May 29 - Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm - the last port of call on this amazing cruise. Unfortunately we only had about 5 hours in the city, because of the long distance from Stockholm back to Copenhagen.

We started off by walking into the city from the port:

and found ourselves near the Royal Palace. Nothing was open yet (damn Europe and their 10 or 11am opening times). So we wandered past closed shops and found an (open!) cafe with free wifi.

This was the view walking back later on, from the shops toward the Royal Palace:

It reminds me of a scene from a computer game! All those straight lines, and it was so clean.

After coffee we sought out a tourist information centre, to see how to best spend our short amount of time here. We decided to get on a one hour tour around some of the islands of the city (14 in all). It was pretty, but made us realise we didn't plan our time very well as we pretty much were not going to have time to see any of the actual attractions.

We got the metro and bus back to the boat. We got a little lost in the subway system...

...but it meant we got to enjoy these crazy high escalators.

After lunch was the sail away - it was a much anticipated one because you sail out through a narrow channel (much like going to Picton on the ferry, but bigger and more populated) for a long long time.

It was really pretty to watch all this going past, and we wondered aloud who owned these houses. Were these the rich and famous of Sweden? Are these holiday homes to politicians and famous people? Or are they just the houses of well-off Stockholm professionals?

In the evening we went to a musical show with an impressionist called Greg London. Afterwards there was a game show called "Sing It" where the band would play a snippet of a song and teammates had to run up to the microphone and sing it if they knew it. Fun! Something I'd not seen before.