Random chance brought us to Östermalmstorg, where Yimei and I came previously to find the Ai Weiwei ice sculpture. Indeed, as Joshua told us earlier, the sculptures were "replaced" by a giant Christmas tree (probably cos the Film Festival has ended, or maybe just because the sculptures melted haha! And "replaced" because it's not at the exact same spot, just a change of attraction in the square).
It is pretty well-known that metro stations in Stockholm aren't very far apart: some Lappis dude recently did a 5 station chase down for a train and did it in 7-odd minutes; that's 2.2 km mind you. And with this roughly 440m per station distance, we arrived at yet another station after some walking: Kunsträdgården (though not on the same line as the previous stations). And we found the ice skating rink! Not as big as expected but it's freeeeeee!
Happy kids skating so fast I can't capture them without a blur
And we walked down towards T-centralen to get to the metro that'll bring us to Globen (that's on yet another line) but nope, we aren't going there just yet. At Sergel Torg, we decided to pay Wayne's Coffee a visit; it's also my first visit to this cafe chain though it's everywhere in this part of the world. And so we sat down and talked; and talked, and talked, and talked; saliva mostly contributed by yours truly. Until the sun knocked off and my saliva almost ran dry (just kidding, it never does), we figured it's time to go.
Finally, Globen. What's there at Globen? A globe, of course! The largest globe in the globe! Okay, it reads: the largest hemispherical building in the world. It's shaped like a large white ball (during Halloween, they decorated it into a pumpkin) and is also home to the Swedish National Ice Hockey team - it's a HUGE thing here, in case you stay in the countrysides; in fact, everyone was in some jersey the day we went cos there was some games going on. Apparently it's supposed to represent the Sun in the "Swedish Solar System" which is a scale model of the Solar System. Yes, you read that right, Mercury (Stockholm City Museum), Venus (in KTH), Mars (Morby Centrum), Earth (Cosmonova Riksmuseet), Jupiter (Arlanda Airport), Saturn (Celsius Square in Uppsala), Uranus, Neptune, Pluto etc. can all be found along the coast of the Baltic sea in Stockholm and other cities of Sweden at a scale of 1:20 million. How cool is that!
Also, it's not named after Lars Magnus Ericsson (at least not in the I'm-honouring-this-place-in-your-name manner); the company - his company, actually - Ericsson, won the naming rights. Some of the Globe's bragging rights, on the other hand, includes having the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela as its visitor/guest.
