Sweden Day Five

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Happy Birthday, Michelle!

We got up and ate the rest of our strawberries. We’ve been eating granola cereal and yogurt, which is really delicious. We took a bus to the Vassa Museum. Cathy was in a foul mood today (she claimed it was because her hand hurt). She even said the sound of my flip-flops annoyed her. The Vassa was a ship that sunk in the harbor of Stockholm in the 1600’s on its maiden voyage. Its location in the harbor was lost for hundreds of years but then they found it and brought it to the surface in the 1960s. It is really amazing to see how well preserved it is considering how old it is and how it sat at the bottom of the harbor for 300 years. They found the remains of several people aboard the ship at the time of the sinking and using facial reconstruction technology they turned the skulls into real looking faces. They looked so real, in fact, that Michelle got very creeped out. After the Vassa, we took a bus to Skansen, which is this “olden-days” outdoor museum. They had it set up like a little village, with a glass blowing shop, a bakery, a pottery shop, an apothecary, and a hardware store. The gardens were so elaborate and beautiful. We were there a few weeks before the tourist season opened so many of the shops weren’t quite open or stocked, which was not a problem since I was not about to carry around trinkets for my friends all around Europe for a whole month. Michelle and I enjoyed a waffle and jam. For dinner, we went back to Jensen’s because I knew there would be food Mom and Cathy “could” eat. The waitress brought Michelle balloons and we all sang “happy birthday.”

After dinner, we walked down the street to the Nordic hotel. Inside the hotel there is bar called the Ice Bar. It was built by the same company who built an ice hotel in northern Sweden. The bar only serves drinks with Absolute vodka so it’s also sponsored in part by them. They keep the bar at -5 degrees celsius. Before we could enter, we had to wear these heavy ponchos and gloves. We also had to go in a holding chamber and wait for the outside door to close before we could open the inside door. It was very James Bond-like. The bar was very small and the drinks were fairly expensive but they were also pretty strong. The drinks came in glasses made of ice. They had fir pelts on the benches, which were also made of ice. I took tons of pictures. I didn’t really think things through in the morning when I was getting ready and I wore flip flops. Surprisingly, my feet weren’t too cold. It reminded me of Sharad and how, even in the dead of winter, he wears flip flops. Michelle and Cathy got two drinks and while they enjoyed them, Ingela and I tried to chew our glasses. I do love eating ice. After the Ice Bar, we took Cathy and Mom to the Sky Bar, because they’d love the view. Inglea told us this story of how she met Pele the soccer player and how he invited her to breakfast and to hang out. She also explained that since ticks are so bad in Sweden she carries a tick-picker with her in her purse. Michelle got a huge kick out of that. On the way home, our train got delayed. We hung around the platform and talked about how the phone we were using to get a hold of Ingela, which was her 13 year-old son’s, had a horrible alarm ring. It sounded like someone was literally screaming about killing you if you didn’t wake up. We kept playing it and I was laughing so hard that I was crying. Inglea tried to explain that it was innocent and funny because the song the kid was screaming was a sweet song like “twinkle, twinkle, little star.” Ingela gave us directions to her house from our hotel, which were “walk straight on the path, until you get to a playground and then make a left.” Somehow Michelle and I managed to get lost, which was not a good omen for trip.

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