Stockholm

DAY 1

I met John and Dale at Heathrow on Thursday morning (25^th July) and we flew to Stockholm.

 

Things didn’t get off to a good start in Stockholm.  The taxi driver had no idea where our hotel was and when we finally did get there we couldn’t get in.  When we worked out how to get in (security number in small writing in an email) there didn’t seem to be rooms for us.  Fortunately the proprietor quickly sorted everything out and things started improving. 

The hotel was wonderful.  It was local and full of character.  It was located in an apartment buildingset around a very nice courtyard.  A wide array of local jams, cheeses and meat were available every morning for breakfast.

We only had 2 days in Stockholm before our cruise left so we had to prioritise.  Fortunately we had assistance from Stephen and Mark, from Erick, who I met at a conference in Berlin a couple of years ago and who lives in Stockholm, and also from Diana.

The first item on the agenda was to wander around Gamla Stan, which is the oldest part of Stockholm.  Of course wandering around mostly included sitting outside a pub on a balmy summer evening drinking sangrias.

Stockholm is truly beautiful.  The architectural style in Gamla Stan, and generally along the water, seemed to be part German and part Russian.  Stockholm is in an archipelago so there is water and greenery everywhere. We kept marvelling at the old buildings and the water views.

The Palace (reputedly the biggest in Europe).  Size isn't everything.

 

 

There is a magnificent theatre on the waterfront, and to our surprise there is already a Swedish translation of an American play that MTC thought it was quick to get the rights to for its production earlier this year, ‘Other Desert Cities’. 



The big mystery for us is which of the 3 actresses pictured is playing the daughter!

DAY 2

On our first full day we decided that the priorities were the Vasa and the ABBA Museums, which were fortuitously located very close to one another.  Both were excellent but obviously incredibly different. 

We didn't visit this museum, but thought it looked impressive from the outside

 



First stop was the Vasa museum, which is dedicated to a ship of the same name that was built as the pride of the Swedish navy in the 17^th century but which sank within moments of being launched.  When they set up an investigation to work out what had happened they very quickly worked out that it was due to the fact that the King of the day had been exerting undue pressure to complete this magnificent ship and no one was prepared to stand up to him.  As a result, they decided to just drop the matter altogether and to never mention it again.

 

Fast forward 300 years and the Vasa was found on the bottom of Stockholm Harbour, raised, restored and eventually a museum was built around it.  Even though the Vasa wasn’t seaworthy it is a magnificent piece of craftsmanship.  We spent hours wandering around the six levels of the museum looking at the Vasa from every angle and taking in many different aspects of the story.  Thank you Mark, Stephen and Erick.

 

Each gun placement had a lion's head carved on the inside to add some kitty power when the portholes opened

The ship was incredibly well preserved in the harbour because the water is too low in salt to support seaworms

All of this carved timber was originally painted in the most gaudy of colours - it would have looked like a floating bordello.

After Vasa it was off to ABBA.  We really enjoyed it – well perhaps Dale and I enjoyed it more than John.  It does have a couple of strange quirks. 

Firstly, they won’t accept cash – its credit card only for Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha and Anna-Frid.  This is then justified as one of the great services being provided to mankind.  You probably didn’t know this but it’s not money that’s the root of all evil, it’s actually cash.  Why? Because you need cash to buy drugs and you need to steal cash to do so! So there! 

Secondly, they’ve gone to a lot of effort to provide interactive experiences such as singing and dancing along to your favourite ABBA songs, which you can then download for posterity’s sake.  Dale was very excited about being able to record his own ABBA song except that the queue was too long. And this was despite the fact that they restrict entry to the Museum.  It shows again Bjorn and Benny’s aptitude for making money money money out of gimmicks. 

Now I do love ABBA and the information in the museum was wonderful.  I didn’t know that their first hit was ‘People need love’.  Although I think it should have been people need money but they don’t need cash.  Also of interest was the whole section devoted to the left wing Swedish music scene’s distaste for ABBA’s populism and the efforts that they went to, to prevent their music being played.  This included Ring Ring only finishing third in the Swedish Eurovision contest in 1973, despite being a huge hit. So ABBA – thank you for the music and yet again you’ve taken lots of my money money money but I’m still a deliriously happy little dancing queen.

Precious momentos like the bench from this photo (apparently)



A recreation of the hut where the music was written, with a video of the view of the lake in the background



It's 1977 all over again



Unfortunately for Simone and Toni-Rose, not available in the gift shop

 

 

At Erick’s suggestion we made booking for dinner in a restaurant on a steam boat called Norrstar, which spent nearly 4 hours wending its way around the Stockholm archipelago.  The boat left at 6pm and our restaurant sitting was for 8.15pm so we enjoyed the first couple of hours sightseeing in full daylight.  The boat is actually a ferry so it stopped at numerous islands for people to get on and off.  What was most interesting was seeing how Stockholmers were spending their summer holidays on the islands.  It was really not so different from being at Phillip Island, which is also an island with lots of holiday houses and which you can also get to by Ferry.  Kids were swimming around the piers and another whole family were down at the pier seeing grandma off on the ferry back to Stockholm or where ever.  The islands are very green and treed, often with small rocky cliffs.  We loved looking at the holiday homes and speculating how things get transported to the islands, because most of them are not connected by bridges.  This question was answered when we saw a barge pass by with a dozen cars on board.  It was all terrifically interesting. 



Dawson's Creek-esque?

We then had a lovely dinner while making our way back to Stockholm.  We arrived back at twilight, which was shortly before 10pm. 

We were initially surprised that the sun was setting so early.  We are a long way north and it’s only one month past the summer solstice.  Then we realised that the sun is coming up at 4.30am and even at 11pm and midnight there is still quite a lot of visibility.  I don’t know if it ever gets pitch dark at this time of the year.

For anyone familiar with A Little Night Music, twilight does go on a long time

DAY 3

As we weren’t sailing until 10pm we had another day free to explore Stockholm.  We decided that the day’s excursion would be to the Town Hall, where they hold the banquet for all the Nobel Prize winners every year.  Erick recommended it and Diana had told Dale that despite her best efforts she has never been able to get on a tour. She has been to Stockholm a number of times and really wants to visit but the reason that it can be tricky to get into is that it is actually the functioning Town Hall and you also cannot pre-book tickets on tours.  If they are holding special functions it isn’t possible to visit.  Anyway we got lucky and did get in. 

Before heading off to the Town Hall John and I went out to hunt and gather lunch provisions in the local supermarket and then walked down to the port to have a look at our cruise ship, the Star Flyer which had docked earlier that morning.  We left Dale at the hotel very happily (not!) doing a French test that had to be done before we get to the language school in Lyon.

The Town Hall was fascinating in the truest sense of that word.  It is a relatively new building, which the architect decided would be based on a Venetian Doge’s Palace but have lots of allegorical references to Swedish history and folk lore. Hmmmm is about all I can really say.  The banquet and dining halls are magnificent large spaces which still manage to be bizarre.  The banquet hall is actually a closed in courtyard.  In the Doge’s palace it would have been open but that doesn’t really lend itself to the Swedish winter climate.  So the result is a white ceiling that they apparently project blue light onto during banquets to make it look like the sky.  Do you see what I mean by hmmmmmmmm? 

A lot was made of the large number of people they have to feed at the Nobel Prize banquet.  Guests have to make do with a place setting of only 60 cms wide!  More than enough I say. 

The city government has 200 councillors who sit in this chamber.  There was originally going to be a flat plaster ceiling, but upon seeing the timber framing holding up the vaulted roof, the architect decided to commission elaborate artwork on the timber itself.  Kind of fabulous and gauche all at the same time.

The ballroom has gold leaf Byzantine tiles on the walls, forming part of motifs and other art work depicting aspects of Swedish history.  It’s a little like Byzantine decoration meets Soviet industrial art.  Nevertheless the tour was fascinating.

 

After the tour we had a lovely picnic in the town hall grounds overlooking the sea and headed off to start the boat boarding process. 

Next time: The Baltic Sea