We've fallen into a bit of a routine after two full days here in the land of the Almost Never Setting Sun. Wake between 9-11 depending on your age. Grown-ups first, 4-year-old next, teenagers, then tweens. Around lunchtime, we exit the apartment to pursue whatever the women have planned for the day. My first stop has been a place called Espresso House, which somehow has kept Starbucks largely out of Sweden. They apparently just recently added an islatte to their menu and it's all the rage with the natives and tourists alike. About $3 gets you some lovely roasted coffee over ice, add milk and sugar to your taste. Interestingly, and this is a trend in most of Europe I'm told, they don't supersize anything. Venti is just an Italian word for really big, not really available. So I order the biggest size they sell, which is akin to about a Starbucks grande in the states, and I nurse it for the first hour of our wanderings. The kids -- and gluten-free Carey -- are big fans of something called chokladboll, which are just what you think they are -- balls of chocolate, the consistency of a good fudge, sprinkled with shaved coconut. About the size of a UAlbany lacrosse ball. Or two golf balls smushed together and re-rolled into one ball, if you prefer. Carey and Kira were holding one in the last post. We then do something touristy for a few hours and start getting hangry about 3-4pm for a late lunch.
The star of today's show was a Swedish ship named the Vasa. It's the only dry-docked ship from the 17th century in Scandinavia. 15 stories high, 226 feet from bow to stern, about 155 feet wide. Sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, the mightiest war ship of her time with 64 cannons. Or they thought she would be, until they tested her in Stockholm harbor and she immediately began listing to the right, wobbling with too much weight above the water line and not enough rock ballast in the hull. Her first test run lasted all of 25 minutes before she sank in just about 350 feet of water in the harbor. Technology being what it was at the time, they were able to salvage a few guns and the top of the masts that were easily accessible below the water, which they used in their next ship. But after that and an inquiry that blamed the King, the Admiral and the Captain with no charges recommended, they let her lie there and she was mostly forgotten to history. Enter Anders Franzen in 1954, a Swedish engineer obsessed with finding Vasa. It took him two years, but in 1956 he pulled up a cork sample from the seabed and convinced everyone it was from a sunken ship that had rested in the muck just 360 feet off the shore for more than 300 years. Fast forward because I'm starting to sound like a tour guide, and in 1961 the Vasa was fully removed from the water for the first time in 333 years. The rest is a pretty amazing conservation tale that is ongoing even today. But the ship on display is 98% original and is certainly the most impressive seagoing vessel I've ever seen with mine own eyes.
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| The stern, containing more than 100 statues, visual symbols which were central to the language at the time, since most people were illiterate. |
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| A reconstructed top rigging. The sailors brave enough to be up there would be more than 170 feet in the air. |
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| A diving bell used in the 1950's to salvage what they could before getting approval for a full-scale raising attempt. |
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