DROTTNINGHOLM! Woke up pretty late to compensate for the lack of sleep the past few nights; drew my curtains and saw that the sky was floating snow (cos they're just like haphazardly flying in the air) and everything was just a white blur. Thought today's plan was gonna get cancelled but I saw the forecast to be rather encouraging and the rest were quite keen too!
So off we go! Took about an hour to reach the place (no thanks to missing a bus while we bought Macs as lunch) but the place is beautiful!
The "summer" palace in white and water fountains filled with snow...
Reached in time for the guided tour to learn some interesting fact as we toured around. Some of the rooms were Illusionary paintings where fake walls were painted for symmetry in the room and some of the paintins even had 3D effects before it was mainstream. Hipster much. Even the nice "marble" we see all around are not real; just painted over but still nice.
Red marble looking thing that made the pillar - fake. Also, can you figure the monogram out? It's HERS that stands for Hedwig Eleonora, the Queen of Sweden (in Swedish); the queen who built this palace, which is the current royal family's permanent residence.
Then we went over to the Chinese room and guess what we found?
Swede king also like to play mahjong...
You'll never guess what's this thing in the same room. It's a bed for the servant boy! Idea for my brother's Studio Apartment...
Continued and saw a whole room on the Battle of Lund that lasted from dawn to dust, and another whole room of portraits of all the kings and queens around the world at that period of time:
It's called the Hall of State and this is but a small corner of it featuring the Swedish king, Queen Victoria of Great Britain, some king whose plaque was too far I can't see the name, and the pope! Nepoleon the third was on the left just cut off the picture.
There were also some paintings painted on leather, some other paintings with a camel looking thing a general of the king brought back from their battle against the Turks, and then there was this room called the State Bedchamber:
Not to sleep but to receive guest with intimacy to symbolize trust...
The tour then brought us to several other rooms and saw several other paintings that were all pretty interesting. But I would think the more physically appeal part of the palace is the outdoors!
Decide whether you wanna be autumn or winter please Did I mention that this place is a UNESCO sites too? Mostly for it's culture and history but also cos of the Chinese Pavilion (sadly, only opens in June) and the garden (sadly, naked, but I like)
It was a small nice place good for a lazy afternoon trip and we ended our palace visit at about 3pm and headed to Slussen for fried herrings (!!) before we headed back home for an even lazier Sunday.
This also marks my last weekend here in Stockholm~
