Where did summer go?
Trip Start
Jun 29, 2008
1
16
58
Trip End
Nov 27, 2008
Stockholm,
Stockholm,
Sweden
Saturday, August 30, 2008
We spent our first day wandering around the open-air Skansen museum, which is like a combined folk museum and zoo. The folk museum component consists of a number of old private dwellings and other buildings from around Sweden. I was more interested in the animals, to be honest - the brown bears were great: there were 3 brown bear cubs that provided quite a bit of entertainment as they were exploring their surroundings.
The following day we visited Vasamuset - a museum of a 17th century Swedish warship that was salvaged from the harbour in the middle of last century after lying there for 333 years. It had been lying undisturbed after sinking 30 mins into its maiden voyage - whoops!! Apparently ship-building was not as technical an endeavour back then, and despite having a very well built ship by a very experienced ship-builder, the ship design was overly ambitious. The King of Sweden, waging battle down in Poland, wanted 2 gun decks rather than the usual single gun deck, and the ship ended up too tall for its width, with inadequate room for sufficient ballast. They knew this before they sailed, as they had carried out a stability test with sailors running from one side of the deck to the other, and they had to stop the exercise prematurely or they would have capsized. However, the Admiral did not want to tell the King about the situation and ordered the Captain to sail anyway! Great plan that was - and he didn't even suffer any consequences!!
Anyway, it has left Sweden with a great museum piece: this wooden warship is incredibly well preserved as the wood worms responsible for damaging wooden vessels in other seas do not like the cold waters and low salt content of the Baltic Sea. It was definitely impressive, with heaps of wood carvings as decoration, a lot of which was actually coloured at the time.
The rest of our time in Stockholm was pretty much spent exploring the old town, Gamla Stan, with its narrow cobbled stoned streets. We stayed at the hostel AF Chapman, which consists of rooms both on a boat as well as in the adjacent building. Unfortunately, there were no free rooms on the boat, so we stayed on land, but the breakfasts were very filling, the location good, and the price good for Scandinavia, which truly is an expensive place to travel.
My first contact with Scandinavia had been in Oslo airport, on route to Bergen, and the music I heard in the airport - Mamma Mia. I was pleased on leaving via Stockholm airport to once again hear ABBA on the airwaves!! Very appropriate, I feel, to be greeted by ABBA and then to hear them on my departure. Well, 'the show must go on' - time to head to Russia!
