Museums, Birka, and Skansen

This last week has been really fun. We spent a lot of time touring around Stockholm and the different museums in the city. On Wednesday we went into the old city, Gamla Stan and got to see the old church and the Royal Palace. In the Royal Palace, one of my favorite sections was the treasury. We got to see all the different jewels and gold crowns, scepters, and orbs (For anyone who does not know what an orb is, it is just a jeweled golden ball that you hold in your hand and is about as useless as the scepter). It was really neat. I felt like a pirate. :) The rest of the palace was really cool as well. It was huge. I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a structure that big. There were so many different bedrooms and big banquet halls and council chambers. It was awesome.
We also got to go to an island in Stockholm's Lake Malaren called Birka. It is an island which was supposed to be one of the main viking settlements in Scandinavia. They had a few reconstructed buildings and that was cool. We went on a tour with a guide who showed us a bunch of mounds that you can find all over the island that are grave sites for these ancient vikings. It was really interesting. The ferry ride there and back was really windy and kind of cold though.
On this last Monday we went to Skansen on the island Djurgården right next Stockholm city. It is a really cool open-air type of museum where they have shops and houses from all different parts of Sweden that you can visit and walk through. It reminded me of Pioneer Village or Nauvoo where they have the same sort of thing. It was all really interesting and cool. I really liked the glass-blowing shop. I could barely tear myself away from watching them make pitcher after pitcher so fast (they probably made one every 5 minutes). It was amazing! The bakery was also fun. We each bought a few baked goods and they were very delicious. So, we spent all day there trying to see everything even though it started raining half way through and we all got soaked. :) Every Tuesday during the summer they have an outdoor concert called Allsång på Skansen where different artists come and sing at Skansen. The artists sing their big hits, but they also sing commonly known Swedish folk songs to which the audience members sing along. It is a huge deal and tons of people come. Since we were there, we stayed for the rehearsal (tons of people come to that too) and got to see it. It was really fun. Since it was the rehearsal, they practiced some of the songs a couple times and we got so we could sing along with them. It was great. One thing that is interesting is that a lot of the bands sing most of their songs in English. Several of the songs that we heard that night were in English. I don't really know how I feel about that. I was glad I could understand it on one hand, but on the other hand it seems kind of lame to sing in a language other than your native one especially when you are singing to your countrymen. I was glad to hear a lot of Swedish songs though.
Okay, well, I've been writing too long and I don't really want to describe the rest of our activities in detail. We went to the National Art Museum yesterday and then went to the Modern Art Museum and the Architecture Museum today. They were really interesting. Oh, another thing: food is so expensive here in Sweden. Well, maybe not so expensive, but more expensive than in the U.S. The cheapest apples I could find were 19 Kroners per kilogram which transfers roughly to $1.50 per lb. A regular ice cream cone with like two smaller scoops of ice cream comes to about $5. I don't know, maybe that's not so bad, but it seems expensive to me. But, despite the exhorbitant food prizes, I love it here and am having a lot of fun. On Monday we start our 3 week language program in Uppsala, so that should be really intensive and good. :) We leave tomorrow though, so I need to pack now. Hey då!