Sweden

Another covid-19 travel retrospective from 2015.

After Copenhagen, we took a train to Sweden. The train crossed the strait on the Öresund Bridge, a combined road and rail bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden. We got off of the train at the town of Kalmar.

Kalmar

Kalmar was on our list because of Kalmar Castle (or Kalmar Slott, in Swedish), which Rick Steves described as one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Europe. He was right! (He usually is.)

The castle had people dressing up in period costumes.

The rooms had been lovingly restored.

The castle also had activities for kids.

I loved the comment about Gustav Vasa’s toilet room: “If a child becomes frightened…there is an emergency door.”

After dinner, I got a wonderful rainbow shot.

The town of Kalmar had a nice park and nice ducks.

And cat sculptures overlooking a ferry.

The next day we took an intercity bus to Oskarshamn, and then caught a ferry across to Visby on Gotland Island.

The ferry was pretty big. Also transported cars and trucks.

Visby is on the UNESCO World Heritage site list because it may be the best-preserved medieval walled city in Scandinavia. Gotland is in the middle of the Baltic Sea, nearly as close to Latvia and Estonia as to the Swedish mainland, so there was a lot of history here.

Visby was delightful.

This is our guide, originally from New Zealand, for the city walking tour.

Nice sculpture garden.

Ruins of the medieval walls around the city.

We took a taxi to the tiny Visby airport and boarded a plane from for a forty-minute flight to Stockholm. Then a bus to our VRBO apartment rental. Trains, buses, ferries, taxis, planes. This was a transportation trip.

Stockholm was gorgeous. A photographer’s delight. A whole lotta pictures…

Outside the Royal Castle

Stockholm is a bunch of islands, each with its distinct personality. Our apartment was on the island of Sodermalm, which is compared to hipster Brooklyn. The neighborhood is full of lovely old apartment buildings. We had both read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books, and a lot of the events in the books take place in Sodermalm. We went on a self-guided Girl with the Dragon Tattoo walking tour, and it was a lot of fun. The apartment is where Mikael Blomkvist lived is on the top floor, one of the dormer windows on the left side.

This tough looking cat was right outside Lisbeth Salander’s flat.

Of course, there were cats!

There were a lot of weird sights in Stockholm…

This is one of my favorites. Bygginfart means building entrance, but juvenile humor always rules.

I don’t know what this means…

This was on the waterfront. A group of blond blue-eyed youth singing for Jesus. The group even has a Wikipedia page.

I love this picture. And this was before we had a travel trailer.

Susan was very disappointed. If we had been in Stockholm a few weeks earlier she could have heard Paul McCartney in concert.

We really enjoyed the Skansen open-air museum, where the employees are dressed according to the era and location and they answer all your questions in character. At least two of the people we talked to were history graduate students, and we learned a lot of history today. Such as the history of alcoholism in Sweden, and why alcohol is so heavily taxed today in Sweden. While our guide book suggested a few hours, we spent the entire day at Skansen!

We first took a ferry across to the island of Djurgården, where Skansen is located.

The island of Djurgården has a number of museums. This is a view from the ferry of the Gröna Lund amusement park on Djurgården, which we did not visit.

Snickerifabrik means carpentry shop.

This man worked at the turn of the twentieth-century print shop.

This is a successful businessman from the 1920s.

This is a homemaker/mother who was also a seamstress working at home. She told us about the alcohol problems of factory workers in the early twentieth-century.

This man worked in the apothecary.

The next two photos are from a farmhouse in the 1890s. We learned a lot about historical labor strife from the farmer.

We had lunch at Skansen. Susan had Swedish meatballs and I had the pickled herring plate. Really good!

Meals in Sweden were very expensive. This was our one night at a “splurge” restaurant, which was excellent. This is reindeer, with sun-dried lingonberries and a lovely sauce.

We also visited the Vasa Museum, also on Djurgården. The Vasa was a huge warship that was launched in 1628. The Vasa was also poorly designed, as it was topheavy with an extra cannon deck. It sank on its maiden voyage when a breeze caught her sails and blew the ship over. The ship, buried in the mud, was rediscovered in 1956. Although the wood in most shipwrecks is destroyed by shipworms, the Vasa was buried under water that was quite cold with low salinity, conditions that inhibit shipworm growth. The ship was recovered, restored, and displayed in this delightful museum which opened in 1990. The first picture is of the museum itself from our ferry ride. The red masts atop the museum roof represent the actual height of the Vasa when she was fully rigged.

Being a scientist, I have always been fascinated by Nobel Prizes. I remember when I started graduate school in 1977 (!) our friend Donna made me promise I would get her a ticket to join us in Stockholm. Sorry Donna, I haven’t yet been invited. More recently my sister Michele turned me on to a fun podcast from The Moth about Nobel Prize ceremonies. I learned that In addition to the cash prize, each laureate can bring forty guests! I assume the guest’s expenses are paid by the Nobel Foundation.

Of course, I wanted to see the Nobel Museum on Stortorget, the oldest public square in Stockholm.