Normally coming into Stockholm, Sweden on a ferry from Finland for a few hours, the time is spent wandering around the old city shops and cafés, looking at well maintained buildings that date back to the 13th century. Yeah, that is 800 years ago. However, on this trip, we chose to do something a little different for our daughter's amusement only, and visit Junibacken, which is a kid's attraction based on books, mostly filled with stories from the famed Swedish writer, Astrid Lindgren of Pippi Longstocking fame.
The place is aimed toward kids up to about seven years of age, so it was pretty borderline for our daughter who is nearing nine, but she enjoys books and stories a lot, and just a few nights earlier was reading some of the story that appeared there, which she enjoyed seeing immensely.
It was easy to get there from the harbour, as we booked a return chartered bus ride that dropped as a five minute walk from the attraction, and right outside the Stockholm museum, which will be the target on our next trip in the future here - maybe in the summer.
The scenes were well put together and the kids seemed to be enjoying themselves a lot playing through there. Again, unless fans, it is aimed at younger children, but if making the day off it, not only is there the museum close by, there is also a Viking history museum next door too - that would have been good.
On top of some adventure places that were decked out for kids to play around with little slides and characters from books, there was also a 25-minute Pippi Longstocking play put on, featuring three kids singing and dancing. It was actually really good, except for one little problem - it was entirely in Swedish. My daughter who was sitting a little in front of us on the floor (as were we) so she could see better, didn't realise that it was going to be in Swedish, but she enjoyed it still. The kids were really good in it too.
I don't get it - I think it is a school day here.
However, there was also an attraction that I weirdly enjoyed, called the story strain, which took a slow ride sitting on a suspended train that went up and down through and over a display of miniature scenes, and rooms from stories. It was weirdly great, though it probably would have been better to know the stories.
This one looked like a scene from Game of Thrones, and as we went through, my daughter thought there was a lot in there that reminded her of reading The Hobbit, complete with a dragon, dwarves and other scary scenes. But, it was well put together and the movement of the seat through the story was really well done - like a really slow amusement park ride.
And this last one was exactly how Swedish families celebrate midsummer's day (or so I imagine). For those who haven't travelled to Sweden before, or the Nordics in general, the areas are safe and clean and there normally isn't a lot of tourists around - because no one wants to risk the weather. Though it is winter now and the weather can be guaranteed to be bad. It was raining today, so it was actually much easier to have an inside thing to do, rather than get damp wandering the streets trying to stay warm.
And now...
Goodbye from Sweden.
We are back on the boat and moving once again.
Taraz
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