Animals
Skansen open air museum – part 4
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Skansen open air museum – part 3
Adelle at Skansen
Skansen open air museum – part 2
Previously: Skansen open air museum – part 1
Skyline
Skansen open air museum – part 1
We accidentally decided to go to the Skansen museum – we went on a bus tour of the city, which drove around Djurgården (among other places) pointing out the attractions available there. We thought there was some deal for getting in cheaply because we’d been on the bus tour but had managed to get ourselves confused. But we decided to go anyway.
It is an open air museum taking up much of the island. It started as a collection of buildings from around Sweden before the industrialisation of the country. So theres a lot of buildings which don’t appear to be in their correct context (which gave the place a slightly sickly sweet Disney meets New England feel).
First stop was food, we climbed from the entrance up to the nearest cafe, sat upon a tall rocky outcrop. The venison stew was remarkably good value (being something like 10 krona more than you’d pay for a McDonalds hamburger) and gave A. her first taste of lingonberries. Just what we needed.
We noticed a lot of people carrying big bags of apples, and decided to go the direction they came from. There was an apple and pear festival going on, but the poor pears hardly had a look in, the apples stole the show. There were a number of stalls selling apples in various forms, mostly raw for later consumption but you could have them cooked in different ways.
The museum, as well as having many buildings from all over the country, houses a zoo with a number of animal enclosures and walks through reproductions of rural scenes.
This post has been split into parts to make it easier to digest with full size pictures (and easier for my somewhat delicate hosting service to deliver those pictures to you).
Buildings of Skansen
Södermalm
A walk around the island of Södermalm
Söderhallarna
Looking back: not far from here was ‘the English Shop’, where you could buy baked beans and marmite, if you so desired. We didn’t go there much but it was a comfort to know that we could.
Södermalm is, in some ways, the Boulevard Saint-Germain of Stockholm, a bohemian island where all the cool kids hang out. In the centre of the island, just over the way from Medborgarplatsen T-Bana station is the Söderhallarna library and arthouse complex. Inside its quite a confused place, trying to be a number of things at the same time without being able to decide which it really is. Its a meeting place, a concert hall, a shopping centre, a cinema and an eating place. And probably some other things too.
Karlavägen
Looking back: Somehow I never ended up finding these places again, despite much ambling around the city.
Taking a walk down Valhalla Avenue
Valhallavägen forms the northeast boundary of the city centre, running north of Östermalm from the 1912 Olympic Stadium to Ladugårdsgärdet. It was built as part of the regeneration of Östermalm from slum dockland to the plush part of the city it remains to this day.
The stadium is far smaller than we expect these days – these days they need to support a whole village of TV crews and technologists as well as the athletes.
The avenue itself is a broad, treed road with traffic along each side and paths and parking in the centre, under the trees.
Ladugårdsgärdet is a large area of parkland, more like Hampstead Heath than, say, Hyde Park, it connects with Djurgården, home of Skansen and Gronalund.
Going underground
Looking back: the Tunnelbana system is known as the longest art gallery in the world – most of the stations have some kind of theme of works.
The underground train system in Stockholm is called ‘tunnelbana‘, t-bana or T-train for short. There are three lines, imaginatively named ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’, though they missed a trick of making the trains the same colour as the line they’re running – I assume because they use the same trains on the different lines. A lot of the stations, especially on the blue line (the one through Kista) are hewn out of solid rock and left fairly rugged on the inside, feeling more like a cave than the London tube system I’m used to. The stations are also less infested with advertising, instead containing quite a lot of artwork to brighten them up.
Central Station
Like many cities, Stockholm has a central station where everything converges – all the ‘pendeltag’ and inter-city trains stop here, and the underground (tunnelbana) lines all pass through T-Centrallen, connected to central station. There is also a coach station here for long distance coaches.
