Happy Friday everyone! Writing up these posts is making me miss Stockholm so much! I wish that we'd had more time there to explore the sights that we didn't get to see. I'm definitely going back there some day :) I hope you all enjoyed Part 1, about my first day in Sweden. I'm going to posting twice today; this post will be all about our sight-seeing adventures on Saturday (it's going to be pretty pic heavy) and I'll be blogging about the Eurovision too! Hope you are all having a great day!
We started off our day with a continental breakfast at our hotel, which was included when we booked our room. It had a great selection of cold breakfast foods, such as cheeses, meats, all sorts of sauces/spreads, bread, fruit, pastries, cereals, biscuits, tea, coffee and fruit juices. I was relieved that there was something I could eat; I'm a really fussy eater plus I need to manage my diet to make sure I don't get an IBS flare. I had juicy honeydew and gala melon and some lovely vanilla biscuits. It was a nice, refreshing breakfast to start my day! I was really looking forward to our afternoon, as we had planned to go to the Swedish Hall of Fame and ABBA Museum!
Firstly, how amazing are these ABBA waxworks? They are so fantastic and realistic!
The Museum was absolutely superb! It was lovely to see how proud Sweden are of their musicians and it's not surprising considering the fantastic artists that have come from there! There's not another band quite like ABBA, so unique and iconic, with so many fabulous songs. The massive amount of memorabilia they have at the museum is really awesome, too. The museum includes two sections, the Swedish Hall of Fame and the ABBA Museum, and we went into the Hall of Fame first. There were some lovely displays in the entrance of the museum, including loads of barbie dolls that we dressed as various Eurovision winners from over the years.
The doll of Conchita was my favourite! I cannot believe that my friend actually spotted Conchita leaving the EuroClub!! Why was I taking photos of a fountain!? The EuroClub has a private section for the artists so some fans who were in Stockholm for the Semi-Finals hung around at the EuroClub for hours to get a chance to meet their favourite performers! In the entrance to the museum, we also got to see some of the trophies from previous Eurovision Song Contests and other bits of Eurovision memorabilia.
The Swedish Music Hall of Fame was filled with more Eurovision props; lots of costumes like the awesome silver costume that Verka Serducka (Ukraine's entry from 2007) wore! They had little rooms to represent each decade of Swedish Music with screens playing famous songs and displays filled with various awards, trophies and stage props. One of the displays that I really liked included glass cabinets filled with music players from each decade; it was very cool to see a gramophone, a record player and old radios from when my parents were young. It was funny to see a Sony Ericsson phone in the cabinet for the 2000's as though it was an artifact from old times because I still had my Sony Ericsson phone when I started university! hahaha how embarrassing!
The ABBA Museum was the second part of the museum that we went into and it was so great! I loved it so much! It's wonderful to see just how passionate Sweden are about ABBA. The displays were really cool and they had so much stuff to see. It was amazing to see such a massive collection of memorabilia in one place! The museum wanted visitors to feel like 'the 5th member of ABBA' so there were loads of opportunities to take photos with props and several interactive displays. There was a replica of a recording studio and behind this were little booths for visitors to sing in and feel like they are recording a song in that very studio. There was also a room where you could get on stage to sing and as soon as the music started, holograms of the members of ABBA appeared on stage with you! It was great fun watching a group of guys singing and dancing along to 'Dancing Queen'.
After visiting the gift shop, we hopped back onto the tram. It was really convenient because the tram stopped right outside the museum and with our travel passes, we could travel all over the city via tram or train. Enroute to the museum, we'd spotted a massive gorgeous building so on the way back, we decided to get off the tram to explore. It turns out this beautiful piece of architecture was actually the Nordic Museum or Nordiska Musset, which is cultural heritage museum and I hope one day that I can go back and have a look inside. Before getting back onto the tram, we decided to take a nice scroll down the waterfront since it was such a lovely day and have a look at all of the boats. There was even a museum inside a boat! We saw some beautiful handmade chess boards and a lorry parked up with a huge gorilla teddy chained to the top of it! It made me giggle because it was so random and I couldn't resist taking a photo!
We were so hungry by this point so we headed to TGI Fridays. I was worried because of my fussy eating habits but thankfully they could make me a plain steak and fries meal. We received fantastic customer care, the staff were very friendly and accommodating. My friend got a Jack Daniel's chicken burger meal with onion rings, and he thoroughly enjoyed it! Unfortunately, the restaurant didn't cook my steak well done like I had asked for, and I had to complain. This is a massive thing for me to do because of my anxiety disorder, and I've never had the courage to complain before in my life! Usually I would have forced myself to eat the food or would have just wasted my money and left it, but I was really hungry and we wouldn't be eating again for hours! I'm so proud of myself! They fixed the problem right away and made me a whole new meal. They were lovely about it :)
We headed back to the hotel to get ready for the Eurovision. I still cannot believe that I got to go to the Eurovision Song Contest! My favourite song this year was Bulgaria's entry so I took with me a Bulgarian flag and my friend loved Malta's song, although he had a difficult time choosing between Malta & Armenia because he loved both entries so much! In the end, he choose a Maltese flag. We wore them like capes :)
Thankyou for reading!
♥
What's your favourite ABBA song? Mine are Waterloo, The Winner Takes It All and Thankyou for the Music.
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