every day at about 4am so far thanks to the early dawn. This is Sofus in front of a cathedral:

The second day we visited the Nordic museum & Vasa museum where we learned all about Nordic history and culture. The Vasa was a poorly designed ship that sank about 300m into it's maiden voyage, it didn't even make it out of the harbour! It has recently been discovered at the bottom of the harbour and restored, and now has it's own museum built around it. On Monday all the museums were closed and it was my 30th birthday. We went training at the pool. It was my first attempt in a 50m pool for quite some time, and went OK considering the jet lag. After we had lunch in a cafe by the river in the sun and walked along the riverbank by the old allotment gardens, which were very cute. They were areas of land that were allocated to apartment or city dwelling families in post war times (I think, from memory) so they could grow veges. Now they seem to mainly grow flowers and it's very pretty.

We then visited the Woodlands cemetary world heritage site designed by Asplund in the early 1900s. Unfortunately we got a bit late and couldn't get inside any of the chapels or the visitor's centre, but did have a look at all the buildings from the outside. The cemetary was very cute. There were lots of pine trees in amongst the graves that gave it quite and eiree feeling. This is peaking through the peep hole to one of the chapels, the crematorium and the woodlands chapel (made famous by Russell Walden I think!):We followed this up with a trip the the Globen (Globe stadium). It's the largest spherical building in Scandinavia. Again we couldn't get inside but there was a lot of information about the building given in a display outside.
We had a very nice birthday dinner and over-loaded a bit on a variety of chocolate cakes and red wine. Freedivers are such light-weights when it comes to these things!

Sofus had to head back to work on Tuesday. I managed to walk down to the train station and get myself to town without breaking my back with my massive pack. I think I have about 40kg of gear – mostly dive gear as I've been pretty conservative with my general packing. I found time to visit the Architecture museum which had an interesting temporary exhibition on decoration in architecture and juxtaposed old styles with new. They also had their permanent exhibition which covers the development of architecture in Stockholm, and quite an interesting temporary exhibition regarding setting up a town as a new World Heritage Site, and what that involves. I then caught the train over to Gothenburg.