Stockholm, the city

The buildings are grand, some quite colourful, but the furniture tastes in Stockholm seem anchored in IKEA! Furniture is modern and rather square and uninteresting, just like the stuff in the stores.

The Royal Palace was somewhat more grand inside in terms of ornate and gilted furniture, but even it has a Silver Jubilee Room, commissioned for the current King, which looks as though it could have come from IKEA.
I hadn't realised the extent to which Stockholm is built on islands. The main city is on the mainland, but many suburbs and the Royal Palace, at the top, are on islands. There are many bridges and we took a 2 hour trip around several of them, entering the large fresh water lake that forms part of the archipelago. It is fed with glacial melt water and separated from the Baltic by locks. There are apparently 24,000 islands in the archipelago.