A beautiful, cold winter day, lovely lunch at a nostalgic restaurant and a little walk around the old city of Linköping in Sweden. That’s a pretty good recipe for a relaxed, happy mind.
We went to visit this extremely photogenic place with a bunch of international travel bloggers and got a guided tour around the historical Open Air Museum buildings and tiny little shops full of beautiful handmade products like soap, sculptures and all sorts of art.
All the photos in this article were taken with Canon EOS M3, a handy little thing!
We started off at Linköping’s Wärdshuset, a restaurant inside two buildings from the 1700’s. Most of us ate something very traditional in both Sweden and Finland: a plateful of butter fried Baltic herring with mash and lingonberry jam.
The lunch was so lovely. I’m not a fan of fish, so I had the veggie pasta, but as soon as they brought the portions around I was a tiny bit jealous of not having what everyone else was having. However, I managed to steal some of the lingonberry jam so I was pretty pleased with my meal.
What an incredible little village this is. In Gamla (Swedish for “old”) Linköping they have workshops, artist and handicraft shops, and of course the buildings themselves: original, over a century old buildings moved to safety from the modernization of a growing city.
This little shop holds inside both a museum full of cute vintage products as well as actual food and sweets to buy.
I loved visiting the little shops full of incredible products, all handmade. I get a huge inspiration from looking at talented people’s art and work, even though it was something completely different from what I do with my hands.
A surprisingly big shop full of incredible wood art and handicraft products hidden inside one of the old buildings in Gamla Linköping.
We had a little peek inside a few of the old buildings. One of them was in its original shape, kept like so by the children of the original owner, then by Gamla Linköping after getting the whole apartment donated to serve as part of the museum.
Most of them had very low ceilings insides, which made warming up the house easier (and cheaper) back in the day.
We were extremely lucky with the weather. I mean, I’m not a fan of winter and especially the cold (as it eats away at the camera batteries), but the sunlight was so pretty. All of us stopped to take photos of it every 20 meters or so, and the guide had to wait in the cold for us to get enough shots.
And like the bloggers we are, we had to stop for a selfie at the end of the tour.