Scandinavia Trip: Wandering Stockholm

[cjsmith]

*** Thu Oct 3

Slightly overcast this morning, misty, and there was frost everywhere,
but all that burned off quickly to another beautiful blue sky day. I
emptied out the rest of the small stuff from the car while Rob
showered. We ate Rob's pound cake for breakfast and finished off the
orange juice in Arne's fridge. It was an all-sugar meal, so we knew
we couldn't skip lunch. Then it was north to Arlanda airport to
return the car. We had driven 3,498 km in the past week or so! I
felt a little sad and vulnerable without our trusty car.

We bought tickets for the Arlanda Express train from an automatic
vending machine. The trip to Stockholm's Central Station was about
twenty minutes. Automated explanations in both Swedish and English
told us where we were going and when we would get there. Flat screens
mounted in the corner over each block of seats showed a weather report
and some stuff that I presume was advertisements.

Central Station was enormous. We hiked for ten minutes or so,
entirely inside the station, to find the subway. They label it the T,
for tunnel, in a font that would be entirely familiar to Bostonians.
Arne had loaned us a strip of tickets to use for trains, buses, and
subway. We got this stamped by the guy at the end of a row of
turnstiles. Two tickets per subway ride per person.

We got out at Karlaplan, near a pretty fountain were people were
eating an early lunch in the sun and one woman was letting her dog
play in the water. About twenty minutes of walking led us to the
island where the Vasa Museum is located. I took a detour to go see a
statue of Jenny Lind, noticing with amusement some buckeyes on the
ground along the way, and then we bought some film and ice cream.
Ahh! Nothing like eating ice cream in Stockholm in October.

The Vasa Museum was truly impressive. It told the story of how the
ship Vasa was built, when she sank (on her maiden voyage, Sept 10
1628), why she sank, how she was found, how she was recovered, and the
ongoing conservation and restoration process. To me, the recovery was
the fascinating part. Divers dug channels under the hull and steel
cables were routed in six locations under the ship. Two pontoons,
Oden and Frigg, slowly winched the cables taut and pulled the Vasa
free of the mud. She was towed underwater to a shallower location to
make her watertight for the final lift. The whole process took years,
just to bring the ship to the surface again. Then the reassembly
began. That process has been called "the largest jigsaw puzzle in the
world". One tool used was a stiff steel wire that would poke through
nail holes in wood. If the nail holes in one piece matched up with
the nail holes in another, then one more piece of the puzzle could be
reassembled.

The light in the museum was very low, as part of conservation, so I
took no photographs of the ship itself. Fortunately there were
postcards available. I'll put those in my album.

There were welcome sheets with maps of the museum in a truly stunning
variety of languages. The temptation was too great. I took one of
each. I knew I would have to carry them around all day, but it was
worth it.

We ate a little bit at the museum's cafeteria. I had cookies, tea,
bread, and butter; Rob had cookies and a 7-Up. It wouldn't hold us
forever, but breakfast had been small.

Back a short distance along the way we had come was the Historiska
Museet (yeah, I know, I have too many "the"s in that phrase). This
showed the history of Sweden from the Stone Age to the Renaissance.
We walked through the first floor: Stone Age to Vikings. Much of it
was labeled only in Swedish. In the Viking section were lots of rune
stones. Yay! I took no pictures, counting on the availability of
postcards, and was disappointed to find no postcards of the rune
stones. We did find T-shirts with runes on them though.

Next we decided to walk through Gamla Stan, the Old Town. It turned
out to be a really neat place to wander. The streets are narrow, some
of them exceedingly so (definitely no cars). There are lots of little
shops. I was getting hungry, so I stopped in a bakery. The sign
outside was a simple pretzel. "Reading" that, I felt like a
semiliterate townsperson in the Middle Ages. We also stopped for a
while in a glasswork store. Some of the pieces in there were truly
inventive, some were beautiful, all were pretty expensive and heavy.
We reluctantly moved on. Quite by accident we came across an American
food shop. It had an amazing collection of things, most of which we
knew instantly we would not find elsewhere: Gatorade, Spaghetti-Os,
Kraft macaroni and cheese, Wheat Thins, corn muffin mix, Libby canned
pumpkin, Charleston Chews, Halloween decorations... Rob went wild in
there. He got Pop-Tarts, Fritos, and microwave popcorn. All of it
was expensive. I could tell he was a little homesick.

I was very ready to move on to the Wine and Spirits Museum, but Rob
was getting quite tired, and eventually he convinced me that we
shouldn't try to split up. I wouldn't know how to walk to Arne's
house from the train station. Rob was the only one who had ever seen
the Tumba train station. So we headed back to Central Station, bought
a new strip of transportation tickets to give Arne, and rode the
commuter rail back to Tumba. We ate at the McDonald's next to the
station. As it turned out, Rob didn't know how to walk to Arne's
house from the train station either, and it was a really good thing
that I had taken a look at the map that morning. I at least got us
pointed in the right direction. After that, we found our way with no
trouble.

We put in some laundry and will probably go to sleep early.