This morning Clare and I finally had a long night’s sleep, helped by the fact our hostel room had no windows so we weren’t woken by the early Scandinavian sunrise. After a slow start we left the hostel and headed to Skansen Open Air Museum.

We ended up spending all afternoon and early evening at the museum as there was just so much to see! The museum is set up with many homes and shops from the 1800’s with people in costume talking about the time period of Swedish history. We got to go into a glasswork shop, a furniture factory and an old spice shop as well as houses of the working, middle and upper classes. In one of the upper class houses they had an old fashioned box piano which I thought was cool.

As well as the historic buildings, there were also kids games on the lawn where Clare and I had great fun trying to use the stilts and the hoop and stick game. We then headed to where the animals were. We started in the kids zoo which included a rabbit enclosure which had an underground passage you could crawl through and plastic bubbles where you could pop your head up into the middle of the rabbit enclosure which was fun. There were also native seals, snakes, birds, guinea pigs and goats. We spent ages in the goat enclosure as they had some really cute kids (the goat ones, not the children running around in there!). Then we moved on to the more Scandinavian animals. First up was a reindeer which was awesome to see! They were such beautiful animals and they had really furry antlers which we could feel. Next up were the moose which were huge! I had no idea how big Moose actually were before we saw them and I was quite shocked. We also saw a bear, wolverine, owls, boars and many other Scandinavian animals.

Another part of the park was old farmsteads from different areas. One of the reconstructed farms we went to had two ladies making cheese in the traditional way over a campfire in a little log cottage. It was really interesting to watch them make the cheese and scoop the whey off the top of the milk in the pot and do different things with different cheeses. We also got to try Brown Cheese which is like a burnt sugar cheese which was nice but quite strong.

We had a really good time exploring the park right up until everything started to close so we then headed out and caught the tram to Gamala Stan where we walked around for a while before choosing a place for dinner right in the square of Old Town. It was great to have a nice meal out for our last night together and I made sure to have the meatballs which are traditionally Swedish and sold in nearly every restaurant. They were very nice! After a walk around the Old Town we headed back to the hostel where we both did a massive (much needed) repack and tidy up of our bags to be ready for our flights tomorrow.