Final stop: Stockholm

Stockholm! A huge huge huge city with lots of big islands ontop of that. Stockholm was nice, stil cold, but very sunny and the bay areas were all very pretty, there just was not a whole lot of cultural history to see apart from the Nordic Museum which showed how people of Sweden and Scandinavia lived throughout the centuries which I did not go to. They did have their own Tivoli Gardens, the sign even called it that although it's proper name is Grona Land, that opens in a week. On Djurgarden there were lots of walking paths and museums, Skansen, which is like a zoo and botanical garden all in one, and the Old Town was on its own little island (Gamla Stan) with little souvenir shops, lots of ice cream stands (remember though, it's like 0 degrees celsius), and the Royal palace and Rikdagshuset, which I think was thte parliament building but not too sure. In any case none of the brochures had walking tours to do so I didn't end up learning very much about what I was seeing, and even though I enjoyed the city it didn't really offer that many exciting options for travelers I thought. I did go to the Icebar, which I know find out is in every major city includign Paris so it's not that special, but that was a cool concept, you put on moon suits these grey things to stay warm and can only be inside for 45 minutes. I did learn, though, that the famous IceHotels are up in Sweden's northern parts, and they melt around the end of April and flow into the rivers and they are rebuilt each year. You can also see the Northern Lights from the north of sweden, not, however, from Stockholm. Anyways, there weren't as many green areas as in some of the other major European cities (on the main island), they had one nice park right on the end of the water Kungstradgarden, with some fountains and again mroe ice cream shops, but the rest of the downtown area was again huge glass hotels and conference centers, and lots and lots of shopping malls. The Swedes know how to shop, in Paris we don't have such malls even! So basically I walked around a lot and tried to stay warm. The guy at the coffee shop was interestingly enough from Seattle and he moved there after he married a Swedish girl on study abroad. So not a whole lot else to comment on in Sweden-yes there were a lot of blonds, no, I didn't particularly notice any amazing cleaniless that's absent in other cities, and I tried to find Swedish pancakes around but I think you had to go to a nice restaurant to find them, in any case they weren't sold as specialties everywhere, althoguh oddly enough there were little hotdog stands EVERYWHERE and they wre called French Hot Dogs, which is odd because the french themselves never eat hot dogs. So after a few days exploring Stockholm I boarded a flight way too early on Sunday morning and made it back to Paris, and I am really glad to be back!