Never Plan Too Much
I started the day with a vague plan to attend some of the events at Stockholm Pride. There was the Opening Ceremony, a Salsa Dance Class, and a talk about the experiences of refugees arriving in Sweden. For whatever reason, I never made it to any of those events.
Instead, I started the day visiting the Glass Is Tomorrow exhibition at the National Museum Of Design. Sweden, of course, has a world-class reputation for glass manufacturing and glass art, and the exhibition lives up to that reputation, and from there I wandered to the Nordiska Museet, which I’ve blogged about elsewhere.
On leaving the Nordiska Museet, I had only a vague plan of walking towards Gröna Lund and catching the ferry. But rather than walk along the main thoroughfare, I took a turn to the right. That’s when I saw an elderly couple.
My interest was piqued, when I saw them open and close (very carefully) a nearby gate. As I headed towards them, I noticed they were entering a graveyard. As I’m a great fan of graveyards (nothing ghoulish, the history), I followed them in, only to discover the most wonderful space on Djurgården, I didn’t know existed. It’s clearly a graveyard for Stockholm’s “well to do”, with lots of graves for sea captains and the like.
But there were also a couple of other graves which really touched me, such as a dual grave for twins born a few years ago, and who both died within a few months of each other. And there’s a multi-person grave for some people who all died in a plane crash over the Baltic Sea. It’s a beautiful, peaceful place, in a space I didn’t expect to find it. So if you’re visiting Djurgården, it’s definitely worth a look, located between the Nordiska and Vasa museums.
After staying there a while, I continued my journey towards Gröna Lund. However, it wasn’t long before I became distracted again, by a sign mentioning a beer garden selling “Swedish Craft Beer”.
Though I didn’t pay a visit to the museum itself, there’s an exhibition right now at Stockholm’s Spirit Museum about Sweden’s “difficult relationship” (their words, not mine) with alcohol. Co-inciding with that, their beer garden is featuring 15 beers from The Swedish Association of Independent Breweries. Overlooking the water, and as the sun began to shine, I couldn’t have planned it better.