Stockholm Long weekend.

November 9
Overnight on the train to…
Stockholm: grey skies and hazy views, underground (T –for tunnel- bannan) and chilly wind and everyone dressed in dark coats, gloves and woolly hats.

Work visits to a Hospital Lab for G and Spinal Injury Recovery setup (Spinalis) for H occupied much of the 1st day with a navigational challenge finding the second!

Saturday, a boat ride around the archipelago gave us an idea of how things look and then, over two days, we visited some of the sights. Definitely one of the best was the Vasa museum – containing the only ‘intact’ 17th C war ship that sank minutes into its maiden voyage in 30m of water because it was too top heavy! It’s decorated with over 200 carved wooden figures of Greek heroes and cherubs. It lay underwater beautifully preserved (the water is not salty and therefore there are no saltwater worms to eat the oak wood) for over 300 years until raised in 1960 something. It’s a very fine museum as everything is so real – even the skeletons that were raised with the ship.
Nearby we enjoyed Lars Lerin’s water colour paintings in Prince Eugene’s former stately house– he’s a well-known Swedish artist of our age – who spent a lot of time in the north of Sweden, so we identified with the scenery. A fun visit was to Junibacken which entailed dragging G along, as it’s a kids’ museum. However, it was absolute magic. We climbed into a train carriage and were transported above large models of the book characters and scenery from the illustrations in books by Astrid Lungren, the storyteller who created Pippi Longstocking. It was so impressive that G thanked me for hauling him along!

Bears, wolves, reindeer and elk featured in a visit to the Scandinavian zoo. It was rather wet and muddy and the animals don’t seem right in a zoo, but it nevertheless gave us an opportunity to see them. We paid an interesting visit to the Museum of Architecture (Swedish architecture through the ages) and a music museum, with many Scandinavian instruments both on show and able to be played.

We also visited the huge city hall (Statshuset) which is famous for hosting the Nobel Prize banquets and dance in the Gold mosaic decorated Hall.

Then ‘home’ to Umea on Monday evening by plane.