London Adventures

A couple of weeks ago my friend Suzan and I set out for England. We spend the first week of our holiday in London. We stayed in a hostel a little outside the city center, but it was easy to get everywhere by public transportation. In a week we managed to see quite a lot, but I definitely want to go back some time because there are still a lot of places I would like to visit.

We visited the London Zoo, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, Covent Garden and famous sites like the House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Kings Cross Station (because we are Harry Potter geeks) and Chinatown. My favorite place was probably the Natural History Museum. It was gigantic and we couldn't see everything we wanted to see in one whole day so we had to come back another day. On the Natural History Museum I will do a seperate post, since I made so many photos there.

Our week in London was very busy. Each day we did a lot and we traveled around a lot by public transportation. Our second week in England we spent in Kent, at a very different pace. Public transportation on the country side turned out to be a lot less reliable! Eventhough we didn't do as much in our second week as we did in the first, we still had a great time and we got to relax a bit.

St. Paul's Cathedral

I hadn't been to a zoo in ages, but the London Zoo was a lot of fun. I really appreciated that they had a lot of information on nature conservation and really tried to make people aware of the effect humans can have on nature.

The aquarium at the London Zoo

The reptile house at the London Zoo

The Harry Potter shop at Kings Cross Station

Kings Cross Station

The Big Ben

House of Parliament

Covent Garden

Trafalgar square

Chinatown

The Science Museum

The last couple of weeks it has been pretty silent here. Mostly because I was writing a lot, but I was also arranging things for my upcoming trip to Argentina! I'll be leaving coming sunday and I will be gone for seven weeks, so it's going to be really quiet here for a while.

Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm

While I was in Stockholm I visited many museums. The museum of Ethnography was my favorite by far. They had so many beautiful objects from places all around the world. It really made me want to see more of the world and I realised that there still are so much places I want to visit. Here are some of the photos I took. They're not great quality, but they will give you an impression.

 

 

My favorite part of the museum was The storage. It was just amazing to look at all those showcases that were chock full with foreign items. 

Source: http://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/en/etnografiskamuseet

The Storage
an Ethnographic Treasury

It is easy to get lost amongst tinder pouches, monkey traps and poison arrows. There are 6,000 objects here, from all four corners of the world. By opening up the Storage, we cath a glimpse of the diversity and magic of our collections - a treasure-trove for the curious. Thousands of artefacts, stories from bygone eras and infinite inspiration for the future.

If you are ever in Stockholm, it is definitely worth the visit!

Skansen

Skansen is an open-air museum on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm where they have old Scandinavian buildings. I had been there a couple of years ago and I went there again last october when I was in Stockholm.
To read more about my Stockholm adventure: Stockholm part 1 & Stockholm part 2.

In this post I just wanted to show some of photos that I took of the buildings in Skansen. Most of the buildings they have are Swedish, but they also have some old ones from Norway.

Stockholm part 2

Here you can read the first post about my trip to Stockholm.

The second week I was there, I bought a Stockholm Card at the tourist centre and visited a lot of museums and I took a boat tour. The museums I went to were the Museum of biology, Museum of Ethnography, The Swedish history museum, Museum of Medieval stockholm, The Vasa museum, The museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Prince Eugen's Waldemarsudde, The Royal Armoury and the Aquaria Water museum. Furthermore I visited the open-air museum Skansen, the Butterfly house and SkyView. As you can see, it turned into a pretty cultural trip.

My personal highlights were the Musuem of Ethnography by far, and the Vasa Museum and Royal Armoury.
















The royal armoury with it's beautiful clothes and armor.

 

I found the Museum of Biology not really interesting because of it's content, but rather because of the building itself. It looks like one of those old wooden Norwegian churches, eventhough it's built much later.

At SkyView you can go in a gondola to the top of the Ericsson globe arena, which is a very high building, from where can see the whole city.  

Some girl was kind enough to take a photo of me, and it's actually the only picture from my whole trip were I'm in. I'm always the photographer (and in this case I was even on a trip by myself), so I always end up having a lot of photos, but very few where I'm in myself. 

The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities had a great collection of objects from Japan, China and Korea. Eversince I saw the movie The last samurai, I've been very interested in Japan and it's culture so I found looking around at the Japanese exhibiton particularly entertaining. The photos I took there turned out horrible, though.












The Royal Canal boat tour I took went around the island of Djurgården. I love that Stockholm has this little green island in the middle of the city. It is a great place to go for a walk and sometimes I just went there to sit by the water and write.

I had visited the Vasa museum before, but I went there for a second time. Usually I'm not really interested in boats, but the exhibitions at this museum are actually really interesting. It also help that they show a movie about the story of the Vasa and the ship itself is just incredible to see.





The train on the left is the one that I took every day to my Swedish class.

It is strange how when you are traveling you experience so much and then when you get back and everyone asks you about how it was all you manage to say is 'It was really nice' and you show your pictures. The stories about that place you went, that lives inside your head now, are so difficult to tell, because you can tell the stories but the feelings that go with them are something that you can not proparly transcribe.

I will do two more posts on Stockholm, one about The museum of Ethnography and the other about Skansen, because I want to show more than just one or two photos of them. They probably will be up on Tuesday and Friday.