June 15 - Stockholm

So here we are in Stockholm, capital of Sweden.  This city is the most populous in the Nordic countries. It spreads across 17 islands in southwest Sweden. There’s a lot of history here but I have a story from my childhood that’s totally irrelevant instead.  As a little girl I saw a movie with Marlon Brandon and Jean Simmons called Desirée.  During the Napoleonic era, the Swedish kingdom found itself without an heir to the throne.  After a series of events, the Swedes offered the position of Crown Prince to Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s Marshals (military leaders).  He accepted the offer and eventually became the Swedish king and joined the alliance which defeated Napoleon.  The present royal family is descended from that Frenchman and his wife Desirée, the daughter of a silk merchant in Marseilles.  I know it’s not a particularly important piece of history, but I loved the movie and have always remembered that trivial bit of information.

Anyway on to more about this place.  We arrived last evening and were totally exhausted.  We didn’t do much of anything but eat and crash.  We’re staying  at the Grand Hotel which is right  at the harbor and for some unknown reason we were upgraded to a waterview suite.  From our balcony we can look across to the royal palace.

The Royal Palace across from our balcony

The harbor

After a good night’s sleep we were on the move pretty early.  Our first stop was the Vasa Museum.  The Vasa was a Swedish warship which was completed in  1628 and sank  in the harbor here on her maiden voyage after only sailing about 1400 yards.  She was built with two gun decks.  Unfortunately, she had a narrow beam and as she sailed out and the wind caught in her sails she listed, enough that water poured in through the gun ports and she sank.  She stayed at the bottom until  she was found in the harbor in 1956 and an effort began to raise her.  After much work she was raised in April 1961 and eventually came to be housed in the Vasa Museum by the harbor.  Restoration work is ongoing but she sits majestically with 98 percent of her structure original.  It is truly impressive to see!

Vasa model

The real stern as recovered

 

This afternoon we took a two and a half hour boat tour around Stockholm.  As I said the city is built on many islands.  Along the way we passed through a lock which raised us from the Baltic Sea level up three feet into Lake  Mälaren.  It’s always interesting to see a city from the water.  There are certainly great contrasts between the old and new sections of the city.  The narrator on the boat called the blocks and blocks of apartment buildings “Swedish modern;”  I thought they looked  institutional and prefer the old parts of the city.

After the tour we came back to the hotel and decided we’d walked enough today (13,000 steps or 5.5 plus miles).  Our hotel has an outdoor bar and restaurant and it was a nice day so we decided to have a drink (or two) there.  It was an interesting evening.  This week is Polar Music Prize Week (we’d never heard of it) and tonight was the culmination with the awarding of the prizes by the King and a banquet at our hotel.  Half the policemen in Stockholm must have been on the street in front of the hotel (that’s an exaggeration, but there were a lot of them) and a parade of people who were evidently luminaries made their way past where we were sitting.  The men were all in tuxes and  looked pretty ordinary, but the women were in a wild variety of garb.  As we watched them I could only wonder if some of the women had looked at themselves in the mirror because some of the things they were wearing were really unflattering.  Anyway, it was an entertaining interlude for us.

 

Enjoying an aperol spritz, the drink of the day

Tonight we ate at the hotel’s famous smorgasbord.  Our waiter gave us a little brochure explaining how to proceed through the variety of dishes.  Everything was delicious, especially the herring and salmon variations.  To finish it off we tried the hotel’s proprietary Brannvin, aka aquavit. You’re supposed to drink it as a shot and we could see why.  It was flavored with anise, fennel and caraway and when we sipped it those tastes were overpowering.  We drank the remainder as a shot and it was much less pronounced (or maybe we just didn’t notice). 

Well, I’ve blathered on enough and it’s getting late, though you wouldn’t know that from looking outside.  We’re almost at the solstice and there’s very little darkness.

More later.