In Linköping, we stayed two nights at Hotel Ekoxen ("The Stag Beetle"), situated right by a big park in the central parts of the city. The park goes by the Swedish name of Trädgårdsföreningen (= The Garden Society); as the park was created by such a society formed back in 1859. Here, I've chosen to call it the Garden Park.
This is the hotel. Its layout inside is somewhat confusing, as it consists of two buildings joined together by a portal across the street. To get to our rooms, we had to first take one lift (or the stairs) up one floor, walk through that middle part across the street, and then take another lift. My room actually overlooked the hotel entrance!
The entrance to the Garden Park was literally just round the corner of the main building, though, so perfect for us to just go for a first short "introductory" evening walk there after we had installed ourselves in our rooms.
Sunday, 10 August
The next morning after breakfast we went out again to explore the park a bit further; and now walked up to the highest point of the park (which is also the 2nd highest view over the city). There is an observation tower up there, known as the Belvedere. Looking up the name afterwards, I learned that this is Italian, and means "beautiful view". It was built in 1881.
We happened to run into a foreign tourist up there, asking us for the way to the city centre. Being tourists ourselves, all we could do was really to point out the direction for her - towards the tower of the cathedral (which we know since a previous visit to be pretty much in the centre). Not of much help to the girl, as she deemed it to be too far away for her - but as thanks, she offered to take a photo of the two of us by the tower (using my phone):
On our way down from the hill, we noticed some dead tree trunks that had been carved into wooden sculptures. (Later, we came across the info somewhere that quite a few trees in the park had died of elm tree disease.)
These buildings from the 1740s were moved to the park in 1913.
Someone commented yesterday on my post from "Linköping Old Town" that the colour red seems to be very popular for old buildings here. As you'll be seeing plenty more examples of that in my photos from this trip, I'll repeat my answer to that remark here:
Red wooden houses are very common in Sweden, and this is related to a special kind of paint produced from byproducts of copper mining - Falun Red, named after the town with the copper mine where they developed it. It's been used since the 16th century, and has a special quality of also impregnating wood to better preserve it in our cold climate. At first it was mostly used by wealthy people as it was expensive, but in the 19th century, with industrial production etc, it became more common and increasingly popular. And it's still much used.
At noon, we met our aunt and uncle (our mum's sister and her husband) for lunch at the Garden Park Café. I had suggested that as I know they often go there, and it's on "the right side of town" for them (and with us staying at the hotel so close, it was of course very convenient for us as well). They're 89 and 88 now, so it was not to be taken for granted that our plan to meet up on a specific day would work out - but luckily, it did. :) And the garden café itself turned out well worth a visit, too. It has an exotic outdoors atmosphere even though it's indoors; and the food was good as well.
Later in the afternoon, my brother and I walked into the city centre, which also wasn't very far from our hotel. Last time we were in Linköping, three years ago, we visited the Cathedral, and also had a good look inside. (If you like, you can see my photos from 2022 here.) This time it was not open, and a large part of the outside was clad in scaffolding, so obviously there were some major repairs going on. I only managed to get two photos from the outside (leaving out the scaffolding), and they do not really give justice to the whole impressive building:
Linköping Cathedral is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in Scandinavia. It is situated opposite Linköping Castle, on a site that has been in use as a church since the 11th century. The oldest parts of the present building date back to the 13th century. (Wikipedia)
As we could not go into the cathedral, we continued to the Castle, where we managed a quick tour of the Castle & Cathedral Museum before they too closed for the day.
The Castle courtyard. (Difficult to get a good photo with the sun right behind it...)
▲ Old liturgical vestments on display in the museum.▼
A lot of scaffolding on it back then, too! ;-)
