Rich in History

Thursday, July 5, 2012

The days are getting to be a little bit blurry so it's a good thing I have the blog to keep track of all of our goings-on. We decided to rest a bit in the morning and to have breakfast at our leisure. We made our way uptown to the lecture hall in time to meet the group for our walk through Gamla Stan (Old Town.) It's actually an island as are many areas in Stockholm which is surround by a big lake on one side and channels to the Baltic Sea on the other. The old town is rich in history and many of the building foundations date to the 1500's.

We had lunch there and then went on to the Vasa Ship Museum via a harbor taxi. The Vasa ship was made of oak and completed in a record two year's time. It was wartime and the King Gustav Adolph wanted to increase his fleet of ships. This one was made with 2 tiers of cannons so quite top heavy with not enough increase in the ballast to put things to rights. A series of errors during the launching caused it to list to one side so severely that the thing unceremoniously sank in the harbor in 20 minutes flat. There it remained from August 10, 1628, until the 1960's when it was finally located and recovered in excellent condition. Thank the cold water surrounding Stockholm for this phenomenon and the tenacious Swedes for assembling the jigsaw puzzle from all the recovered pieces.

With our secret weapons (John and Caroline as navigators) we then got on the bus to visit Skansen (think Wisconsin without the Wis). Founded in 1891, it is touted to be Sweden in miniature and is a75-acre park containing gardens, animals and houses typical of Swedish farm life.

By the time we returned to the hotel, we had to thrown on our clothes for a rather fancy dinner which took a very European 2 hours to consume. This time the entre was moose. Sigh. I have never been one for exotic meats. Sweden has some of the most stringent laws concerning the keeping of animals so they are treated well and have good lives until such time as they give themselves up for human consumption. Plus, they are not fed any chemicals, etc., so the Swedes think their meats are much preferable to ours. True, but hard to deal when you are not used to it. I won't mind leaving the meat behind, but it will be so hard not to have such wonderful bread with every meal. I think the people here would be appalled at our bread in a plastic wrapper. Not the way they do business.

 

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