As a sunday pleasure, I thought I should invite you to our city, the capital of Sweden, Stockholm. (Stock = log, holm = islet or small island). There is no clear evidence of how it got it’s name.

The earliest mention of Stockholm dates from 1252 (not counted as town until 1270), so we really do have an old town. The most popular part of it is called The Old Town and have very old buildings with narrow streets (MÃ¥rten Trotzigs Alley measures 35 inches between the walls!)
and a special athmosphere of time aging, like you were thrown back in time.

The mentions I’ve heard from tourists is that Stockholm has interesting architecture, it’s beautiful, clean, green (38 parks) and with a lot of water. Often called The Northern Venice - no wonder - it’s 14 islands joined by 53 bridges! The city is one third water, one third green and the last third is urbanized.

Mr Lifecruiser forced me to write this fact: Stockholm region has about 54 golf courses too.

The beautiful and popular stockholm archipelago starts here with it’s 24.000 islands, rocks and skerries. The sweatwater Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea at the sluice. Actually it’s several sluices, the most central’s name is Carl Johan after a swedish king, but it’s also called “divorce ditch” among people, because of all the problems and swearing that’s going on when boat people are going through the sluice with their boats

You can even go fishing in the middle of the city. The unpolluted swiftly-flowing water that runs through the city has the greatest number of fish species in the region. Salmon trout, pike, perch, bream, and salmon. The biggest known salmon caught there weighed 48 pounds.

Stockholm has 760 000 inhabitants. Greater Stockholm 1.900.000. (Sweden’s total: 9 millions). The average Stockholmer is 39 years old, earns SEK 20.500 ($2.622) per month, and has 1.36 children. And what about this fact: Stockholm has more single-person households than any other capital in the world. I can’t decide if it’s good or bad…. I think bad. I can’t imagine that all of them really wants to be single…?

Now we comes to the most important stuff for the hungry monsters like me: Sweden publishes more cookbooks per capita than any other country in the world, averaging one per day. We’re really appreciating good food, wanting variations in the recipes and have taken up cooking from all over the world. Only in Stockholm there is said to be between 1600-2500 restaurants. What can I say? We like to eat… Or maybe we need more because of the cold weather?

Mostly people come to Stockholm for the food, the design and the music. We enjoy the highest density of galleries and museums in the world, but there is so much other things to enjoy here too. After all, it’s a capital, so even the nightlife is high rated.

So what are you waiting for…?

NOTE: We’ve uploaded some old pics from The Royal Swedish Castle with surroundings, taken in springtime 2004. We were there to see the change of the royal guards (with horses, you know how much I love horses!) - and it was freezing cold. Brrr… Cold winds made our poor camera hands stiff, so no good photos…

Lifecruisers Royal Castle Photos

Stockholm Town Guide about The Royal Castle
Wikipedia about Stockholm