Friday, September 26, 2008
Eurotrip 2008: Stockholm is Abba-rific
Stockholm was the next stop on this summer’s magical mystery tour, and if you thought I wasn’t going to walk around that city rocking out to a continuous loop of ABBA and Ace of Base on the iPod, then oh, how wrong were you? Because it was awesome. After a post-trip review of the photo album I’m going to have to be honest and say that, no, this is not some of my finest camera work. In fact, it was pretty damn sloppy. The one saving grace is that at this point, without the Wingman along to take photos with his extra slim pocket camera, I was forced to hit the bars with a camera in my pocket. Anyhoo, the first photo above is possibly one of the top ten I’ve taken in my lifetime. A nice little sunset shot of one of the clearest skies I’ve ever seen in my life. The extreme northern latitude made for some crazy sunsets, here and in St. Pete and Helsinki as well. If it had been closer to June, it would’ve been light till roughly, well, all night, with only a few hours where the sun was below the horizon.
Anyways, moving right along. There was an amusement park with roller coasters right on the harbor in Stockholm. Obviously, I was going to go there and ride them. The giant space shot tower was great, as it gave me a rather nice view of everything in the main harbor area. And it was scary as hell, too.
A little ways in from the amusement park was the Vasa Museum. The Vasa is a 380-year-old sailing warship that sank on it’s maiden voyage about 15 minutes after leaving dock by capsizing when the wind hit it. Basically, it was poorly built. It sank pretty quickly, and since the harbor was freshwater, it was preserved perfectly for 300+ years, before they raised it and restored it. This was by far the coolest thing I saw in Stockholm. It should be your first stop if you ever visit the city. Here’s some photos of it, it’s stored in a gigantic closed building with low lighting, so I couldn’t get any good shots of it. Here’s a link to more information and pictures of the museum.
On the hill above the amusement park and museum is an open air “cultural park” that has little setups of living scenes throughout Swedish history. From Viking camps to medieval farms to 18th and 19th century farms…etc. It was a wee bit boring. It’d have been nice if there’d been a ton of blonde girls in authentic clothing running around giggling and whatnot, but one can only expect so much. They did, however, have an assortment of indigenous animals. So, I finally got to see some up close moose and reindeer. So that was pretty cool. They also had a wolfpack, some bears, and buffaloes.
One morning I took a fast boat tour around the archipelago to the east of the harbor. With 14,000 islands, the archipelago is rather large. It’s certainly a nice place to own a home, but I imagine it gets a bit cold in the winter.
This is tennis player Bjorn Borg’s summer house. Not too shabby. Being an athlete certainly has its perks.
On the return trip in on the boat, we swung by the front face of Old Town Stockholm. This is the oldest part of the city, and thstreets here were extremely narrow and twisty. All the buildings are 300-400 years old or more. You can see some of them sagging with age.
This is the royal palace. If I said I was going to Stockholm without hoping to run into the single youngest daughter of the King of Sweden, who’s 26, I’d be lying. C’mon, is it that bad to want to marry into (great heaping gobs of) money?
So that was Stockholm. It was a lot of fun, and I’d gladly go again. The bar scene was nuts, especially on Sunday night, when I ended up with 3 other Australian guys at a club at the Royal Opera house. That was by far the coolest bar I went to on this trip. That I can remember. Friday night was a blur, all I remember is waking up with two unopened beers in my pocket, a pack of opened yet unsmoked cigarettes, and rather dubious headache. Good times. and I'm pretty sure we went to some club like you'd see in a eurotrash gangster movie.
# posted by Wooderson : 2:11 PM
