Alfred Nobel is the password in Stockholm. He invented dynamite and that made all the difference to the city, which is basically built on a granite base. With dynamite, it was possible to blast granite away and adjust street levels. As a result, people didn’t have to climb stairs to reach different levels of roads.
The rock here was blasted away (with dynamite, of course), making the shoreline accessible to the city above without climbing stairs.
Stockholm is built on an archipelago larger than Indonesia, so there are a lot of bridges in the city as you travel from island to island. We saw some interesting things on our city tour, including a parade that included marching bands. That was fun! ABBA (I wish I could type the backwards B) Museum is in Stockholm and continues to produce income for the group. We saw a beautiful city on our bus tour, except for one building. See the picture below.
This is beyond a doubt the ugliest building we saw in Stockholm. It’s the U.S. Embassy.
On our walking tour, we passed an interesting bathroom (or toilet, as Europe calls it). One of the men in our group tried it and said there was a stainless steel cover that, when removed, revealed a hole for use.
The toilet and the brave (desperate?) man who tried it.
Some of the buildings we walked past had “gossip mirrors.” The mirror allowed the person on the second (or higher) floor to see a person at the building entrance. When the doorbell rang on the first floor, the gossip mirror made it possible to decide whether you wanted to answer the door or not.
The black triangular thing mounted on the building beside the window and above the white sign is the gossip mirror.
We went into a small bakery and bought a sweet roll just so we could take a picture of the original painted ceiling. I can’t even imagine a ceiling like this now.
We could see from the open doorway that the ceiling was beautiful.
Eating a sweet roll was no hardship to get a good look at this ceiling artwork.