From this aerial view you can already guess it -- Stockholm is a water town. Indeed, the town is built on 14 islands. The part in the middle is the "old town" or "gamla stan" and the big building at the right end of gamla stan is "kungliga slottet", the royal castle.

Right outside of Stockholm begins the archipelago, an area with tens of thousands of small islands, some of them just a few rocks, some of them real islands with small villages on them. The further you get into the archipelago, the more barren these islands become. In the inner archipelago you find trees and little forests -- further out these islands are mostly smooth rocks.

The archipelago is where many Stockholmers spend their weekends in the summer, to swim, boat or just to relax. I have some photos of the archipelago on another page.

But back to Stockholm itself. This ship is the Af Chapman. It lies in the Stockholm harbor, and it is a so-called "wandrarhem", which translates roughly as "youth hostel". This makes it one of more unusual youth hostels in the world. It's very popular and typically totally booked out. But don't fret -- there are other youth hostel ships in Stockholm -- they are just not that nice...

The previous photo showed that the evening sun this far in the north gives some wonderful photo opportunities.

Yes, this is ice in the water. These photos were taken in early Spring. At that time most of the Stockholm harbor typically is frozen shut. Therefore there are also no boats to the archipelago at that time.

It does indeed get very cold here in the winter. But, although we are that far north, it gets very warm in summer!

Another peculiarity here is that it is light very long in the summer (and very briefly in winter). During my recent visit (in May) the sun rose somewhere around 4 in the morning and didn't set till 10 in the evening or so. Now you might wonder if Stockholm has "midnight sun", that is: if there is a day where the sun doesn't set at all. I have to disappoint you. Stockholm is too far south for that. You have to fly 800-1000 miles further north to experience the midnight sun. But, at solstice, it gets doesn't get entirely dark at night, I've heard.

The flip-side is the winter with it's very very long nights. In a typical office work day you don't see daylight at all. When you go to work at 8 in the morning it's still dark and when you leave work at 4:30 or so it is pitch black already. Use your lunch break to see daylight!