Day 5 - Wandering Around Stockholm, Vasa, a Boat Ride, and a Wonderful Dinner

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Today was a busy day in Stockholm – it’s hard to say too much about this wonderful city. Having toured some of the city and the countryside, I now understand the attraction. We started our morning by meeting our local guide, Marco, the quintessential Stockholm man – young, charming, with a handsome face, perfect body, pink shirt and every hair in place. Our tour began with a visit to Stockholm City Hall, which would not normally be expected to be very impressive, but this city hall was very impressive.

Built in the 1920’s with both public and private funds, the City Hall was very architecturally and artistically impressive. The building is massive and built in the National Romantic style The main hall is called the Blue Room, and is brick, not blue. The original design called for blue glaze to be applied to the walls, but it was so impressive in the red brick, it was decided to abandon the blue glaze and leave it natural, but the name Blue room was on the plans and the name stuck. This hall is instantly recognizable as the room where all the Nobel Prizes are handed out, with the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize which is traditionally awarded in Oslo, Norway. Fun Fact – Alfred Nobel’s claim to fame was the patenting of TNT, as a way to stabilize nitroglycerin, which up to the development of Nobel’s process was too unstable to be really useable.

We visited the golden chamber which is decorated with millions of tiny gold mosaic squares which are made by sandwiching gold leaf between two pieces of clear glass. We also visited the City Council chamber where 105 part time city councilors vote on measures to run the city of about 1 million residents. Sweden in general, and Stockholm in particular are very serious about green initiatives. Even the city trash cans have built-in solar powered compactors so the the trash takes up less room and does not =need to be emptied as often. In the US, we are always trying to think of ways to incentivize developers to build new construction with green energy initiatives in mind. Because the US has so much land, they must do things to incentivize the builder to do what the government wants. In Stockholm, it is exactly the opposite, there are plenty of builders that want to build in the city, but there is very little land available. So, the Stockholm City Council can set the standards they would like the developer to meet, and simply will not issue a permit until the requirements are met.

From the City Hall, we went past the national parliament building, where a unicameral national legislature with nine political parties pass the necessary laws. Sweden is still a kingdom for the last 500 years, but it is governed with a prime minister and a legislature. The next stop was a return to old town Stockholm that we had visited on our own yesterday. Stockholm is actually a series of 14 islands connected by bridges and one of the smallest is the centrally located island that holds old town Stockholm. It is considered the “cork of the Baltic” as Stockholm sits at the junction of fresh water Lake Malaren and the salt water Baltic Sea. The Baltic near Stockholm is actually brackish water from the infusion of fresh water from Lake Maralen. Stockholm is currently building a lock system between Lake Maralen and the Baltic Sea to better control the mixture of water between the two water bodies to ensure future stability, and a continued supply of fresh drinking water.

Old town Stockholm also contains the Royal Palace where the king works as he lives outside of Stockholm in his residential palace. There are also several museums in the Royal Palace, including the one that contains the crown jewels of Sweden valued at around 40 million dollars. We didn’t have time to visit the museums this time, but maybe someday in the future. But for now, we finished this portion of our tour and headed of to the optional Vasa Museum tour.

Now a couple of months ago, we happened to be watching 60 Minutes on a Sunday night when they showed a segment describing the remarkable salvage of a 17^th century wooden ship called the Vasa from the 1960’s until opened to the public in the 1990’s. After watching the show, I checked our itinerary and we were indeed visiting the Vasa Museum, so we were of course excited. The story of the Vasa is kind of a sad one. After 2 years of construction, the warship Vasa was ready for its maiden voyage on Aug 10, 1628. The king had wanted to build a massive, formidable warship, adorned with colorful painted statues and double row of cannons to terrify anyone who came in contact with the Vasa. The ship was ias impressive and was expected and while everyone looked on in horror, after 15 minutes of sailing on its maden voyage, a small wind gust caught the sails, caused the ship to tilt to one side and water to enter the ship at the lower cannon bays. Within 15 minutes the ship had sunk taking the lives of about 30 on bord.

An investigation revealed that the ship was too tall, too narrow, and that there were insufficient ballast stone causing a high center of gravity, making the ship unstable. The Vasa sank to the bottom in 30 meters of water, leaving nothing visible but the top of the masts. The king ordered the masts to be cut off below the surface, to not be a reminder of what was below. There was evidently some salvage of some of the cannons as they were particularly valuable, but from that point on the ship had been largely forgotten.

Beginning in the 1960’s there was some interest by an amateur archeologist to find the location of the wreck. Using homemade equipment, he believed he had found the wreck in an unknown condition and sought both permission and funding raise the ship. The king, being a amateur archeologist himself, was all in favor of the project and helped in raising enough funds. Soon the salvage operations began and before long, the Vasa was raised enough to be towed back to dry dock for repair. It took from the 1960’s until the 1990’s to restore the Vasa to its former glory including 17 years of spraying all the wood with ethylene glycol to help provide stabilization for the wood. They built a museum around it and opened the Vasa Museum to the public.

On our first visit to the Vasa, we were blown away by the sheer size of the ship. It’s much bigger than we expected. The museum also contained a lot of artifacts that were recovered from the ship. Since the ship went down so quickly, and the brackish water of the Baltic had kept the wood worms from destroying the ship, there was only real damage were some of the metal bolts and nails holding the panels in place had rusted away, causing various panels to drop to the sea floor. Most of these panels were recovered, and like a giant jigsaw puzzle, the panels were all restored to their original locations. The result is an impressive view of an impressive vessel which we thoroughly enjoyed.

While we were at the Vasa Museum, there were a couple of things that Americans would probably find amazing. The first is that admission is free for anyone under 18 to encourage children to visit. Most US museums only admit children under 3 for free, and in fact, revenue from school field trips is usually a substantial portion of their income. The other thing is that most Swedish restrooms are co-ed. Since the typical toilet enclosure features a full floor to ceiling door and there is no view to the inside by cracks between the panels, when the stall door is closed, there is no way to know the sex of the person inside. Consequently, they just remove the urinals from the men’s room and mark both rooms for men and women for existing construction, and only a build a single unisex rest room in new construction. No one seems to care, and “bathroom bills” are unnecessary.

After visiting the Vasa Museum and grabbing a couple of Vasa t-shirts, we returned to the hotel for an afternoon of free time during which we used to wander to the shopping district near the hotel which is used mostly by the locals and not by the tourists. There seemed to be an inordinate number of men’s barber shops, not really unexpected and otherwise some typical shopping venues. They do tend to block of areas to pedestrians only to make shopping easier, and we generally thought the Swedish clothing tended to be bulky and bland, so we just had a couple of hotdogs from a local hotdog stand and chatted with the young Thai girl running it who can evidently speak English, Swedish, and Thai. After our shopping wander, we headed back to the room for a little rest before going back out tonight for dinner.

At 4:15PM, we hopped on the bus for a quick trip to the docks where we boarded an antique steamboat for a cruise out into the Baltic to the Baltic Archipelago and to the location of our evening dinner. The Baltic Archipelago is to the east of Stockholm out in the Baltic Sea and consists of about 24,000 small islands. Some of these islands are public and some are privately owned. But the Swedish “Right to Roam” allows anyone to pull there boat up to an island and pitch a tent to camp for the night even if the island is privately owned, though the camper must be respectful to the owner’s property and not be destructive. It really is a very beautiful area, and some of the archipelago close to Stockholm is actually used a suburban house where the owner commutes to Stockholm for work and lives there year round. But most of the archipelago is too inaccessible for commute, so they are used for summer or vacation homes. Many of these homes are quite beautiful!

We had to be careful, as our steamboat ride is actually public transportation for people living on the archipelago, so we had to stick together and remember to get off at Hasseludden and not remain on the boat beyond our stop. Maja’s warning was that if you are on the boat steaming away and you see her on the shore waving, you probably should have got off. The ride was great, and when we got off the boat the bus was waiting to take us the final couple of miles to the restaurant.

The restaurant is called Restaurang Langaraden and according to Maja, we are the only tour group that goes there. It is right next to a horse farm, and an inlet of the Baltic and is about as idyllic as you could imagine. They set up one large table for all of us and we had a traditional Swedish dinner of shrimp on toast, local caught salmon on boiled potatoes and asparagus, and a dessert of chocolate lava cake with strawberries and whipped cream. It was delicious! The camaraderie of the group has been excellent and we got a chance to talk to some of the last remaining passengers that we hadn’t talked to yet. It was really a wonderful evening! But all good things must come to an end, so at about 8:30 we said goodbye to the owners and boarded the bus back to the hotel.

Tomorrow is a late start day, but there is a little rain in the forecast, so it may be time to break out the long pants again. We don’t leave until 9:00AM so we get to sleep in an extra hour. Tomorrow we are heading inland an north to Upsalla and Falun to see what adventure awaits!

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