Vasa

 We slept well, and when, around 6:30 on the morning of Sunday, August 7th, I peeked out the window, we were already among the 30,000 islands of the Stockholm Archipelago.  After continental breakfast at a coffee shop on the Promenade, we went up on the Sun Deck to watch our approach to Stockholm, where we arrived around 10 a.m.

The ferry terminal is out to the northeast of town.  At the ship's information desk I had bought tickets for the shuttle into the city, so, after debarking we immediately hopped on board the bus and were quickly taken to the Central Bus Station.  We walked our luggage through the modern city center, which Mary Joy thought was barbaric, to Östermalm, which we later learned is the wealthiest district of Stockholm.  Our room at the Hotel Riddargatan was not yet ready, so we left our luggage and headed for the Vasa Museum.

The weather on all three of our days in Stockholm was variable and cool.  On this particular day we were rained on a number of times.  The Vasa Museum is on the island of Djurgården, a nineteen-minute walk from our hotel, along the harbor, across a bridge and past the Nordic Museum.

The first order of business when we arrived at the Vasa Museum was to buy our tickets and go through the museum to the cafeteria, which had very good reviews, and eat lunch.

My first meal in Sweden was, of course, Swedish meatballs.  Mary Joy's past experience with that dish in Wisconsin led her to have fish instead, but she tried one of my meatballs and was pleasantly surprised.  Unfortunattely, she didn't have any other opportunity to have Swedish meatballs of her own while we were in Sweden.

Vasa, when it was commissioned in 1628, was the pride of the Swedish Navy, elaborately decorated and carrying 64 guns.  However, it proved to be topheavy, and minutes into its maiden voyage in Stockholm Harbor, having just fired a salute, it was caught by a gust of wind and heeled over so far that water poured into its open gunports and it sank.  There it sat, at the bottom of the harbor, for more than 300 years, until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and raised in 1961 (I remember reading about it back then in National Geographic).  The cold, worm-free (and toxically polluted) waters had kept it in amazingly good shape, and after painstaking stabiization and restoration work it was given its own museum in 1990.  It is the best-preserved 17th-century warship in the world.

Very interesting.  We took the English language tour and then spent three to four hours in the museum.  The ship was there, fully re-masted and re-rigged, with brightly colored replicas of its decorative carvings and interpretive displays explaining the ship, how it would have operated and how people would have lived and worked on it if it had actually gone on station in the Baltic.

We returned to Hotel Riddargatan to check in, whereupon I discovered that my wallet, which should have been zipped into my back pants pocket, was missing.  All it contained was my Visa card.  The desk clerk called the Vasa Museum, who had wallet and card, so I ran back there.  I told the ticket office, and they sent someone with me into the museum, to the information desk, where I was reunited with wallet and Visa card.  They said that recently, due to pickpocketing, they had brought in security personnel.  Either someone had picked my pocket and, not finding any cash, had just dropped the wallet, or I had left it when I paid for lunch at the cafeteria.  Who knows?

We went to the 6 p.m. English language mass at St. Eugenia Catholic Church.  Like St. Paul's in Reykjavik, St . Eugenia has a varied ethnic community.  It is right on the Kungsträdgården, the park in the center of downtown Stockholm, and from the outside doesn't look like a church at all, but like the other buildings around it.  Mass there was interesting.  It was the first time in sixty years that I attended a mass where the priest was facing away from the congregation.  There were maybe eight pads on the floor in a semicircle around the sanctuary, and at communion people came up to those pads and either knelt on them or stood behind them, as the priest and the other communion distributor moved from one pad to another.  It was like back in the fifties, when people knelt at the communion rail and the priest went along it from one side to the other.  Some people took communion in the hand, others on the tongue.  I'm not sure what the point is, other than nostalgia for a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church that they are too young to remember.  I, on the other hand, am old enough to remember that Church very well.  I was an altar boy in the early sixties and can still say some of the Latin responses.  At St. Eugenia, I didn't kneel for communion and I took it in the hand.

Dinner was reserved for 7:30 at Kryp In, in the Old Town.  Mary Joy had their specialty, a "deer beefsteak."  She has never tasted venison, and, unfortunately, didn't like the taste of this.  I forget what I had.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't memorable.  At the table next to us was a couple from New York who were, like us, doing a two-week blitz through Scandinavia, on their own.  They were on their way to Oslo, Flåm and Bergen, so we gave them some pointers, while they gave us some ideas for Stockholm.