Water, Water Everywhere

We took the boat on a one hour ride over to the island that has the King and Queen's summer palace of Drottingholm on it. They like to call it the "Versailles of the North"...not! Either they have never been to Versailles or else they have had too many brain freezes from being out in the cold too much! They say you should save the best for last. Well, we have already been to Versailles and it is absolutely spectacular. The summer palace, Drottingholm, is completely covered in marble...that is, faux, marble-painted plaster. When it was built in the 17th century they were on a budget so they cut corners where they could. I guess you could say they were one of the first to use faux painting but in a Royal Palace we expected the real thing. We were completely under-thrilled and took the next boat back to town.



Next we went to Stockholm's City Hall, which is the postcard picture that always used to represent Stockholm. It is completely built out of red bricks--8 million to be exact. I thought they were the little red bricks that we use in the yards and houses. These are actually larger bricks, about four times larger than our bricks. It was built in the early 1900's and used annually for the presentation of the Nobel awards. You can climb to the top of tower if you want to...we didn't want to!

Did we mention we are in the middle of heat wave here? Tuesday's high is supposed to be 30 degrees Centigrade...that's pretty hot here. I suppose it is very humid as well, but they don't talk about that as much as we do. Remember that there is no air conditioning in any building or hotel room. Of course, this is really unusual weather.

After City Hall, We went on another boat tour that went around some of the islands of Stockholm. There is 8,000 miles of coastline and over 700,000 boats. Boats are everywhere and docks line the lakes and canals. One interesting thing was that all of the beaches and rocks and mountainsides were covered with people sunbathing and swimming.
Print this post