Our first stop today was the National Historical Museum. Stockholm has over 80 different museums, and we only have two days here, so we chose this one to gain a bit of a handle on the history. They had a large Viking display of articles from throughout Sweden, and a timeline of Stockholm’s history.
After this, we headed for the Vasa museum. The Vasa was built in 1628 as a warship, and sank 20 minutes into her maiden voyage, while she was still within the harbour area of Stockholm. A bit embarassing for the king at the time, you’d have to say! Anyway the ship was salvaged in the 1960s and restored (by slowly replacing the water in the timbers with polyethyleneglycol); over 95% of the ship as we saw it today is the original timbers. We watched a short film about the salvage and restoration processes, and listened in on a brief tour which pointed out different parts of the ship.
Our final stop for the day was the Eriksson Globe. This is a purpose-built ice hockey facility, although from the obligatory promo video that we had to watch about its construction, it looks like they use it for other indoor sports and concerts as well. It’s the largest spherical building in the world, and there’s a capsule that runs up and down one side of it, giving views over the city from the top. It was especially weird coming back down...
Today must have been ‘take your baby for a walk day’ in Stockholm. We had lunch from a kiosk in the park on Djurgården, and every man and his baby were out for a walk. Literally. Of the many people we saw pushing pushchairs and prams, the majority were men.
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