Its *that* cold.

Its been pretty cloudy here. Not too cold (if you don't count the day last week that it snowed, of course) but really gray. I have had to make an effort to go outside, partly because its so depressingly gray out and partly because I have 3 papers due this week for school.  Not to worry, I am taking multi-vitamins, which supposedly have 100% of my daily Vitamin D needs taken care of.

 

Anyway, Stu and I decided to walk to Fridhemsplan yesterday to order our Thanksgiving turkey from one of the big grocery stores there. Its about a 20 minute walk or so, through a nice neighborhood and over the bridge to Kungsholmen (because Stockholm is a bunch of little islands, everything is over some bridge.)

We walked up Odengatan, and ended up spending a large chunk of time in Vasaparken, which is what I am posting about. Its a little city park that apparently used to be considered the "outskirts" of town, and in WWI, they used it to grow potatoes for the city. Its better known for being described in many books by Astrid Lindgren, because she lived in an apartment adjacent to the park from the 1940s until she died in 2002.

 

Even more interesting to us was that someone had hosed down a football field (uhh, I mean soccer) in Vasaparken. And it froze.

There were a dozen or two "ice skaters" without ice skates and a few kids with hockey sticks. We got to watch a bunch wipe out, which was admittedly rather amusing. I, however, did not spend any time on the ice, because I didn't want to be amusement for anyone else...I'm not that coordinated, and probably would have ended up falling on my butt, ripping my jeans and crying.

You can see the white field lines in the ice in these pictures from the grass beneath...Stu might have been "skating" out of bounds, I'm not sure.

The natives have told us you can skate out over the water between some of the islands when it gets really cold (which I will never do, I promise you.) But the impromptu skating rink in the park was really kind of cool. You know, its cold here. But I didn't realize it was *that* cold.