Headline, September09, 2013

''' THE WATERY RAVE AND CRAVE OF

 THE WORLD : STOCKHOLM '''

The first thing you notice in Stockholm is the girls  -just so, so many. and and so strikingly good-looking. One just stops breathing. The second thing is the water. One knows that the city is on the coast, but one just cannot realize without a closer look, just how integral water is to its existence.

Central Stockholm is situated on fourteen islands, while an astonishing 30 per cent of Greater Stockholm is made up of water; wherever you look you see bridges, ships and boats. And it is the water that well traveled visitors come to celebrate,  -visiting in mid-August during Stockholm Water Festival.

A wide-ranging and fairly populist arts-oriented affair which capitalised on the city's spectacular setting. It also provided an excuse for a late-summer fiesta with tented stalls and cafes outside the Parliament buildings and the relaxation of normally rather restrictive licensing laws. The Water Festival was such a success that it now a regular brightness.

Festival time or not, this very very clean, bright city, which is now an increasingly tourist destination, lends itself to independent, serendipitous, exploration, particularly during the long, long days of June and July. While the central area is most conveniently explored on foot, other parts of the city are easily reached on Stockholm's efficient underground system, the eighth-largest in the world.

It has 99 stations, the majority of which have been extravagantly and idiosyncratically decorated by contemporary Swedish artists, giving the underground a claim to be  ''the world's longest art exhibition''.

Ferries are another vital link to the city's transport network and these vary enormously in size and style, from those which ply back and forth on five-minute shuttle routes, to grander boats with restaurants on board which steam up to the royal palace at Drottningholm. This seventeenth century Baroque palace is often described as a small-scale Versailles.

In the grounds there's a Chinese Pavilion and the deliberately unmodernised 200-year-old Drottningholm Court Theatre, which stages an internationally acclaimed opera season every summer.

Although many parts of Stockholm's extraordinary archipelago can be reached by road, ferries are certainly the most interesting way to reach them.

The archipelago comprises some 25,000 islands, islets and skerries over an area of about 150 square kilometres, but only about 140 of the islands are inhabited year-round. Mostly the archipelago is simply Stockholm's summer playground; there are about 150,000 pleasurecraft on this coastline (that works out at roughly one boat per ten residents in the country of Stockholm), not to mention 35,000 summer houses dotted around the islands.

Several of the islands served by the ferry network have specialist museums, art galleries and craft shops as well as bars and restaurants, while some of the closest are the rocky Fjaderholmarna  (Feather Islands) These formed a military zone until a few years ago, but are now open to the public. They feature, amongst other things, a vast aquarium carved out of the rocks which features Baltic fish in a naturalistic environment.

Back near its centre, Stockholm boasts two very different museums. The first is the purpose-built Vasa Museum, opened in 1990. It contains the restored seventeenth-century warship Vasa, which capsized and sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, as a result of a critical design flaw. The ship remained perfectly preserved in mud until she was raised in 1961.

In contrast, Skansen is hundred year old open-air museum of all things Swedish, made up of over 150 representative old buildings brought from all over the country and rebuilt in the Skansen park, which also houses an open-air zoo specialising in Nordic animals like bears and wolves. And just below Skansen lies the perfect museum antidote : Grona Lund, a waterside amusement park with a particularly impressive rollercoaster.  

So, apart from beautiful girls and omnipresent water, one other beauty of Stockholm remains pre-eminent : the fireworks. During the Water Festival an international firework competition often takes place. Each night a team of leading pyrotechnicians from a different nation stage a lavish display, and the whole city grounds to a halt as crowds of spectators throng the streets 

On food the best advise is to stick to Swedish specialties of fish, shellfish and game, not to mention the ubiquitous smargasbord. And nothing can be more delightful meal in a night out in a warren of a dining rooms of a seventeenth century building.

! Holm Swede Holm !

A hello to all the Students, Professors and Teachers of Sweden.

  

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors, and Teachers of the World. See ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless : '' Pleasure And Serving Principles''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless