Stockholm V

Gamla Stan (the old town), where we visited the royal palaces and had lovely afternoon tea, or as the Swedes would call it: fika.

Stockholm IV

Beautiful morning in Skansen, Stockholm's open air museum.
As you can see we especially loved the part with Scandinavian animals.

Stockholm III

A lovely evening in Södermalm.

Stockholm II

As soon as we had our three-day Stockholm card (which gives you free entry to dozens of museums and free public transportation) we hopped on a boat to get to the Vasa museum. This museum was built to house an enormous ship (the Vasa) which sank on her maiden voyage on the 10th of August 1628. It stayed at the bottom of Stockholm harbour for 333 years before being pulled out in 1961. 50 years later, the museum still draws more than 1 million visitors each year, and rightly so! The ship itself is absolutely incredible, but the way the whole museum is built, and the way the different exhibits are displayed is tremendous. We had a wonderful time there, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Stockholm!

Stockholm I

We just came back from five beautiful days in Stockholm. I took lots of photos, which I look forward to sharing with you in the next few days (I've found I really like doing that... it allows me to go back to many happy little moments again, and to keep the wonderful holiday feeling going for a little longer).


We had the most traditional (or stereotypical is maybe a better word) arrival in Stockholm. First we were greeted by a reindeer on our way from the airport to the city (well, he was just eating grass on the side of the highway, but I was very excited about the whole swedishness of it all already!).
Then the weather turned out to be quite chilly and a bit rainy, which I guess is quite normal for Stockholm at this time of year, and which was a great contrast with the warm almost summer-like weather we had been having in the Netherlands before leaving.
And third, we had the first of many meat-ball-y type of food of the weekend, on board the very cool boat-hotel we stayed on for the night (the first photo is the view from our very small cabin).

A great start to a fantastic long weekend!

Happy birthday Iben!

Happy birthday, dearest Iben!
I hope you'll like this pair of faceted earrings I made especially for you.
Love,
a.

Colossal stuff

I think I might have stayed stuck on this blog for almost two hours the other day. I couldn't believe how many incredible artists, videos, installations and works of art are featured on there... it's a real treasure chest!
To give you an idea, here are the three things I remember right now:

• a humongous and incredibly amazing toothpick sculpture
• an incredibly ingenious invention to save people across the world
• some adorable automatons (i'm in love with the duck one)
  

There is SO much more though... I'd definitely recommend you go and have a look for yourself!

Photo from here (via here)