Sweden: Stockholm & our Third Sea Day
Oct. 11th, 2008 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreGosh, it's been a while, hasn't it?
Well, the post will be worth it.
Coming into Stockholm by sea is one of the most beautiful things I've seen. The Baltic Sea is incredibly calm normally, but it was almost glassy this morning, with only the ship's bow and engine waves disturbing the surface. To give perspective, the shadow is of our ship; the Norwegian Jewel is 965 feet long, so quite a large ship.
You can tell that the Baltic doesn't have tides; roads and buildings are built right down to the water.
We had two items on our agenda with our tour: a city tour, which seemed interesting but not terribly remarkable -- except that Stockholm is a very green city, very welcome after seeing so little greenery in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. There are lots of trees.
After the tour, we visited the Vasa museum, which is dedicated to a marvel of technological failure.
The Vasa was under construction for two years, designed to be the flagship of the Swedish fleet. They'd picked the finest Dutch shipbuilders, but the king wanted two gun decks.
On a flat-bottomed ship.
Well, it was built, and twenty minutes after the ship set sail, it sank for good. Getting it out was quite the ordeal (covered in the link above), and once they had it and most of the 15,000 pieces of statuary and ornamentation out, they built the museum that houses the ship.
It's not every country that puts one of their more remarkable failures out there for everyone to see, so I've got to hand it to the Swedes for that. It shows humility.
Of all the people on the bus, only my mother went into town, in part because there was a light rain going on. We enjoyed Stockholm -- it's quite beautiful there.
Well, the post will be worth it.
Coming into Stockholm by sea is one of the most beautiful things I've seen. The Baltic Sea is incredibly calm normally, but it was almost glassy this morning, with only the ship's bow and engine waves disturbing the surface. To give perspective, the shadow is of our ship; the Norwegian Jewel is 965 feet long, so quite a large ship.
You can tell that the Baltic doesn't have tides; roads and buildings are built right down to the water.
We had two items on our agenda with our tour: a city tour, which seemed interesting but not terribly remarkable -- except that Stockholm is a very green city, very welcome after seeing so little greenery in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. There are lots of trees.
After the tour, we visited the Vasa museum, which is dedicated to a marvel of technological failure.
The Vasa was under construction for two years, designed to be the flagship of the Swedish fleet. They'd picked the finest Dutch shipbuilders, but the king wanted two gun decks.
On a flat-bottomed ship.
Well, it was built, and twenty minutes after the ship set sail, it sank for good. Getting it out was quite the ordeal (covered in the link above), and once they had it and most of the 15,000 pieces of statuary and ornamentation out, they built the museum that houses the ship.
It's not every country that puts one of their more remarkable failures out there for everyone to see, so I've got to hand it to the Swedes for that. It shows humility.
Of all the people on the bus, only my mother went into town, in part because there was a light rain going on. We enjoyed Stockholm -- it's quite beautiful there.