Nordiska Museet

Nordiska museet has exhibitions about life and work, trends and traditions, in Sweden from the 16th century to today. It's a beautiful building for the museum which was founded in 1873. I remembered I hadn't taken a pic of the building as I was leaving at the 5pm closing. It had already been long dark since sunset was at 3pm so it's hard to see.

London

It was another midweek holiday and another opportunity to take 2 days off and be out of work for 5 days. This time my nearby European trip was London. I've always wanted to visit and it's just a 2 hour flight from Stockholm, so why not? Life has a time limit so I still plan on doing as much as I can while I can.

I saw lots of touristy things in 4 days of wandering using the London Underground. There's still so much more to see and do that I'll have to go back several times to feel like I've seen it all. Maybe I'll even try to get posted there some day since it's one of those cities I just enjoyed being in. I took hundreds of photos so it's hard to pick out representative samples but I'll try...

Dublin Ireland

Ireland is a beautiful country and Dublin is a fun city with all of the Irish pubs filled with music and beer. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves (click on them for bigger versions):

 

Tough Viking

Tough Viking is the leading, largest and most brutal Obstacle Race in Scandinavia and Russia. The obstacles are massive and consists of fire, water, electricity, deep mud, monkey bars and barbed wire set out along a challenging route. The obstacles are designed together with the Swedish elite maritime special forces unit Kustjägarna.

We participated in the Tough Viking competition in the much easier "spectator" class. We actually went to cheer on the Embassy team and enjoy the nice summer weather for possibly the last weekend. None of these pictures are of the Embassy team since this is a publicly visible blog so they're just random tough vikings.

The entire course was 15 KM with 30 obstacles. We stayed on the left side of the map and watched some of the more interesting obstacles. If anyone wanted to watch all of this then they probably should have joined as an actual competitor. It was spread over a huge area even with some of the winding back and forth so it would have been difficult to see everything.

Stockholm Zombie Walk

Once a year in Stockholm there are zombies. They go for a walk through the city.

We're having a little nice weather for a few weeks so it was actually sunny and 73F. Summer appears to be unusually short this year with a bit more umbrellas and jackets needed compared to our first summer here. But I digress so here are the zombies...

Foreign Service Administrative Promotion

Kolmården Wildlife Park

Pairi Daiza in Belgium is a really awesome zoo we visited earlier this year. We have a zoo near us in Sweden which was good too but wasn't quite as big. This is a regular looking zoo but it has a couple of unique things. There's a cool indoor dolphin show with huge video screens adding to the show. The real highlight of the zoo is a cable car safari dangling us over the animals like fresh meat box lunches. LOL

Kolmården Wildlife Park is about an hour and a half away from Stockholm. We rented a car for the day to get there. Since it's Sweden they gave me a Volvo station wagon as the smallest car with the luxury option of an automatic transmission. I'm a silly American who hasn't been driving manual all my life. I learned the basics a couple of decades ago but I'm not going to try to pick that skill up again unless I really need it. It's definitely not going to be during a rental car day trip.

Our daughter's pictures of the day (click on them to enlarge):