Wanderung 31

Once on Djurgarden, we walked around the museum to find the entrance, bought tickets, and were inside gawking at the big old ship by 12:15. The Vasa towered above us, about 4 stories high at the stern, and it was really old as it sank in 1628 in Stockholm harbor and was preserved by the harbor mud which then slowly covered it. The wood carvings on both the bow and the stern were fantastically detailed. But our biggest piece of luck was getting an English language tour by the museum's director of research, who just happened to be an American from Leesburg, Virginia. Wow, how knowledgeable and well-spoken he was! He explained in detail both the military aspects and the political aspects of the ship.

Militarily, the Vasa was a visionary man-of-war with two decks containing cast bronze cannon that fired 24-pound cannonballs. In total, the Vasa would have fired a broadside 4 times as large as any ship afloat at that time, making it quite deadly.

Politically, the Vasa was a statement of the strength of the Swedish government in projecting military force onto the surrounding Baltic states, much as the US Navy does for the United States today. But unlike a modern, plainly functional warship, the Vasa was decorated with a plethora of carved and painted symbols. Some of the symbolism in the stern carvings indicated themes such as the legitimacy of the ruling Swedish Royal house, the "peaceful" intentions of Sweden fighting its "defensive" wars overseas, and even the composition of Swedish society at that time!

Unfortunately , the Vasa was fatally flawed in being too narrow for its height and weight above the waterline. When launched, it was so unstable that when it was launched, a gust of wind tipped it over far enough for the lower row of gun ports to let in water, which sank the ship immediately. It was still right in the harbor, directly in front of crowds of Swedish people and, as our guide put it, all the spies from the competing maritime nations like England, Holland, and Denmark.

Curiously, a sister ship designed along the same lines but with a broader beam, and thus much more stable, was completed a year or two later and successfully served in the Swedish navy for over 30 years, so the fundamental military vision of the Vasa's design was confirmed. The Vasa is now in a new museum which has 4 floors of exhibits and a 1/2 hour movie about its raising and preservation, NONE of which we had time to see. Sigh.

We didn't take the time to see the rest of the extensive Vasa museum because by this point we were all quite hungry, and so we started searching for a place to eat. There was a restaurant somehow adjoined to the museum, but there seemed to be no external entrance to it and we never did figure out how to get in there! We tried again at the old ship museum at the wharf adjacent to the Vasa museum which advertised a cafe, but could only find a snack bar, and we were too hungry to be satisfied with that! So we decided to forgo visiting the nearby Gronaland amusement park (somehwat similar to Copenhagen's Tivoli), and take the HOHO boat back to Gamla Stan to find a place to eat.

Gamla Stan, having much of the old city including the Royal Palace and the Nobel Museum as tourist attractions, is a veritable hotbed of restaurants mixed in with all the little shops and boutiques. Once back ashore, we wandered through the narrow, crooked, but oh so charming maze of streets dating back to the 13th Century, checking the menus posted outside each restaurant that looked remotely feasible. We finally settled at one in the plaza in front of the Nobel museum that offered a medium pizza for 95 kroner ($11), and local draft beer for 58 kroner ($7). Since we had a total of 306 kroner in cash, we thought that 2 beers (Monika and Jerry) and two medium pizzas split 4 ways would be about perfect for lunch.

Surprisingly, we were also offered a small salad bar, and we all really enjoyed the salads while our pizzas were baked. Monika and Jerry thought the beer was good, and we enjoyed the pizzas although I got much of Jerry's prosciutto. The heavily-salted, thinly sliced ham has an odd taste to the uninitiated, but one that I have definitely acquired so I didn't mind having double prosciutto on my pieces! One thing I did not expect was that the female gypsy beggars in the square would come right up to the railing of the outdoor section we were seated at, lean over the railing, and try to cajole us into giving them money. It made me glad that we always left at least one person at the table to guard our things when we went inside to the salad bar.

Right next door to our restaurant was a wooden horse museum---small ones, not the Trojan kind---and we visited that after lunch. Linda bought horse-themed gifts, and Monika bought a necklace and pretty Amber earrings, which we charged as we were out of cash. But by then we were also out of time and we meandered back to the dock to take the last (4:00 p.m. ) tender back to the ship. We all agreed that we really needed more time to see Stockholm properly, say another 1/2 day for the Royal Castle, 1/2 day for the complete Vasa museum, 1 day for Skansa and the Gronaland amusement park, and 1/2 day to walk around some of the other old sections of the city. If you wanted to include a visit to the museum of fine art, Nordic culture museum, and the Nobel museum, that all would be at least an additional day. But we had to head back to the tender to take us out to our ship in the middle of the bay before it left port!

The sun set as the Costa Pacifica eased its way back out of the channel, leaving Stockholm behind. It was fun watching the scenery roll by -- sometimes the homes appeared to be only 100 feet or so from the ship, and we felt we could almost reach out and shake hands with the residents!

After dinner we tried to pick out pictures from the ship's photographers to buy, but the band was playing ungodly loudly in the atrium below and I couldn't even think because it was so noisy. So we ended up sticking our fingers in our ears to quiet the din and then and running back to our cabins for the night.