24 July - Stockholm day 2

Today we instituted a new regime meant for dealing with the heat, which quickly saps Marian's energy. Do one or at most two things starting fairly early, and be back in our air-conditioned hotel room by 2pm or so, there to estivate until at least 7pm when the temperature starts to drop, and go out for evening sightseeing and to find supper.

So first thing of the day, not so terribly early with a 10am scheduled departure, was to take the "Bridges of Stockholm" boat tour. We like bridges; we have done ever since the 70s when we had a project of photographing every bridge on the Thames from the Tower to Twickenham (where we then lived).

In another flashback to London, we used the T-Bana (the Tunnel Railway, Stockholm's metro), where the Blue Line runs deep and is reached by some loooooong escalators.

That got us to the Nybroplan (New Bridge square) boat area and we got on for what turned out to be a fairly routine boat ride in a boat that didn't allow for any better photography than the Ho-Ho bus did.

The sightseeing boat experience.

The route was supposed to be like this, captured from the cruise company site:

However the lock just below the Royal Palace was in maintenance, so the whole top part of the loop was dropped, and the boat went back and forth south of the big island of Södermalm, passing under a few bridges and through a lock.

Starting out we noted a long queue boarding a ferry.

Also, fine old apartment blocks with colorful eyelids.

A little ways along, Luna Park, Stockholm's equivalent of Tivoli Gardens.

We saw masses of people sun-bathing below a huge modern apartment block.

We saw some actual bridges.

And an obscenely huge cruise ship.

Resemblance to huge apartment block unintentional but suggestive.

A more reasonable size cruise ship with some spires behind.

And some waterfrontage at the return dock.

Stockholm is a very attractive city.

From the boat, we had noticed the twin spires of Högalids Kyrka, which according to the map stands in a green space with a T-Bana stop just under it, so just for the heck of it, we took the metro there, aiming to find some lunch and see this church in a park. We found quite a good lunch, unexpectedly, in a Vegetarian Deli which had an Indian-style buffet all you could eat for 150sKr. And then we took such modest portions that the owner knocked it down to 100sKr—about $15 by the highly unrealistic official exchange rate but by far the cheapest lunch we'd had yet.

The church, which we'd imagined would stand in a nice park-like square, actually stands on a high knob of ground which we climbed to see it. Turns out the church was built in the early 1900s and is architecturally unremarkable except for its twin spires (builder figured a church with only one spire would attract no notice in Stockholm). But there's to be a concert in it on Friday, so we'll go back and post a picture then.

So then back to the hotel to wait out the afternoon. Where David looked up various T-Bana stops on google maps and used "search nearby" for restaurants. And found Café Tranan, an historic purveyor of Swedish traditional cuisine. So about 19:30 we were on the T-Bana Green line to the Odenplan stop, which is directly across the street from the restaurant, where we had this highly traditional Swedish meal:

Fried herring with mashed potatoes on the left; salt-cured salmon and new potatoes on the right.

It was an experience, we agreed on that.

Then for giggles we rode the Green Line to its end (about 7½ miles from the city center), mainly wanting to see how far out of town one has to go for the apartment blocks and condos to give way to detached houses. They never did, really. There was a small area of detached house with gardens about halfway out, but the apartment blocks quickly resumed from there to the end of the line. Buildable land is at a premium in this "Venice of the North".