Europe Trip Part 9: Stocking Up

Stockholm, Sweden


Sunday, June 13

In the morning, I took full advantage of the solo cabin - and, most notably, the last private bathroom I'd have for the entire trip - to gather my things, grab a bite at the hideously overpriced but oh so satisfying breakfast buffet, and use the slow but free internet connection to make my last blog update from the European continent. Around 9am, the boat finally docked in Stockholm and I got out and hiked the 2 miles from the ferry terminal to my latest hostel.

I wandered through downtown again, this time without all the streets closed off for marathoners. However, as I walked through Old Town, I noticed just how many advertisements there were for something called "Love 2010." A bit of investigation showed that this was in fact a series of concerts and other festivities that were being held in advance of a royal wedding, specifically that of the Crown Princess and her old gym instructor - a commoner, how shocking! Anyway, I had seen all the stages across the city being constructed during my earlier visit, but now it turned out that in addition to all the thrilling (read: low scoring) World Cup action in the evenings, I'd also have a rather sizable concert series to keep myself occupied.

After about an hour of walking, I finally made it to the af Chapman, my lodging place for the night. The interesting thing about this place is that the af Chapman is a 120 year old sailing vessel that was converted to a youth hostel back in the 1940s. When I booked the room, I was quite excited about the prospects of staying in a boat - a boat! - for my one overnight in Stockholm. However, in actuality this anticipation was significantly tampered by the fact that I'd just slept in a ferry boat the night before, and it was quite a rambunctious night at that.

But no matter, a prepaid night with a bed is better than neither. Although in some ways I wish I'd booked at Stockholm's other vehicle-turned-hostel, the Jumbo Stay (housed in a converted 747), now that I look at it this hostel is really far from downtown and is also INCREDIBLY expensive. So the af Chapman seems like a good deal to me now.

Since by this point it was still well before noon, I couldn't get a room. However, the hostel staff made me aware of the availability of their luggage storage room, so I dropped my stuff and headed off into town. Man, if I'd been thinking about storing my luggage at the other hotels, I could have saved... well, I could have saved some money.

The af Chapman is located on Skeppsholmen, one of the 14 islands that make up the city of Stockholm. While it was nice to always be near the water, it was kind of frustrating to be around 200 yards from the central palace or the National Museum yet have to walk a mile to get there because of where the bridges are located. So instead, to start out I stayed on the island and walked the 2 blocks to two prominent museums.

First up was the Moderna Museet, home to a bunch of exhibits of modern art. Like most of the museums I visited in Stockholm, they didn't allow cameras. Suffice it to say that the art was quite... contemporary. In some ways the trip reinforced my concept that modern artists are lazy and unimaginative, but I guess that a couple of the exhibits were intriguing enough to make it worth the 6 bucks.

Attached to the modern art museum was the Architecture Museum. The museum was really quite small, so I was glad that I took advantage of the cost savings of the combination ticket with the Moderna Museet. In fact, both museums are actually attached, in the same building. I wandered around and saw a few exhibits on building materials as well as probably 150 models of different noteworthy Swedish buildings, so despite my initial concerns over its size I guess I was at least as interested in this museum as the other one.

Again, owing to the picture prohibition the only photos I have to show of either museum are of these funky sculptures in the plaza outside, next to the Calder mobiles.

I hadn't spent very much time at either of those museums, which fit in with the trend I'd observed so far of Scandinavian museums being quite small. So it made sense to me that my next stop should be equally short, especially given the fact that they were only asking for the equivalent of $3.50 to get in. But, as it turned out, I was completely wrong about Stockholm's Musikmuseet - the Music Museum.

Again, I don't have many pictures to share because of camera restrictions - other than the one below of the inevitable ABBA exhibit - but the whole place was really quite fascinating. Right off the bat, the museum began with a multitude of hands-on exhibits on such physical concepts as pitch, resonance, and amplitude before moving on to a section where you could play rudimentary instruments to see how they take advantage of their shape and form to produce sound. As you progress through the museum, you see how instruments have become more complex yet more capable in varying fields, from brass to woodwinds to strings to percussion and more. They even had a section just for kids with a bunch of unconventional instruments like lengthy springs and PVC pipe drumsets and didgeridoos to play.

My favorite part came towards the end in the electronic instrument section where they actually had an entire band - keyboard, electric guitar, and electronic drums - for you to mess around with. Somebody who designed the museum had clearly been thinking because each instrument was also equipped with headphones so people in adjacent exhibits didn't have to listen to "Chopsticks" played over and over again by small children. However, the part that really set the electronic instrument section apart for me was that one of the instruments that was available to experiment on was a theremin. A theremin! I love those things.

After a while in the museum, I looked at my watch to discover that I'd been in there for over two hours. Compared to the amount of time I'd spent anywhere else on the trip, that was quite impressive. I guess that's some indication of just how interested I was in what the museum had to share.

Although by this point I'd visited all the museums I was interested in that were going to be closed the following day - a Monday, which as I discovered is just a bad day to try to visit European museums - but I still had one more on my list for the day. When I was growing up, we had this big poster sitting in a corner in one of the upstairs rooms that had a picture of a big ship with the word "WASA" written in big letters.  Well, as it turns out, the Vasa is a real boat, and on top of that a really old boat.  Given my tendency for going to see old boats on this trip, I figured I might as well make the trip over to the Vasa Museum.

By this point, it really shouldn't have been a surprise, but I was still caught off guard by the fact that it took another 25 minutes to walk to a place that was under a half mile away in terms of straight-line distance.  But eventually I managed to get to the appropriate island and saw the imposing Chernobyl containment structure-like museum building.  Seriously, the thing is enormous and creepy.  

What's more, after you've gone inside and bought your overpriced ticket, you have to go through 3 more sets of doors before entering the main room of the museum.  However, upon entering the gigantic interior space, you finally start to understand why.  As you enter, you're immediately struck by the size of the main exhibit of the museum, the Vasa herself.  All those doors are meant to serve as a series of airlocks to help the building's technologically impressive climate control system do its job to combat any further degradation of an immensely old artifact.

This ship was constructed in the late 1670s to be the flagship of the Swedish fleet.  No expense was spared in terms of her impressive proportions and the hundreds of intricate carved sculptures that adorned her sides, rails, and stern.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that her oversized proportions led to the inclusion of an inadequate quantity of ballast stones, she tipped over and sank less than one mile into her maiden voyage.

Because of her size, salvage was impossible even in only a few dozen feet of water, so she rested on the bottom of the Stockholm harbor for almost 300 years until she was rediscovered and salvaged back in the 60s.  After years of collecting pieces from the surrounding waters - all remarkably well preserved due to the low oxygen content of the fairly polluted harbor among other reasons - and several decades of reassembly, the ship was on display for all to see.  In fact, thanks to some complicated chemical process that replaced all the water in all of the ship's wooden parts and after replacing all of the rusted out nails with non-corrosive stainless steel, the ship actually looks remarkably new considering that it is actually over 330 years old.

While seeing the ship itself - in all its poorly engineered magnificence - is really quite impressive, they also have some pretty neat exhibits.  In one, you get to climb around through a reconstruction of a few decks of the ship, while others delve into how the sinking could have been prevented (don't make the ship so darn top heavy) as well as the salvage process.  However, the most interesting one in my opinion is a small model of the ship itself located near the information desk.  During your time in the museum, you begin to grow accustomed to the waxy brown sheen that covers the entire boat.  However, this appearance is entirely a result of 300 years of slow wear from water currents and the subsequent chemical preservation.  Tests of particles found on the boat's surface indicate that the whole thing - elaborately carved sculptures and all - were painted in very vivid colors.  To this end, the 1:30 scale model was left bare until about 10 years ago when the paint research was completed, at which point the model was updated to reflect the best guess as to what the Vasa actually looked like.

The whole experience was all really fascinating, so it was too bad that the museum closed at 6pm, like all the others in this region of nonexistent darkness.  Fortunately, as I wandered the streets of the city I eventually started to hear the blaring of music from a few different points throughout the city.  After wandering past two different parks with seemingly identical pop musicians singing whiny songs in Swedish, I eventually stumbled upon what I eventually found out was the main stage for the citywide concert series just in time to catch the tail end of the Stockholm Concert Orchestra's stirring rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" to close out their set.  Since as much as anything else I was eager to hear a bit of English once again, I stuck around through an artist change to see what they'd play next.

By the way, it was raining quite a bit.

Fortunately, they were just giving the singers a bit of a break, and during the intermission a bunch of very tall blondes wandered through the crowd passing out sheets with the lyrics to several songs that - gasp - I'd actually heard of.  The performers returned and explained that we should feel free to join in the singing whenever the mood struck us.  And so the orchestra and the performers launched into a set of predominantly English-language show tunes from The Phantom of the Opera and The Sound of Music and other notable musicals.  At first, the audience was slow to warm up to the potential for audience participation, but before long pretty much the entire crowd was belting out tunes from Grease, which fed nicely into the concluding medley of ABBA songs - once again showing that ABBA is apparently the best thing to come out of Sweden with the possible exception of IKEA - culminating with a big and enthusiastic roar as the crowd shouted along with the chorus of "Dancing Queen."

As I made my way back to the boat in the perpetual twilight (the picture below is from around 11pm), I reflected back on the day's events.  If this trip had been a movie, I thought, this day would have been the feel-good conclusion, where everybody fades out into the credits, swaying back and forth shoulder to shoulder belting out a slightly off-key rendition of ABBA's greatest hits.  I'd pack up my bags and head to the airport in the morning and be back in the US with my ears still ringing with "Super Trooper" or "Mamma Mia" or something.

But this isn't a movie, and there are still 4 days of globe-trotting semi-excitement left in my increasingly lengthy
recount of the trip.  Stay tuned for more!