Headed Somewhere, We Think

Lucas is fascinated with all of the vehicles you can see outside our hotel window. It keeps him entertained for a long time as Grandpa educates him on the boats. He's adding lots of words to his vocabulary on this trip, most of them in English (that's Lucas learning, not Grandpa.)

This morning we went on our first Swedish adventure. We took the tram to Skansen, which is on another island, to see a historical village and children's zoo. It's like a large outdoor museum--think Lower Fort Garry.

It's a Saturday morning here and we couldn't believe the lineups to get onto the tram. We had to wait for the third vehicle to arrive before we could even think about hopping on. The tram is their newest form of transportation. If you board the last car on the tram there's a special area to accommodate baby strollers. Our ride came to an abrupt halt though, because the tram apparently ran out of power. Everyone had to evacuate and walk the rest of the journey. It's a strange sensation to know something's wrong but to not understand the language. Some words were pretty similar to English though, and "evacuate" was one of them. The crowds on the streets were enormous. The malfunction just added to the adventure. We decided even though we weren't quite sure where we were going, it had to be worth following the crowd because they were all headed somewhere. It turns out that Skansen had a special event related to Pippi Longstocking so there were lots of little kids in stockings running around and some even had freckles painted on their faces, and cute little orange wigs with pigtails. Lucas was a little young to appreciate this opportunity so we focused on the heritage buildings of the site.

It was interesting to think that my Great-Grandma & Grandpa Anderson (Thea & Albert) would have lived in something similar to some of the farm houses they had on display. These buildings were dismantled from their rural villages and transported to Skansen to provide a historical picture of life in Sweden.

Next stop was the Skansen Squirrel Playground where the highlight for Lucas was the acorn hut.

This afternoon David and I strolled to Gamla Stan (The Old Town). It's close to our hotel and has miles of cobblestone streets and lots of interesting shops and restaurants. The area is full of tourists and locals, too. Stockholm's population is over two million so there is a good population base for all of the restaurants and businesses. Gamla Stan is more what we were expecting Sweden to be like. The central downtown where we are staying is very 1970s-ish. In many ways it reminds us of Portage Avenue or even Toronto. Once you get on the tram or even go walking a short distance, however, the large open spaces for all of the historical buildings appear and it is quite charming and picturesque.