A Glorious Fourth in Stockholm

photo gallery

JenniferWe spent the Fourth of July this year in Stockholm. It was an unusually beautiful day, with clear skies and sunshine, and warm enough to go without a jacket. (Days like this have been rare so far this summer; it's been mostly cloudy, often rainy, and in any event too cool for shorts and sandals.) We bought food from Cajsa Warg (Stockholm's closest thing to Zingerman's) and picnicked on Korean beef, samosas, baguette and ginger beer in a tiny park overlooking the city, which has a rather disturbing monument (too many thumbs!) dedicated to Swedes killed in the Spanish civil war.

After lunch we went down the cliff to Fotografiska, the photography museum, to check out the exhibit on famous and/or Swedish moments in Olympic history (the city is having various celebrations to honor the centenary of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics). One of my favorite pictures was this, of a famous Swedish weightlifter named 'Hoa-hoa' Dahlgren, who is here featured in an ad for the Social Insurance authority, in a campaign promoting paternity leave. This blog entry from the official Swedish promotional site says that the baby is now a grown up who has a daughter of his own, and dutifully took his 5 months of paternity leave to care for her.

We started back to the train station, and it was such a lovely day that we then decided to just keep going instead of catching a bus. I miss the water back home, so we stayed as close to the Stockholm's lake as possible, which fortunately is quite close, as you can see...