Last bank hol­i­day week­end, Steffi and I went to Stock­holm, for a change. With the cheap RyanAir flights nowadays a quick week­end away to some ran­dom European city is eas­ily done, and a great way to get a small time-​out from the every­day life of Maynooth.

What a won­der­ful city. We really, really enjoyed our time there — which was also helped by the fact that we had bril­liant weather, and every­body was out and about because of that. We were sur­prised by how clean everything was, mak­ing it pos­sibly the clean­est city we’ve seen so far. Also, the prices aren’t as bad as people say, at least if your pain bar­rier has been lowered over the years by life in Ire­land.

Apart from the usual tour­ist stuff you should see (like the nar­row­est alley­way in the city), we espe­cially liked the Rådhu­set (“city hall”). It con­tains a num­ber of very inter­est­ing halls and cham­bers, such as the fam­ous “Blue Hall” (which isn’t blue; this is where the Nobel Price ban­quets are held every year), the “Coun­cil Cham­ber” with its amaz­ing ceil­ing and col­ours, as well as the “Golden Hall” com­pletely covered with a gigantic mosaic. There’s actu­ally a funny story about that mosaic: Appar­ently, the artist had to do it in such a hurry — and some plans had been changed dur­ing his work on the mosaic — that in the end one of the most import­ant fig­ures in the mosaic got “decap­it­ated” by the ceil­ing…

As you can see, a fun place to visit. Hon­our­able men­tions also go to the Royal Palace (try to be there for the change of guards), the Vasa Museet, Gamla Stan (the old city), the amaz­ing Nor­d­iska Museum as well as this warn­ing sign next to an elev­ator about how not to kill your­self.

For a full pictorial run-​down of our trip, see this flickr set.