Hello!  I just got back from Sweden last night and here are the pictures!
Serene and I got there at around 9 am (yup, that meant we left London pretty danged early).  Now, pay attention, because the next part gets confusing!  If you are more interested in the photos, just skip ahead!  We took a bus for around 90 minutes to get into Stockholm and a friend of a friend of Serene's met us at the station.  Anna, the friend of a friend, is studying abroad in Stockholm for the year at a school about twenty minutes by train outside of town in the suburbs, along with Serene's friend Eston, who was unable to meet us at the station.  She was very nice and sent us on our way with some food and instructions on how to get back to Stockholm.  We met another one of Serene's friends (who knew so many people from Singapore go to Sweden???) who is earning a degree partly in Stockholm, partly somewhere in the Netherlands.  She took us to her boyfriend's apartment which was at the top of a hill right next to the harbor!  Here's the view from the street leading to his house!

Stockholm (overlooking the harbor on a cloudy day)

We had some tea and lunch at her boyfriend's place and Serene and I were introduced to yet another Singaporean girl who was also doing the tourism thing, so we hung out with her for the rest of the day.  We decided to take a boat over to another little island that has a lot of museums.  We went to the "largest open air museum," Skansen, in the afternoon.  If you paid them 100 crowns (€10 / $13), you could play in an enclosure with some lemurs!  I am not made of money or else I totally would have done it!

The rest of Skansen, the outdoor museum, was not all that interesting, actually.  It was very pretty, and there were a lot of animals.  They had various pens with "Scandinavian" animals, so that was cool.  Stocky northern looking ponies, moose, sheep, etc.  They also had accumulated, moved, and scattered different buildings from Sweden all over the park, so you could see a 17th century farmhouse, 18th century windmill, and one pretty decent sized granary building that I think was several centuries old.  I was kind of getting the "Silver Town Colorado" type vibe with reenactments and hands on history stuff, although there was only one person on duty in a little farm building while we were there.  It looks like they are set up to do a lot more during the summer.

View from the edge of Skansen Museet

It started to rain on us while we were in the park, and the temperature was dropping pretty fast, so we headed back towards the center of town and found a giant shopping mall.  H&M has its home in Sweden, so we wandered around the store(s) for a while looking at stuff, got some dinner, etc.  Serene and I went grocery shopping as well, because there was quite a lot of interesting food to look at.  It would appear that Sweden's cuisine focuses mainly on desserts, because almost the entirely grocery store was dedicated to sweet breads, chocolate, sugared items, candy, and berry compotes, haha.  Serene and I stocked up a bit and then headed back to the dorm.  Or so we thought!  It had seemed very easy to reach during the day, but when we came out of the commuter train station everything looked different by night!  We tried both directions and just got confused, so we called the girl who had originally picked us up.  Alas, she didn't know what we were talking about when we described where we were, so we wandered a bit more.  We finally called her again and she realized we had taken the wrong exit (we didn't know that there were two exits) and so we were on campus instead of by the dorms.  She had to talk us through a bit before we made it back to the room!

It was very pretty by their dorm.  There were quite a few trees and steep ledges / rock formations and hiking trails.  The dorm itself was very new and colorful.  The room we were staying in had two beds, a small kitchen, and bathroom, plus a tiny balcony!  Serene's friend wasn't there the first night, so we got the two beds to ourselves, hahaha!  We got up the next morning to go on a free walking tour of Stockholm's old city, the Gamla Stan.

Our tour guide was not so great.  He told us more about himself than about the city, to be honest.  We walked up to the palace just as the changing of the guards was happening.  "Oh, we are so lucky, this is hard to catch," he said.  "Let me say a few words before we take a peek."  He then talked for the next five minutes until the changing of the guards was over.  "Oh well, you can still look if you want to," he said nonchalantly as he strolled off with most of the group in tow.  Serene and I were a bit miffed about that, but we took a few pictures of them leaving the square anyway.

Here's a statue commemorating chasing those pesky Danes out of Sweden.

A view of Stockholm from the cliffs on the south (?) side of the harbor.

After lunch, we took a boat back over to the island of the first day in order to go to the Vasamuseet!  The Vasa was a 17th century boat that was top heavy and sank fifteen minutes into her first voyage in the Stockholm harbor.  She stayed there until they rediscovered her and managed (through a lot of really scary diving work, it looks like) to lift her up in one piece!  Because of the brackish water, the ship is very well preserved, and they recovered thousands of items from the ship, including a lot of well preserved skeletons.
The ship was really massive.  The museum is seven stories and starts at the base of the ship until the top, if that gives you an idea of the scope.  It looks like most of the ship is structurally sound enough that people can walk in it, although we weren't allowed to.  We just saw on videos that archaeologists and specialists were jauntily strolling through the insides of the hold and gun decks, etc, as if they weren't worried about the centuries old wood breaking.  They said that 90% of the original timber is still intact.

I was very impressed with the Vasa.  After a few hours in the museum, we got a call from Serene's friend Eston.  He had made it back into town and wanted to know where we should meet up.  We suggested the city center, but he kind of make a big deal about not wanting to spend a fortune on food (it turns out he had never eaten out in Stockholm, which I thought was impressive considering he has been there as long as I have been in London!), so we went back to the dorm to meet him.  He made us some swedish meatballs with sauce and lignon berries (kind of like small, sourer cranberries), plus potatoes.  Serene and I had brought a sweetbread that we found at the store, so overall we had a pretty awesome meal.  He was trying to ply us with alcohol and seemed very depressed that we are not the nightlife type of people, but we did go out with him to town to go to a bar (although at our request he did acquiesce to go to a bar that didn't charge a crazy high admission fee.  Stockholm, seriously, you are expensive!)

Here's a picture of the harbor by night!  I stuck my hand in the Baltic Sea just for funsies and I have decided that it is not as cold as Lake Huron, which still takes the cake for Coldest Water Ever.  I was surprised, because I thought that the sea would be painfully cold, but it basically felt like garden hose water in terms of temperature.

The next day, Eston wanted to go to an art museum, so we found a bus and went out to one of the piers pretty far from Stockholm's center.  Here are some churches that I saw that looked cool, haha.

We had trouble finding lunch since we weren't really in a happening part of town anymore, and it was a Sunday so all the actual establishments were closed.  We finally did find a pretty nice diner, where due to my inability to read Swedish, I foolishly picked something that sounded like chicken but was actually salmon.  Alas!  Every country I go to, I somehow wind up eating fish!

We headed back to the old city after lunch and wandered around a bit.  We didn't feel like paying for a museum (I'm telling you, ridiculously high rates), so we just looked around.  Here's a cool fish sign.

We got lucky, and as we were walking around we heard the changing of the guards happening again!  We ran to the royal palace and were just in time to see everything happening, although there were no horses this time.  :(

Here is one of the guards.  I really like her uniform, it is way cooler than the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, who look like they are encouraging people to mess with them.

This square was the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath, where a bunch of Swedes got chopped when Denmark got the upper hand.  The red building has bricks commemorating each head, supposedly.

We found a cool church, the Deutcher Kerche, or something like that.  It was quite small but very beautiful on the inside.

We stopped for a snack in the Bloodbath square before our bus to the airport.  They gave us hot chocolate in bowls!  So awesome.  That's Eston, our kind host, and Serene!

For an airport with only five gates, the line for security was crazy!  Serene and I got through with only about ten minutes before our gate closed, and we should have had forty minutes or so.  We ordered nachos before we realized how little time we had, so we had to stuff it in a to-go box and dash for the plane.  We also had intended to spend our remaining 100 or so crowns on random stuff at the airport, but instead had to spend it on M&Ms and things on the plane.  The flight attendant was amused when we put the bill in his hand and said, "What can we get for that?"  I had an apple juice incident, so it appeared as if I had wet my pants and I rode in squishy shame for the rest of the trip (and on the bus trip back to London later, sigh).

Overall it was a fun trip!  I met a lot of people and I didn't really spend much money at all thanks to Serene's friend being nice enough to let us stay with him!  I felt a serious Canada vibe while I was there.  I guess the hockey world championships were going on, so there were a lot of hockey jerseys.  There was a lot of moose paraphernalia and pine trees, so I think I can understand my Canadian perceptions.

I think I would prefer to see the back country of Sweden more.  Stockholm as a city was not particularly notable, in my opinion.  It had nice features but it doesn't stand out to me all that much.  I loved the water, cliffs, and their incorporation into the city, though!  Anyway, I have to go, but in two weeks I go to Madrid!  Probably more updates then!