My dream run with the weather came to a brief end today, as it was snowing lightly for much of the morning.
While the rest of Stockholm was probably bemoaning the return of snow, I was nonetheless excited.
But with the arrival of the snow, I’d pretty much resigned myself to a day indoors, and headed off towards the museum precinct which includes the Seaman’s Museum, the Technical Museum and the Police Museum.
The police museum tickled my fancy so I went in there first. Although it’s reasonably small, it’s quite a good museum. It includes lots of detail about famous criminal cases, forensics, and so on. And they also have some police cars and motorcycles, including one police car you can sit in and use the siren. I sympathised with one mother sitting on the seat as her sat in the car and ran the siren for as long as I was there.
If you have a bit of a fetish for men and women in uniform, you would love the museum, especially as they have a looped video of police officers starting off in their underwear, and getting dressed into their uniforms. It’s quite mesmerising. I sat and watched it for at least ten minutes :)
By the time I had finished in the museum, the weather had changed and so had my plans. I’ll be saving other museum visits for the next time it snows or rains.
Because it was now time to go for a walk along the river. Yes, seriously.
For the last week I’ve been looking at the ice and wondering if it was possible to go for a walk along it. As I hadn’t seen anyone doing it, I assumed it wasn’t possible. But then today, I saw loads of people doing just that. Even a few people were ski-ing along what is for at least half the year, a waterway.
And so with confidence that other people were doing it, and hadn’t fallen through the ice to a watery grave, I did the same.
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It was an amazing feeling to walk along the river. “I’m walking along the river”, I kept saying to myself. And everywhere I looked it was either white (the snow), blue (the sky), black/brown (the trees without leaves), or yellow (the houses). It was a really wonderful, magical moment of being in the midst of nature, and experiencing something I’ve never done before.
I was still a little nervous though, and there were a couple of times when I put my foot down wondering if I was going to fall through, but I didn’t, although it did come close.
As I was about to come back onto land, a woman, sitting in the sun enjoying herself nearby, shouted “don’t walk there”, as I was about to put my foot onto what was normally a boat ramp. She could obviously spot the difference between firm ice and snow and that which would have seen me plunge to my watery grave.
“Thanks a lot”, I said to her in Swedish. “You’re welcome”, she replied in English.
Later this afternoon I spent some time enjoying the sunshine, sipping hot chocolate at the Royal Motorboat Club. There was, maybe, a dozen people sitting in the sun warming themselves, enjoying another spectacular day in Stockholm.
After a few months of sub-zero temperatures and grey days, the Swedes love it when the sun comes out.
You could see it in town also, as the streets are packed with people.
I’ve come back to my room to freshen up for a while. It’s Melodifestivalen tonight.
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