Day 53 Stockholm, Sweden

Talk about four seasons in a day, we certainly had them today! Sunshine, Cloud, Rain, Wind and then Sunshine again.

This is our second day in Stockholm and today we visited the City Hall and Steig Larsson's Stockholm.  First was the city hall.  A competition was held to choose the person who would design the city hall and the winner was Ragnar Östberg. Construction commenced in 1907 and was completed in 1923 using 8 million red bricks.  The City Hall is notable for the Nobel Prize Banquet held after the awards.

We enter the large courtyard and to our left we find the entrance and walk straight ahead into the Blue Hall that is the banquet hall.  The kitchen is two floors above this hall.  Pity the waiters and waitresses who have to walk up and down all those stairs!

The next room we enter on the first floor is the Golden Hall.  The walls of the entire hall are covered in tiny little mosaics, 18 million of them.  The artwork depicts Swedish history and is a masterpiece.

After our walk our guide suggests we take some free time to wander the waterfront garden area that is also impressive.

Our bus arrives to drive us to the island of Sodermalm where Stieg Larsson lived and gained the inspiration for his Millennium Trilogy.  The three books are Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who played with Fire and The Girl in the Spiders Web. Millennium is a series of crime novels written by Larsson who unfortunately died before the books were published.  I won't bore you with details about the places we visited on our hour and half walk because unless you have read the books they wouldn't mean anything to you.  Of course the books are a work of fiction but it is known that the places Steig mentions in his novels are taken from real life places with name changes. All I will say is the two main characters are Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.  Millenium has also been adapted to screen.  

We are now back onboard the ship and sailing towards Visby, another Swedish town.  I took this photo shortly after we left the dock.  This is definitely the newer and posher end of Stockholm and look at that sky.  Five minutes after the photo was taken, you guessed it, it was raining…...