Hagaparken

Today, P., Luna (who I am dog-sitting for the week starting today!), and I went to Hagaparken, which King Gustav III (the one who was murdered at the masked ball at the Stockholm opera in 1792) designed in the 1700s. We walked for a few hours around the lake (inlet?) Brunnsviken, about 8 miles in all. I finally got to see the copper tents, and we saw funny things like Ålkistan, which translates literally to eel coffin. It's actually the name of a canal coming off of Brunnsviken where they used to trap eels using some sort of hatch back in the 1600s. We had fika at Bergianska trädgården (botanical garden), where I had a chocolate ball about four times the size of the ones I made last night, and ten times better.

The first two pictures below are of the ruins of the foundation of a castle Gustav III started to build before he died. The cellars were as far as they got. He wanted to build a whole Versailles-style park, and appropriately the architect for all this stuff, including the copper tents, was a French architect named Louis Jean Desprez. P. told me that he also wanted to build a huge promenade where Sveavägen is, so that he could sit in luxury in Hagaparken and observe central Stockholm down the boulevard.

The bottom two pictures are of an EXHAUSTED Luna.

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