Delicious Pastries, Sunken Ships and Pregnant Moose in Stockholm

13 May 2009

Delicious Pastries, Sunken Ships and Pregnant Moose in Stockholm

Anna studied biochemistry in university, which, sorry Anna, has always been one of my least favorite subjects ever! She is now working at Uppsala University in a lab dealing with blood samples. There is always some PhD student giving their dissertation during which the rest of the department is expected to listen to the dissertation defense and attend a party in the evening to celebrate. Anna has one of these to attend today so I am unleashed on my own to explore Stockholm.

On her way to work in the morning, Anna walks me to the Uppsala train station and points me to the correct platform to wait for the Stockholm train. I lug my huge rolling bag suitcase into one of the train cars and sit amongst the Swedes on their morning commute to work. Stockholm is about a 45 minute train ride to Stockholm so there are many people who make this journey for work each day. Many of the travelers are working quietly on their laptops throughout the ride. I finally arrive in Stockholm in the large open central station. First I find my way to the train station lockers where I take the biggest one and leave my bag there. It costs about $7 but it is worth it to not have to lug around baggage all day. My plan is to see as many museums as I can in one day and later in the evening, meet up and stay with another Swedish friend of mine, Helen. Helen and I also met in England and actually lived in the same house in Brighton together. I call Helen to say a quick, “Hello! I made it to Stockholm safely!” and then I navigate my way out of the station.

Before I leave, however, I purchase something called the Stockholm Card. This card can be purchased to cover a few different lengths of time; I get one for 48 hours. Now that I have bought this card, I use this for the subway, buses, and entrance to all of the museums in the city. When I finally emerge from the train station the sun is out in full force with barely a cloud in the sky. Stockholm appears to be a bustling city with Swedes and tourists alike walking through the busy but clean streets. I find my bus stop and take about a 15 minute ride to the Skansen Museum on the Djurgården island. The Skansen Museum is the world’s first open air museum founded in 1891 by Artur Hazelius. Hazelius went all over Sweden to collect actual buildings which he then transported to Stockholm and assembled into a museum. Basically Skansen is a miniature Sweden, the northern part of the museum grounds displays some typical northern arctic towns and so on. Different areas also house some of Sweden’s typical wildlife and the Skansen workers are in the appropriate traditional dress.

I start in the south of Sweden and work my way north. I visit a typical southern barn and home complete with Swedish ponies. I visited what would have been a Finnish colony in Sweden. These people lived in homes called smokehouses because there was no chimney to release the smoke from the fire place. I went inside of the little cabin with two women in traditional dress and they explained how people lived there. Not having a chimney actually allowed their homes to be heated much more efficiently. One fire could keep the house warm for most of the day so excessive amounts of wood did not need to be used. The smoke settled on the low ceiling of the cabin so it was advantageous to stay seated when inside. I visited a traditional school house, town hall, and church.

Then I came upon the animal area, somewhat like a zoo, and full of Swedish school children on field trips. There were seals, bears, European bison, wild boar, ponies, foxes, and birds, to name a few. My favorite animal experience was the moose display. There was a female moose lying on her side in a bed of hay and she was furiously licking a baby moose. After watching for a few minutes, I saw her whole body go into a spasm and she lifted her hindquarters off the ground. I could see that her vagina was swollen and looked to be bleeding and then it was clear to me that she had just given birth to that baby moose! It was quite fascinating so I watched a bit longer and got to see the baby take a few of it’s first wobbly steps before plopping back down in front of its mother.

Finally it was lunch time, so I found a tiny little café located inside of an old house. I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich on chewy rye bread and had my pick of lots of homemade pies for dessert, I chose the mixed berries. A section of Skansen is set up like an old town with a blacksmith, general store, shoemakers and so on, everyone in their traditional dress. In this area, I found what would be one of my favorite spots in all of Sweden, the bakery! I found this place my following my nose to the scent of warm dough, cinnamon, and butter. Outside the entrance was a wooden sign that resembled a soft pretzel, and inside were an array of freshly baked pastries. It was all warm and aromatic inside the tiny bakery. The men working there were dressed all in white with chef’s hats on. There were two men in the back room rolling dough and putting pastries in the oven. After eyeing up each treat, I finally chose a cinnamon roll. I didn’t care if I had just eaten pie, I was going for round two. The cinnamon roll was warm inside the paper bag and it some butter was seeping through the paper. It was heavenly!

My next stop was the glassblowing studio. Sweden is known for its glass, both functional and artistic. Inside the studio, there were benches where one could sit and watch the artists blowing their glass creations. It is quite a mesmerizing and interesting process to observe. I picked up a few knickknacks and vases in the gift shop adjacent to the studio. I really enjoyed the shops at the Skansen museum, although I wished the souvenirs were a bit cheaper. There is a famous hand carved and painted Swedish horse from the northern areas that one will see in most tourist shops. They are colorfully painted and are actually a symbol of Sweden in general. I really wanted to take one home but I couldn’t justify spending $30 on one the size of my palm.

I could have spent more time at Skansen but I decided it was time to move onto another museum. A few blocks up the street I found the beautiful Nordic Museum. This building was constructed in the Dutch-influenced Danish Renaissance architecture style and founded by the same guy who made the Skansen, Artur Hazelius. The Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet in Swedish) pays displays the cultural history and ethnography of Sweden. There were exhibits on fine china, modern Swedish weddings, Swedish furniture design (picture the orthopedically designed Ikea chair), and the Sami people of Scandinavia.

The exhibit on the Sami was most fascinating to me and I took advantage of the free audiotour headset I was given. The Same people, also known as Lapps or Laplanders (a derogatory term), are the indiginous people of northern Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Finland and part of Russia). Anthropologists have studied the lineage of the Sami and found they are direct descendents of the first Homo sapiens inhabitants of Europe and also share DNA with the Basque and Catalonians who were also early inhabitants of Europe. I guess the closest group I would compare them to would be the Inuits of North America. They have their own very unique language in many dialects and they inhabit some of the coldest parts of the world, living off of the land. They are a semi-nomadic people as they herd reindeer. The Sami also use fur trapping, fishing, and sheep herding to earn a livelihood. They have very colorful traditional clothing made of natural fibers, furs and skins. They have their own traditional music, festivals, beliefs and cultures. They used to practice a mix of Shamanism and Norse mythology as a religion before the Lutheran church became widespread in Sweden. The Sami were discriminated against at one point as an ethnic minority but today they are very integrated into modern Scandinavia even having their own Parliaments in the Scandinavian countries. The modern Samis are very proud of their heritage and keep their culture alive in art, language and music.

My finaly museum visit of the day was to the Vasa Museum (Vasamuseet in Swedish) located next to the Nordic Museum. The Vasa is a museum wholey devoted to one impressive ship. The Vasa was a warship that was built for King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden from 1626 to 1628. On its maiden voyage the ship sunk after only making it one nautical mile from the port in Stockholm. They believe that the ballast was not weighted enough with stones to prevent the ship from toppling over in strong winds. A good many of the ships crew perished along with the ship on that fateful day 10 August 1628. People tried to recover the expensive ship cannons over the years but failed. Finally, in the 1950s, an archeaolgists by the name of Anders Franzén wanted to locate the ship and attempt to recover it. With a gravity powered coring probe, he went out in a boat to where he thought he might find the Vasa and dropped the probe down. As luck would have it, the probe came back up with a chunk of wood inside of it, and so the excavation began.

I watched a great video about the recovery process of the ship. Lucky for the exacavators, the ship was basically in one piece. Divers worked to place steel cables under the hull of the boat, 100 feet deep in water, and eventually the ship was slowly brought to docks and lifted up in stages. On 2 April 1961 the ship broke free of the water for the first time in 333 years! It was still amazingly in almost perfect condition. The cold Baltic Sea is made up of brackish waters and this was the saving grace for the Vasa. There is a shipworm called Teredo navalis which inhabits warmer saltier waters and is responsible for destroying submerged wood. Over subsequent years the Vasa was restored by spraying it with hot polyethylene glycol and eventually a huge open museum was built to house the ship. People are not allowed to go inside of the ship, but there are many levels built around it so you can view it from different angles and heights. The ornate wood carvings are still impressively intact. It is really an amazing sight to see and the only ship of its era still intact today.

As I was finishing up at the Vasa museum, I got a call from Helen, she was finished with work. Before getting back on the bus to meet her, I took a quick stroll along the edge of Djurgården island, where I had spent the whole day. The views of the rest of Stockholm over the water in the evening light were beautiful. The city is full of colorful buildings, green copper peaks and docked sailboats. Helen and I met in the middle of the train station. It had been six years since I last saw her when she visited me in Hoboken. Of course I recognized her immediately; she looked just the same as before. She took me on the subway to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Jonas, in the Södermalm neighborhood.

The apartment was three stories up in a pretty old building. I thought it was quite spacious for a city apartment. Jonas’ sister and her friend were staying with them to take a cake decorating class in Stockholm so we had a full house. Helen set up a bed for me in the foyer and I settled in. Hungry for dinner, Jonas and Helen took me out to Thai restaurant in the neighborhood. It was a fun atmosphere with bamboo huts inside, background noise of chirping crickets and every hour an artificial monsoon passed through the area complete with thunder, lightning and rain sounds. We had a good time catching up on life and reminiscing about fun times in England in the US.

On the way home from dinner, Helen walked us to a lovely elevated point in Södermalm, called Katarinahissen, with awesome views of the city below. The city was full of light which bounced off of the surrounding waters. We took a stroll through the cute and historic artist district of Södermalm and I made a mental note to come back in the daylight. The city was quite full of life for a Wednesday evening and I decided I really liked Stockholm.