Stockholm

Stockholm-

I am way behind on the blog now, so perhaps I will accelerate the narrative and hopefully get caught up.

After traveling up from Jonkoping, we settled into our AirBnB place in Stockholm, which turned out to be just a bit south of the major attractions downtown.  This didn’t turn out to be a problem, since with the bikes we could easily jump on the hugely extensive bike path system the city is blessed with and get to most of what we wanted to see in about 15 minutes.

Like Copenhagen, the bike-friendliness of the city is an integral feature as opposed to a well-meaning afterthought as it is in many American cities.  Bikes not only have their own lanes, but have a whole intertwined road system that gets riders across bridges, through major intersections, and around most obstacles that can make urban biking a dangerous chore elsewhere.  It is no exaggeration to say that (in the summertime anyway) biking would be  faster and less of a hassle than venturing into the city in a car (and far cheaper- not only is parking difficult to find and expensive, there is a “congestion fee” drivers must pay even to enter the city!).

Stockholm is a BEAUTIFUL city, built on a huge archipelago- so the entire downtown is criss-crossed with brackish waterways that are in fact the mixture of a large lake to the west and the Baltic Sea to the east, and the water between all the islands.  The city is hilly, and bridges go all over the place and at all sorts of different levels, yet the handsome 18th and 19th- century buildings that grace the skyline are showcased and spaced apart attractively by the water and the topography.  The city is also well-endowed with extensive parks and green-spaces, and it’s  not difficult at all to find some peaceful natural space minutes away from the bustling downtown.    It’s huge and complex, yet inviting and friendly, and of course there are approximately 1 jillion places to eat and drink.  It’s just a great city.

The first day we went right for the main sights, foremost among which is the royal palace (Kungliga Slottet) on the center-most island in the city, Gamla Stan.  The palace actually has several sections you can see, some more museum-like (such as the Treasury, where you can see the bejeweled crowns of immeasurable value), and some more a tour of the parts of the gigantic palace the royal family doesn’t happen to be using at the moment.  The guidebook explained that after the previous fort-like castle burnt down in the early 1700’s, the new one was built more in the style of a Versailles- type palace- large castles being of little military value anymore and and apparently gargantuan gaudy  Rococo-style palaces being more the thing at the time.  So yeah, it’s really fancy, and it takes a while to see, and it really brings home the fact that a powerful monarchy can certainly collect a lot of ornate golden stuff from visiting foreign dignitaries given a few centuries.

The palace was certainly worth seeing, though, and you get some other admission tickets with the ticket cost, like the Riddarholmskyrkan, the church where they buried most of the royalty from the 1300’s onward.  The whole church is in fact a tomb, with all the alcoves to either side stuffed with ornate sarcophaguses of expired kings and queens, and the floor beneath  your feet the resting places of various prominent church figures, lords and ladies.  Dope.

The rest of Gamla Stan is pretty fun to wander around, with its narrow picturesque medieval cobblestone streets and historical buildings and so on, though it is about as touristy as it gets.  The Swedes, like the Danes, keep it fairly classy, however, though not cheap!

We finished Day one at the Medieval museum (Medeltidsmuseum) on the little island directly north of Gamla Stan that it shares with the parliament building.  Funny story- they were going to put an ugly parking garage there in the 60’s and as a part of that did and archeological survey-  oopsie!  Turns out the site was loaded with all sorts of medieval artifacts.  So they built a museum around the site and left many of the excavated buildings where they lay.  It’s an overlooked museum in a city packed with great museums, but we really got a lot out of it.  They also have the remains of a boat from the 1500s which would be really super interesting unless you were to go to the much more famous and impressive Vasa museum, like we did the next day.   We had dinner and some wine in one of the very many delightful restuarants across the water on the way home.

We targeted the attractively forested Djurgarten Island, which is pretty much all a park.  Of course, it has plenty of pleasant paths and gardens and forests, but it also has the Vasa museum, which you may have heard from other people than me is one of the coolest museums you’ll ever see.  It’s built around the amazingly-preserved 17th-century ship of the same name, that the King Gustav II Adolph built to amaze and terrify his enemies.  With two levels of guns, it was a groundbreaking design, and that’s usually a compliment.  But it turns out if you build a ship tall, it’s pretty important to build it wide, too.  Oh, and be sure that the gunports are not going to be underwater when the ship leans in the breeze.  Oh, and also have a lot of ballast in the hold if the ship is super-tall.  Oh, and also maybe have plans for the ship before you build it.     But really I shouldn’t be hard on the naval engineers of Gustav II’s court, because if his ship hadn’t sunk almost immediately on its maiden voyage, we wouldn’t be seeing it today!  Apparently, it took nearly 20 years to raise it from the goop of the harbor and then pump it full of chemicals to get the water out and preserve it, but it’s just amazing, and the museum does a fantastic job showing it off and having lots of side exhibits explaining the history of its construction, operation, rescue, and restoration.

Next door is Skansen, which apparently what most Stockholmers come to the island to do.  It’s sort of an open-air museum/zoo/amusement park, which sounds really cheesy but the Swedes being Swedes, is actually really tastefully done and interesting.  The main attractions are the 150 or so transplanted or re-constructed buildings that were place on the grounds that give you examples of the traditional architectural styles from all the various reigons of Sweden.  Some of the areas are re-creations of historical townsites, some farmsteads, and some hunting camps.  All have interpretive guides dressed in period costume who will tell you all about the building they are in or what activity they might be doing, many times when they are actually doing it- which is really cool with the glassblowers or 19th century furniture shop, etc.  Again, it sounds kind of goofy, but the fact that all of the buildings are the real thing (or meticulous imitations) makes it really interesting.  A nice touch is that the food sold in the park is on-theme, with reindeer meat-cones for sale, washed down with lingonberry juice.  Almost made us sorry we ate at one of the very tasteful and charming restaurants in the park for lunch, if that lunch wasn’t so incredibly good.  Anyway, you could spend a whole day here at Skansen easily by itself, and I’d argue you may want to!  It was about 7 or so by the time we were done looking at it all, and a beautiful evening, so we rode  the long way home, looping out through the park, and of course stumbling on yet another charming place to grab a drink by a marina, so we did that and then wound our way back along the beautiful bike paths through the park and back onto the inner-city system and thus back home.  An excellent day.

Our third day we decided to go a little afield, out into the Stockholm archipelago.  There are a LOT of island to choose from, but the guide made one named Gallno sound nice, so that’s the one we aimed for.  You get there by going downtown to a cluster of passenger ferries all heading out to various islands in this large cluster, and like everything here it’s easy, efficient, and a little more expensive than you would like. But to my delight particularly, the ferry we got was a turn of the century oil-fired steamboat, with beautifully restored woodwork inside and out, and an exposed engine room I really wanted to go down and check out but that, as the Swedes put it bluntly, was not possible.  It was a gorgeous day, and though the old steamer wasn’t very fast, the ride was worth it just by itself, chugging along watching the boats and the islands go by in a pleasant procession.  We got to our island after about 3 hours, but that was fine.  Gallno turned out not to have a whole lot in the way of town on it, but it did have a nice little path to follow, which we did, coming to a lovely little marina and store which made for a nice lunch.  We kept walking after that, where the trail then ended at a rowboat crossing to another small island.  The rule was you had to leave at least one boat on each side, so by leaving the grain and the dog on one side, and crossing with the chicken for the first ride, we were able to continue.  That trail ended at a place where you could flag down a ferry back to Stockholm if you didn’t want to hike back, and you had a little semaphore contraption to signal the boat.  This looked like fun, but after messing with the semaphore and puzzling out the schedule, it appeared the next boat would be hours from then, and it wasn’t really all that far back.  So back in the rowboat we went and back down the country lane we hiked, and caught a much more modern and quicker ferry back.  Though our day out wasn’t quite as action-packed as the last couple, it was very pleasant, and it was very nice to see the islands.  We got back home at a reasonable time (helps that there really is no night to speak of), and ready to go for our trip to Gotland the next day!