Today we slept in…hard. Grandpa stopped by at 7:30, woke Lauren up, then she went right back to sleep.

Around 10:30, after waking, showering and doing the morning routine, we headed for Gamla Stan and wandered the old streets. It’s gorgeous. We had breakfast in a café in Stortoget, a square where in 1520 Christian II of Denmark beheaded 80 noblemen. It’s now where they choose the nobel prize winners each year.

Elias’ quote of the day (as we were talking about the fact that Omar was in Seattle and was asleep) was “Do we share the sun with Seattle? Does Seattle and Sweden Share the sun?” Just as we amazed said yes, he also said “Is this the number 2 of August?” Which was also correct.

We wandered the streets of Gamla Stan, looking at the little shops, and wound up seeing the replica of St. George and the Dragon.

At noon we were supposed to meet up with my folks, but we saw the changing of the guard instead. Elias was very whiney all morning, but the music really seemed to sooth him.

At 12:30 or 1, we got back to the hotel. My folks had already left for Gamla Stan.  After a short break, we went back out only to find the streets were ALIVE – and packed. We couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, it did look like it was going to be a parade, but we did see a lot of same-sex couples.

We walked back to Gamla Stan so Ruben could go in the church where the real St. George and the Dragon. It cost money to get in, something we didn’t expect, so Ruben went in alone while Elias and I got some post cards. Elias wrote to Manina, and insisted we get a stamp.

We had lunch in a dungeon. No really. It was a prison for ??? from the 1300’s. We had to go down these very steep steps into this series of rooms and find the bar, where we ordered food. Elias had yet another ham and cheese sandwich. I had a crepe, which was ok. Ruben had the best baked potato with some creamy shrimp … they surely do like their crème and potatoes around here.

As we left the dungeon… I mean café, we headed back through the square where the noblemen were beheaded, and towards the parade. Just then we heard the police sirens – and about 15 young men came running around the corner and straight at us. I pulled Elias to the side, and kept walking to the parade (which we could hear all the music from). The guys all scattered. I was a little worried but headed on.

We came down the hill from Gamla Stan, we saw a lot of police in riot gear surrounding a bunch of people sitting on the ground. We stopped for a while to make sure that we could get around safely, which we did. At the bottom of the hill we paused for a while to see the parade and figure out how to cross the street. An ambulance pulled up, had to stop the parade to cross it. Immediately some paramedics got out, brought out the stretcher and ran to someone in the crowd. We later learned that the group of ultra right wingers who where “just protesting” the same sex adoptions and “pedofiles” had thrown bottles and rocks at the parade. Nice.

We crossed the parade route (in the parade for 4 seconds), then walked the opposite direction of the parade route. Elias was very tired and over stimulated. The parade was awesome though – gay doctors, gay soldiers, naked people in the streets, a lot of rainbows, you name it. Ruben saw one naked girl with the following written on her belly. “Sorry guys I only lick pussy”. He’s still trying to come up with a good response for that one. It was the hugest gay pride parade I had ever seen. Little did we know that my parents had gotten involved in the parade – they saw the “Anna Nicholes” getting made up at the NK department store, they were at the start of the parade, posing around with a bunch of the participants, just having a great time.

Elias was a little over stimulated, so we went down a side street and wandered around, wound up shopping in the NK department store. That place is huge, bigger than something like Macy’s, only with a gourmet grocery store in the basement (we found this out the next day).

We finally met up with the folks around 5:30 at the hotel, then left for the restaurant back in Gamla Stan at 6:30. Dinner for our last night was pizza for Elias, which was delicious but also ended up giving him that great rash on his face the next day. Still he almost ate the whole thing himself. The interesting part about the pizza was that it tasted differently from American pizza – we theorized that the oregano tastes differently here. Our meals were ok. The only other thing to note was that Matthew did return our call and we were able to talk to him for a few minutes.

After dropping Lauren off at the hotel, Ruben went off cruising in Stockholm at night. One of the biggest surprises of the night was when he stumbled upon the “main drag” of Stockholm and found every Swede with an American car or American motorcycle cruising up and down the strip. Along a 20-30 block strip. The cars and people were 3 deep on both sides of the street. The traffic moved at about 5 mph and every car was an American make ranging from 1950 Cadillacs, to 1960 Impalas, a 1970 Corvette painted as the American flag. Harley Davidson’s up and down the street. Everyone was wearing “American” parephenalia, hard rock t-shirts, or jeans and vests. One car was a beat-up old police car with a huge speaker on top and both the driver and the passenger were dressed up as the Blues Brothers. Vans and pickup trucks were alternately parked or moving with benches of people sitting in the back drinking beer and watching everyone else go bye. Given all the anti-cruising laws and open container laws in the U.S. His current favorite spot to go cruising would be Stockholm on a Saturday night during the summer.

Late night television discovery – E! “Wild On” is shown un-edited in Europe. All the blurred out bits shown in the U.S. actually have backing video. I would start a protest but I don’t know where to start.