Woolly says – We had left the lovely Copenhagen by train and spent an enjoyable five or so hours whizzing through Sweden admiring the autumnal colours and the lakes, arriving at our next destination of Stockholm.
Stockholm is the capital and largest city of Sweden as well as the largest urban area in Scandinavia and as we looked around ourselves it seemed huge in comparison to Copenhagen. The city stretches across fourteen islands where Lake Mälaren flows into the Baltic Sea. For several hundred years, Stockholm was the capital of Finland as well which then was a part of Sweden.
Sweden itself if known for so many things from IKEA, Spotify, Minecraft and the Noble Prize to Abba, meatballs and Ice hotels, I was excited to find out more about some of these things.
After a good night we tackled the metro system and then moved onto the trams and with Jo’s skills of asking, it took us no time at all to arrive at the days centre of discovery. Climbing down from the tram we found ourselves in a leafy loveliness as well as being forty minutes early for opening time, but better early than missing the most important part to the day. We strolled along the waters edge admiring the views and attempting to keep warm as temperatures seemed to have dropped substantially from one country to the next.
At the allotted time we were first in the queue and as the human paid for our tickets I raced through the door before stopping dead in my tracks in shear awe.
I nearly fell over him as I arrived at the same point and stood in total amazement at what I could see.
The Vasa Museum, located on the island of Djurgården, has the only almost fully intact 17th century ship that has ever been salvaged, the 64 gun warship Vasa that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. The Museum opened in 1990 and, according to the official website, is the most visited museum in Scandinavia. Many, many years ago I knew that my carer had been to see the Mary Rose, a warship of King Henry VIII which had been located in 1971 and was raised on 11th October 1982 and had thought that impressive, I looked up at her face and quickly realised that Vasa blew the Mary Rose out of the water, not literally of course.
I was speechless, it was the most wonderful site that I think I have ever seen and that is really saying something. We stood for several minutes just trying to take it all in before starting our walk around it.
Vasa or Wasa was a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10th August 1628. She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannons were salvaged in the 17th century, until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbour. The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet (“The Vasa Shipyard”) until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Museum that was built to house her.
A completely wooden construction the carvings were incredible from the lion’s heads on the gunwales to the stern which stopped us once again as we tried to take in the detail of the carvings that decorated her.
A display behind the ship gave us a far better idea of the colours that would have been used in her paintwork, she must had looked spectacular when she left her moorings and I felt so sad that she had barely made it across the bay let alone out into the sea. No one is really sure as to why she sunk, and many theories have been considered but evidence suggests that she had been built with insufficient room for ballast and had basically just tipped over the first moment that wind had taken her sails.
We walked up a flight of stairs to look at some of the items that had been salvaged from her hull, the Swedes had done an amazing job in finding so much amongst the silt in which she had sat for over 300 years. From hats, boots and gloves to pottery, pans and games the sailors would have been looking forward to playing before their untimely end.
A life size mock-up of what her interior allowed us to stand on the gun deck and I quickly realised given that Jo is a proper shorty at only five foot two that the crew at the that time had been a similar size as her head was nearly touching the roof.
As we rounded a corner, we got an even better view of her rear and again spent many minutes looking at all of the detailing that had been used.
Walking all the way to the front once more, at least a football pitch stroll, we arrived at an exhibit that showed what her lion figurehead would have actually looked like in colour, although now only showing the wood it was still wonderful.
Several flights of steps took us down to the hull and I started to get a strained neck from looking so far up, she was immense.
This area was dedicated to explaining how she had been raised and how the preservation had been done over many years, nineteen of those years alone had seen her kept under running water before a substance called PEG, a waxy solution, had been applied, many years later this had then been dried. There would never been an end to the work needed to keep her looking as fine as she currently did.
Next came displays of skeletons found on the wreck and computer generated facsimiles of the people they had once been. They looked so lifelike I almost expected them to speak.
We climbed back to the ground floor and stood for another ten minutes of so admiring her.
I really didn’t want to leave and seeing something so wonderful made me quite emotional, having taken a final last look we headed through the shop and back into the chilly day.
Woolly says – We hadn’t far to walk to our next port of call and entering the warm building my paw started to tap and I glanced across and could see that certain someone was mouthing the words to Mamma Mia one of Abba’s many hits.
Opened in May 2013 it charts the life of the band members and the career that launched them to worldwide stardom. The first exhibits gave us information on the four member, Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad who had all gained fame prior to meeting and starting together in 1972.
The become a household name in 1974 when the won the Eurovision song contest with the song Waterloo. We stood watching a recording of the very show and admiring the costumes they had worn that night. My carer whispered into my ear that she remembered watching it that night as it had been the first time, she had been allowed to stay up that late in her then young life.
The tour took us past the setting that portrayed the house in Stockholm that so many of their hits had been written with the very piano used, before showing us how the studio would have looked in the early days of recording.
A corridor of memorabilia led us into an area where you could go behind a curtain and join the band. Jo and I went behind the curtain and happily sang away to a couple of their hits hoping beyond hope that no one could actually hear us as neither of us can hold a tune.
As we continued, we passed a stage where you could stand and perform with them which would have been way to embarrassing to actually do before arriving in an area which displayed some of the early instruments that Benny and Bjorn had used.
A circular room showed off album after album along with a whole host of stage costumes which I have to say definitely looked better on the screen and with people wearing them.
Then came a section on what happened after Abba stopped working together, an information board explained that the band had never actually split up but had just decided to work on separate projects. For the ladies of the group that had been a number of highly successful albums especially in their home country.
And for the guys the huge successes of musicals like Chess and Mama Mia.
The last exhibit told us about the Voyager project that is currently touring showing the band as virtual avatars, depicting the group as they appeared in 1977.
All to soon we were walking back into the sunny but cold day with Thank you for the Music playing in our ears.
A late lunch and something to drink was much needed as well as a sit down as paws and feet were starting to ache. We debated on our last destination for the day knowing that we would be meeting Vikings in another country we decided to see what the Nobel Prize Museum had to offer.
The Nobel Prize Museum is located in the former Stock Exchange Building and showcases information about the Nobel Prize and Nobel prize-winners, as well as information about the founder of the prize, Alfred Nobel (1833 to 1896). I knew little about this sort of thing and I had a feeling that the human didn’t know much more.
I have to say that he was correct, I knew that Einstein and Marie Curie had both received the award but that was as far as my knowledge went.
Woolly says – Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. Nobel’s most famous invention was dynamite, a safer and easier means of harnessing the explosive power of nitro-glycerine; it was patented in 1867. Nobel was later inspired to donate his fortune to the Nobel Prize institution, which would annually recognize those who “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”, an information board told us.
Our first encounter was with a fox who had apparently who was a time traveller based on H>G> Well’s ideas, this was a little strange but amusing.
The it started to get very, very strange and to be honest I hadn’t got a clue what a lot of it was about. With this in mind Jo and I decided to take pictures of the displays and the information about them and let you work it out for yourselves, you can thank us later.
We found three things that we did understand, the previously mentioned workbenches of Einstein and Curie.
And the inoculation for HPV (cervical cancer) which I knew Jo had heard of as daughter Zoe had had this as a teen.
With our minds blown apart and a complete lack of understanding we left the building feeling befuddled but admiring of what some of these people had achieved.
Although there were all number of other museums that we could have visited in the area we both felt that our day was done and that it was a good time to head back and rest up for tomorrow’s long list of sites to see.