Today was a bit of a weather forecast two-step. Yesterday morning when I checked the forecast, it said there’d be rain starting at 11:00 a.m. Based on that, I cancelled the 9:40 walking tour I had scheduled, which was for three hours. It would have been mostly in the rain, which wouldn’t have been much fun. I began looking for indoor things to do.

Last night, the forecast said the rain had moved back to noon, so I started planning outdoor things for the late morning. This morning’s forecast had moved the rain to 1:00, so I focused on my outdoor plan. It was a pretty morning out.

So we left the hotel around 10:00 and boarded the free ferry that runs across the Gota River. That dumped us near the old part of the city, and we started walking toward Kungsportsplatsen, a small square near the river. Along the way, I saw a pretty church, and it had the door open, so we popped inside. It was a church from the 1800s, and it was simple and full of light inside – very pretty. The organist also happened to be practicing, so we sat down and listened to two songs. That was lucky.

We made our way to the square and bought tickets for a fifty-minute canal tour. We joined about forty people on a low, open boat. It turns out the bridges over the canals are really low. We cruised through the canal and out into the river harbor area and back along the canal. We had a young man narrating things to us in Swedish and English, and he was the first Swede I have heard who definitely had flawless English, but with a British accent. He told us that Goteborg was founded in the 1600s by the king in order to have a western port so as to avoid the narrow straits that Denmark controlled and therefore taxed. The whole area was mud flats, so the Swedes had to bring in the Dutch to learn how to reclaim land from the sea. It’s still mud below – the tallest skyscraper (a very cool twisty building) had to sink pylons three hundred feet into the mud to make the foundation stable. Nonetheless, Goteborg is still Scandinavia’s largest port by shipping weight.

After the boat tour, I still wanted to take advantage of the good weather, so we walked south to the Haga neighborhood. The Haga is a cute area of restaurants and cafes down four blocks of pedestrian-only streets, with some residential areas on each side. The cafe street was active with people also enjoying the weather, and we saw some cinnamon rolls that were close to the size of dinner plates (although sadly, the Swedes go for crystalized sugar lightly sprinkled on top instead of frosting).

By now, I wanted lunch and wanted to be back at the ferry dock area for when the rain came, since there were museum possibilities around there. We headed toward the rather wonderful-sounding “Mr. Cake” restaurant. It did indeed have pastries and cakes, but they also served freshly made meals that turned out to be really large; rather than each getting our own dessert, we split a piece of cake, and I haven’t felt any need for supper.

I did check the weather again at lunch, and now the rain had been moved back to 5:00, so it took another quick decision on what to do outside. I felt we should go to Goteborg’s botanical gardens, which are very large (430 acres). They’re easy to get to using a tram, until you get on the one going the wrong way and get off at the next stop, only to find out that the tram you need doesn’t come back this way and you have to walk ten minutes back to the station you started from. Sigh.

We did make it to the gardens, and they were what I was expecting – lush, verdant, well cared for – and as a bonus, it was only six dollars total for both of us to get in. The garden is a mile long and narrow, so we headed toward the far end of the park, stopping to admire whatever caught our eyes. Then I saw some rough-hewn stairs leading up next to a sign that said “Viewpoint.” It was obvious what we had to do. I figured it would lead up fifteen to twenty feet to a little terrace with flowers all around. Ha! Was I happily wrong.

The steps went way up and then led to more steps winding though bare rock. And they kept going. It turns out the heart of the gardens was a large, rocky hill, and the viewpoint was at the top. It was an actual hike to get there. It was great. It looked back at the harbor area and down along the river toward the sea. I was very pleased.

We went back down, managing to get turned around a bit, but still came out where we should. The weather was still fine, so we went on and came to a huge rock garden based around a thirty-foot waterfall cascading down over some of the rocks of the hill. I loved the area. And I saw a sign for “Viewpoint – 50 m,” so we climbed those steps to what must be another viewpoint. Except it wasn’t – it was a much much shorter way to get to our earlier viewpoint than the way we had gone when we were further down.

By now, it was starting to sprinkle, so we worked our way down the path, having covered about two thirds of the main path of the garden. We could have spent another hour or two there if I hadn’t been worried about getting rained on. We actually got on the right tram and got all the way back to the center of town without any real rain, but the radar showed that it was coming soon, so I looked online for things to do. There was only one thing I could find that was open – the Paradox Museum, which was a collection of optical illusions, and turned out to be hosted in a mall. Good enough. We like stuff like that. Off we went, and when we were about half of the way there, it finally started raining.

We did enjoy the Paradox Museum. We laughed quite a bit, and some of the optical effects were quite good (there was a picture that shifted as you moved that was very effective; it turns out to have parts of the painting protrude so the perspective makes it look as if the painting moves as you shift – I thought it was a hologram). It fit the bill. We had a fun time, indoors, and it took us a little over an hour, which got us to the end of the touring day. We had an efficient tram ride back to the hotel, and we got though a day that was supposed to be rainy while still touring fours sights. I’m very happy with that.

Of course, there are showers predicted some tomorrow as well, so I’d better be flexible.

We got to Goteborg (or Gothenburg, in English) today around noon. Goteborg is Sweden’s second biggest city after Stockholm, and I have to admit to a few tense moment of driving in a city where I can’t read the signs. But we’re here, and our room was even ready at noon, so we dumped our stuff before heading out.

Just as Stockholm has an in-city amusement park called Grona Lund, Goteborg has one too, called Liseberg. Liseberg is bigger and has a good-sized hill in the park (which is important). Mer had also determined that this was where we were going to spend this beautiful sixty-degree day.

Liseberg has seven roller coasters – five adult coasters and two children’s coasters, as well as various other rides. Mer wanted to ride all of the coasters, as well as see Swedes at play. The park opened at 1:00, and we were inside at 1:30. Not bad for coming from three hours away this morning.

We did very well today. The park felt busy, but that didn’t translate to ride wait times; those seemed to be running at fifteen to twenty minutes in general. We ended up riding all seven coasters, including one twice, as well as three other rides. So we rode eleven rides and ate two meals and dessert, all in a park that was new to us (so we didn’t always know how to get to the next coaster efficiently).

A brief rundown on my opinion of the coasters, in the order we rode them:
– Stampbanan – (steel kiddie coaster) – A warm-up ride and checklist ride. Nothing too special, except you get to go around the loop three times.
– Rabalder – (steel kiddie coaster) – Great kiddie coaster that goes around twice. It has some real banked turns that are pretty fun.
– Lisebergnbanan – (steel contour coaster) – My favorite, hands-down. I’ve always wanted to try a contour coaster, for which the track follows the contours of a hill. This coaster never gets more than about thirty feet off the ground, but is really long, at two minutes and fifteen seconds. It has some wonderfully kicky corners, including three horizontal loops into the same part of the park. Much fun. We rode it twice over the day, finishing with this coaster as well.
– Luna (steel coaster that goes backwards as well) – This is a fun coaster that backs you up a bit and then uses the hill to generate speed to “launch” you vertically to the moon before going backwards to the station.
– Balder (wooden coaster) – As always, the wooden coasters are rougher than the steel ones, but this one is long, loops around on itself often, and focuses on throwing tons of bunny hops at you. It always alarms me to come out of my seat on a coaster.
– Valkyria (steel coaster with six seats across, letting your feet dangle) – This is a smooth ride, and the highlight is that it holds you for three seconds while you face down the first big drop hill. I had to close my eyes – I couldn’t handle it.
– Helix (steel coaster with 1.75 million inversions) – Oh, my. This was quite a coaster. The track inverts you as many times as they could cram on the course, and it launches you not once but twice while you’re out on the track, including one late in the ride when you think you’re almost done. Then, whammo!:  you cross a launch pad and scream up into an inverted loop. It gets to sixty mph and pulls over four Gs and inverts you seven times – but the twists and turns are such that it feels like a lot more than that. The engineers for this ride are very bad people. I still can’t get over that second launch when I thought the ride was ending.

Since Mer and I are in our fifties and our bodies take time to recover from being turned all around, we need to pace the coasters out. We did three coasters and then lunch. The we did one more coaster and a log flume ride (which, because of the hill, had two lift sections and two downhill splashdowns – we got wet). We did a set of two coasters, then did supper and the Ferris wheel. We then rode a kiddie ride that was a car on an elevated track designed to let you see the park from fifteen feet up. We finished with Helix and then, after dessert, we did Lisebergbanan  one more time, finishing up a little after 9:00. Good amusement park day.

One odd cultural thing for carnival games. In general, instead of winning stuffed animals, you win huge (like three feet long) boxes of various chocolates. You win them on the spin of a wheel instead of any game of skill. These games were very popular. It seemed strange to me to essentially gamble for candy, but people were walking around the park with huge boxes of candy.

So today was a bit of an unorthodox touring day. We’ve been to amusement parks in Europe before, but then we only did an individual ride or two just for the experience. Today was the first time we ever spent a whole day at an amusement park while on one of our European jaunts. We did get to see lots of the city from unusual angles.

Today I had to drive a bit into the unknown. I wanted to go to the cathedral town of Lund, about an hour northwest of Ystad. We had a B and B booked, with parking, but it was a fifteen-minute drive outside of town. My usual plan of dump-the-car-and-walk wasn’t going to work. I knew I wanted to get close to the old town without actually having to drive in it, so I programmed my GPS for the center of the city and then started looking for parking signs as we got close. The end result was okay – a large parking lot, but further from the cathedral than I might have wanted at a fifteen-minute walk. That got us to the church at 9:57 for our 10:00 tour with…

Lund Greeters is the local branch of Greeters International, a group of volunteer city guides all over the world who are local people who love their city and want to share it. They are a no-cost and no-tipping organization. We got to the cathedral and pulled out my travel phone and looked confused enough that Leif and KC (“kay-see”) came over and asked us if we were looking for them. KC is from Colorado, but married a Swede and has lived in Lund for thirty years, and Leif, from the northern part of Sweden, went to college in Lund, met a local girl, and married her and stayed.  Both KC and Leif were retired (or at least of retirement age) and were vibrant and energetic people. They led us around the old town for three hours without slowing down, and again, all for free. Amazing people.

A few highlights from the tour:
– The cathedral dates back to the 1100s, but didn’t have enough money for upkeep after the Reformation, so buttresses started being put up to hold up the Romanesque walls. An architect in the 1800s fixed the roof and rebuilt the front towers (which impressively match the rest of the church) and ditched the external supports.
– The university here has 30,000 students and is the second oldest in Sweden, next to their rivals in Uppsala. For a town of about 100,000 people, that’s a large student population.
– Students have to find their own housing – the university doesn’t have any. That led to frat/sorority-like co-ed housing called “nations” where students from the same regions house together.
– The university students have a great sense of humor. After the town carried on forever trying to decide what statue to put in the square between the cathedral and a university building, the students had a large and official unveiling of nothing. They put a plaque on the ground with the title Nothing, and it stuck. The town liked it because it cost, well, nothing. At some point, the cathedral folks pulled it up to do some cobblestone renovations, and the student group put another plaque nearby proclaiming that Nothing had been stolen.
– The university also has a collection of casts of noses, started by a student casting his own nose back in 1986. Every year, a couple or a few people connected to Lund are chosen to have their noses added to the collection, including famous people like a woman professor who won the Nobel Prize in physics – the cast-makers walked into her class after the class was done and asked her to lie down to get her cast made. They’ve recently added audio of some of the people sneezing so you can hear the nose. Some casts are recreations, including one for Tycho Brahe, and they included a brass band across the plaster of his nose. I loved that (he is supposed to have had a fake brass nose).
– Near the cathedral is a gorgeous pharmacy, where everything inside is carved of wood, including the names of all the head pharmacists going back to the 1600s. When it was thought that the pharmacy might have to close because of costs a few years ago, the normally tranquil Swedes protested out front and saved the business. It’s a work of art to see the inside.
– A farmer who was digging for a new pigsty hit some iron objects on a site about three miles south of Lund. It turned out to be a lost town predating Lund, and the area of interest is huge. Less than one percent has been excavated.
– The town used to have twenty-two churches (for about six thousand people). All but two were torn down after the Reformation, and two were rediscovered, one wooden and one stone, when the town was trying to build a parking lot in the 1980s. Nothing now remains of the wooden one, but the outline is shown in the cobblestone. The stone church’s foundation was preserved in the publicly accessible basement of a new building.
– KC and Leif made sure we were at the church to see the six-hundred-year-old astronomical clock perform. Two knights at the top strike at each other with their swords, once for each stroke of the hour. Then four servants and the three wise men process around Mary and Jesus while two trumpeters play the tune to “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.”

It was a fun tour, and we got to ask lots of questions, including asking how things went in 1967 when Sweden decided to change from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side of the road on one day. Leif said it had been well planned, and the Swedes are rule-followers, so it went fine. As someone who doesn’t love driving on the left, I’m grateful.

Leif and KC left us around 1:00, and Leif recommended we go eat at a local place about ten minutes up past the church. We value local information, so we walked there and were told we could order at the bar. The menu was in Swedish, and the bartender kept serving other people drinks over helping us, so we gave up there. The second place we tried was a cafe, but it was going to be twenty minutes for the bread to come out. Our third place was an Italian cafe, and we finally got a pleasant lunch, seated outside in an inner courtyard.

After lunch, we went to look in at the cathedral. It’s free, even to go into the crypt. In fact, we didn’t pay for any touring today anywhere – everything was free. While most of the church is plain, above the choir area, there is a huge and impressive mosaic of Jesus calling his saints out of their graves on the Last Day. After we toured the crypt, we sat and looked at that for some time (and we were hoping that a group in the choir area was going to sing, but it never did).

The crypt was interesting – some graves of important people were in the floor or on the walls, but what was new to me was that many of the supporting pillars holding up the roof of the crypt/floor of the church were carved with figures or patterns. I liked that touch.

From the cathedral, we wandered east to the botanical garden. We both like gardens, and I had seen this recommended on a couple of websites. We got there, and it was free (sponsored by the town and university). The early results were a bit disappointing – the garden was basically a park – nice, but just grass and trees and shrubs. We got around to the other side of the (under construction) main central building, and things picked up. There were beds of flowers, and then the paths started winding thought flowering shrubs and around small undulations of rock and plants. That was more what I was expecting.

We came across some teens on a lawn throwing wooden rods at wooden blocks. It became clear they were playing a game, so we sat down to see if we could figure out the rules. We’re still not sure of all the rules, but it seems as if the goal is to knock down all of the other team’s blocks, and then knock down a central block, which it seems had to be done by throwing the rod while you were bent over and looking through your legs. We suspect that this last part may have been house rules.

I then took us to the university library, which was an okay library with one really cool wooden silent-study room that was lined with old books. The outside of the building was very picturesque too, but I’m not sure why my research found sites saying it was a “must-see.” Still, lead an English teacher to books and she’s impressed.

My last touring adventure of the day was to go see the elaborate interior of All Saints Church. It took between ten and fifteen minutes to get there, and we discovered that the church was in use for a graduation ceremony. Ah well.

Speaking of graduation, today was high school graduation, at least in Lund. We kept running into hordes of students wearing white graduation caps, and then at some point, most of them piled into the backs of huge semis that drove them slowly though the streets for a couple of hours while they played loud music, yelled, blew whistles, waved, and generally seemed to be having a good time. Odd tradition to an American, but it was festive.

We ate supper at an Italian restaurant we had passed during the tour, selecting it from the smell alone. It was a bit pricey, but worth it.

We found our car again by comparing landmark notes with each other, and drove out to our B and B, which is in an odd area. Much of it is farmland, but there are two large business headquarters-looking buildings of metal and curves. There are roundabouts where there’s only one street coming in and going out, so they seem to be ready to be expanded for future plans. There’s  a new rail station, but the tracks don’t go anywhere yet. And our B and B is on a three-quarters-of-a-mile-long single-track dirt road. I’m guessing the area is in the early stages yet of transition.

Tomorrow we continue going back north, going to Sweden’s second-biggest city, Goteburg. Mer will be in charge tomorrow, so I get a break from planning.

Today was an ebb-and-flow kind of day. The rain came and went and came and went and came and went. My touristic planning went from plan to improvise to replan and reimprovise. The touristic results went from wow to ehh to okay to wet to okay to good to okay to good.

The forecast called for rain in the morning, but that was easy, since I had indoor plans until 11:00. Online, I had stumbled across a cello player in the region named Petronella Torin, whose website had a “book me” link, so I got in touch. She was willing to play and sing Swedish folk songs for us for an hour, and for a rate that was more or less in line with good seats at a Cleveland theater.

That was a fun time. Mer and I have never been to a private concert before, and Petronella was affable, taking time to explain the cello and what the songs were about. She warmed up with two Bach pieces which she played deftly, and then she played and sang for the rest of the time. Her cello is over two hundred years old, so the sound is full and rich. She took time to answer our questions, and we really enjoyed the entire experience.

Petronella had mentioned a waterfall in one of the stories of her songs, and it was nearby, so we went to see it. It was in a small nature preserve, and when we got there, it started drizzling, even though we’d seen no rain since heading out today. But the path was in a leafy forest, so the rain mostly didn’t get in. The walk was in slightly rolling hills and in the woods, so it was nice in a Cuyahoga Valley National Park sort of way. When I saw that one path looked as if it led down to the stream and was very muddy, and I didn’t know how long the other trail was, I decided to take the shorter inner loop and go back to the car. I wasn’t sure it was worth the touring time.

The rain had stopped, and I drove the short way on to Vik. One website I had read had mentioned a couple of coastal towns as being cute to wander in, so that was my itinerary for the day. Vik turned out to be a tiny hamlet of one-way roads that led to a parking lot that had a path to the sea. The “beach” was made up of rocky slabs, although we could see sandy beaches further up the shore. Oddly, on a sometimes rainy, windy, fifty-degree day, we were the only ones on the beach. We found a rock and sat and watched the waves for a few minutes. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a main street to wander down, so I checked my next two towns. One was even smaller, but Simrishamn had about seven thousand people, so we drove there.

We parked near signs for the harbor, and as we got out of the car, it started sprinkling again. Since the forecast hadn’t called for any rain, neither of us had umbrellas, but we did have rain jackets, so we were fine with showers. We walked along the harbor, which was oddly isolated, and headed in the direction of town (away from the very extensive beach). The more we walked, the heavier the rain got. As we got to the main street of the town, I was pretty much looking for any place to eat that was under cover. We found one, and got settled outside under a canopy when the rain intensified to a full-on steady rain. I told Mer to take her time eating.

By the time we were done eating, the rain stopped. We took the improved weather as a chance to explore the town, but it wasn’t very extensive – a couple of streets of nice shops and a few cute homes. We headed back to the car, keeping right on the shore of the sea, and we discovered a small, pretty seating area and got a better look at the rain-free harbor. When we got to the beach, we walked out on it for a short distance, but we didn’t go very far because the sand was very hard to walk in.

I was determined to do better, so I headed us back to Kaseberga, where we had seen the ship stones the night before. We hadn’t seen the pier or the town, so I wanted to correct that.

I’m glad we went to see the stones last night. When we pulled in to the parking lot at 3:00, it was pretty much full and included a couple of buses. We walked into town and then down the road to the pier area, which was away from the town, since the town was built behind the cliff top, presumably to keep it out of the wind. On the way down, we spotted four windsurfers out on the water doing their thing. They were having a good day of it today with pretty high winds.

We walked along the base of the pier, which was made up of restaurants, a cafe, a few souvenir shops, and a small fish shipping warehouse. We then walked out to the end of the pier, where we watched much more active waves and had a fun time watching the various windsurfers. One man rode right by us on his way in to the shore, and his board was about two feet out of the water, with only the stabilizer still under the waves. It looked fun.

We walked back up to the car and stumbled across the surfer as we went though the town. We told him we’d had fun watching him and asked him how long he had been surfing. He smiled and said, “A long time.” That was why it looked like fun – he knew what he was doing.

And so back to Ystad. As we got back to the hotel, it started raining again, so I took thirty minutes to do some work stuff. We went to wander the town randomly to see what we could find. We found several cute houses and a few half-timbered ones that were clearly old. We happened upon the old monastery, which is now a town museum, and the grounds and gardens around the building were pretty. By then, it was 6:00, so I found us a place to eat on the square, and we were the only ones sitting outside at the pub. The food was good, but so was sitting in such a pretty place.

After supper, we wanted to explore more of the town, so I downloaded a map from the tourism bureau. It showed twenty-two buildings to find, but they were all in a weird order, so I decided  just to look at the ones we happened to be close to. We started with the theater, but were puzzled how to find it when it dawned on us it was the building we were standing in front of with our backs to it. It mentioned an elegant facade, so we went around the building to see it, finally getting to it on the fourth try.

We then failed to find the old Latin school building immediately, and then laughed when the front had a large sign identifying it. We had trouble making the map line up with St. Mary’s church, and then we went all around the old city hall before finding the front and verifying that it was what we were looking for.

We ended up going down a long pedestrian street just to see it, but it took us to the longest half-timbered building street in the Nordic countries (almost a whole block long). There was another old (1700s) half-timbered building around the corner from it was well.

Our phone-guided tour had taken place in a little rain at the start, but by the end, the day was very sunny and pleasant. It was a good way to end the day – seeing sights and laughing at our own foolishness at missing obvious buildings. Tomorrow we start heading back north, but along the west coast side of Sweden this time.

Today was another travel day of about three-and-a-half hours as we went from Kalmar to our next hotel in the southern coastal town of Ystad. The next stop south from Ystad is the German/Polish border.

I decided to break the drive up by adding thirty minutes of driving to the trip. Odd, but it broke the trip up into (roughly) two-plus hours for the first part and one hour and forty-five minutes for the second. That was worth it to me, especially when the stop was the Wanas Konst sculpture garden.

Meredith and I love sculpture gardens. We swing by them any time we get close to one. Seeing sculpture outside on a nice day is a real treat to both of us. Wanas Konst is a bit of an oddity in that it’s across the street from a working (and tourable) farm, and it isn’t really close to any major towns. Somehow it has managed to be open for forty years and continues to add sculptures to the collection, which now has over eighty sculptures spread over forty heavily wooded acers.

We got there about 11:30 and finally left at 3:30 and still didn’t get to see everything. Wanas Konst is now my favorite sculpture garden anywhere. The grounds are gorgeous – about a third of the grounds is manicured ponds and lawns around a large private residence (the owners of which allow the sculpture garden to reside on their land as a donation), and about two thirds is wooded. Many pieces of art can be interacted with. We sat on a curved bench and a black rocky sculpture. We climbed a tall wooden ziggurat and admired the views from the top. We had fun swinging on swings suspended from various heights from a tall tree. We walked through a ball pit that filled a black door that went into the ground. I mildly hurt myself on a set of four closely spaced swings that were designed to have people swing in unison; I hit the swing in front of me fairly hard. We looked through a periscope to see the palace. We played huge windchimes suspended from a metal-frame jellyfish wrapped around a tree. 

Some of the art was odd – there was a creature with a lion’s body, two tails, and a feathered neck with no real head, and it was standing in a large nest in the water. There was also a 150-by-150-foot space in the woods enclosed by a fence so that the forest could be undisturbed art. But most of the are was fun or thought-provoking. Meredith and I both loved a piece that was a net suspended in the shape of a movie theater screen and covered with sequins. They moved in the breeze, so you could see the forest behind the net shimmer. We sat and watched that one for several minutes.

There was a smooth, round, polished stone piece sitting in the middle of stone fragments of an eggshell; it looked as if it had just hatched. One artist made an replica of a New York museum, but shrank it down to a (still colossal) outhouse. There was a metal strand strung across a pond, and the strand would expand and contract with the temperature, so its height above the water was always changing.

One thought-provoking piece was an American-style narrow building that suggested a church. From a speaker in the building, a poet’s voice read short excerpts of his work, while outside the building, high up in the trees, some peaceful music played. It was the artist’s tribute to the poet, who committed suicide at the age of eighty.

The model and actress Isabella Rossellini had several video installations in the park in odd places; for each video, she had filmed herself pretending to be a bug or animal and dressed herself up to show the mating and/or survival behaviors of the animal. They were quirky.

I loved how the art integrated with the trees of the forest. It felt like nature trails with surprises scattered throughout the walk. I absolutely fell in love with the place, and I’d love to go back to see it in different seasons (and see the ten or fifteen percent of the park we missed).

From Wanas Konst, we drove on to Ystad. We checked in to our hotel, which is in, at least partly, a building from 1793. After we got settled, we had supper at Thor’s, but oddly, Chris Hemsworth didn’t wait on us. I guess he was in the kitchen.

It was a perfect evening – cool and with a light breeze, and some sun coming through a layer of clouds. Since the weather was so agreeable, I did the rare thing of getting back in the car after I had parked it in a town, so that we could drive twenty-five minutes to Ales Stenar. Or so I thought. The drive got us to a parking lot, from which there was a fifteen-minute walk up to the stones. That was okay – it was a pleasant walk, and made the stones get revealed more slowly.

Ales Stenar is the largest stone ship monument/grave/meeting-place/we-have-no-idea that is preserved in Sweden. The rocks are all five tons or so, and the fifty-nine stones in the monument are arranged roughly in the outline of a ship. The monument is set dramatically on a small cliff, and since we got there after 7:00, we had the place almost to ourselves – there were usually four or five other people around, but not always in and around the ship. The clifftop itself was a grand place to sit and look at the sea and flowers and sun and the other gentle cliffs of the area, and that was exactly what we did for ten minutes or more as the gentle breeze blew on us and kept bugs away, and the light surf lapped the shore, sending up the sound of the waves, but only if you were within ten feet of the cliff; otherwise, it was very still around the ship stones. I was happy on the clifftop – what a mellow and peaceful place to end a day of beauty.

We headed back to the car and back to Ytsad. It was a great travel day when we got to see two unusual sights. We’re in this area tomorrow, so the drives should all be fairly short. I’m looking forward to seeing more of the southern Swedish coast.

Mer let us sleep in this morning until 8:30 since we’d had such a long day yesterday. That was a welcome decision. I’ve been having trouble sleeping this vacation (oddly, usually because our rooms have been too hot when it’s been fifty degrees outside), and getting a decent sleep was needed.

After a rather extensive breakfast where we also got to sit outside on a sunny day (but in the shade, of course), we headed off to church. Meredith had found another Pentecostal church that had live English translations, and it was about a fifteen-minute walk away. It was called Lorensberg Church, and we found it with about four minutes to spare.

It was a lovely service. The entire thing, including the songs, was all in Swedish, which, to me, is how it should be for any church that isn’t trying to minister to international people. Our translator did a fantastic job, and he even translated the lyrics of the songs for us. The sermon was given by an elder since the pastor was out of town, and he spoke on what baptism and “living in your baptism” means. It was a solid sermon.

Sometimes Pentecostal churches can be a little wild for outsiders – they can be very emotional, and interactive, with lots of raising of hands and verbal affirmations from the congregation. Lorensberg Church was very much on the “tame” end of the spectrum and was pretty much what we’re used to back home. There was a lot of speaking in tongues, but I’m pretty sure it was all Swedish.

I did crack myself up. During one song, I saw some English cognates in the song, so I was excited to follow along with, “You are my hope, You are my life, You are my filbblegibbit.” There was a disconnect there toward the end.  Some Swedish words are similar to their English equivalents, but others, not so much.

After the service, a retired man came up to speak to us, and he used very solid English. He invited us to stay for “fika,” which is the Swedish term for coffee and light food. We were happy to stick around, and he pointed out a man sitting outside who had lived in Dallas for a couple of years, and he had been the guitar player for the church service today. Mer and I went up to him and introduced ourselves, and we chatted for a long time. A couple of other English speakers joined us and chatted with Meredith, but I kept talking to Par (the guitar player) about guitars and his line of work. He and his son spent six months building a guitar from wood sourced from family property, which is very cool. He was a quality control engineer for Ericsson, which had a factory in Dallas, which is why he lived there for a couple of years. Meredith and I had a great time getting to talk to locals. We finally thanked everyone and left around 1:30.

We got changed and organized back in the room, and then headed out, driving to the island of Oland. Oland was connected to the mainland by a nearly four-mile-long bridge back in 1972, so it makes for an easy drive. We were aiming for the largest town, Borgholm, about forty-five minutes away.

It was a pleasant drive, except for the unsettlingly tall bridge we had to cross. The island does have dozens of old-style wooden windmills scattered all over, and even a few modern ones as well. The old ones no longer turn in the wind since the arms aren’t covered in cloth.

Just before the town, an old semi-ruined castle broods on a cliff overlooking the sea. It’s very weird in that the roof is completely gone, but the rest of the stone structure is intact. Usually at least a wall or two is damaged, but not in this case. We turned off at the castle drive, but kept going past it and on to Solliden Palace, the summer escape home for the royal family. The home is closed to the public, but the gardens are open.

We only had two hours to closing time, but while the grounds weren’t tiny, they weren’t extensive. We saw everything in about an hour and fifteen minutes. The gardens were quite lovely, and everything was heavily shaded. The garden had a very cool three-tier fountain waterfall, and there were classical statues scattered around, and some modern sculpture as well. There was a large art installation in one part of the grounds that celebrated a husband-and-wife team of artists who are well known in Sweden. The wife passed away in 2018, but the husband is still making art at age eighty-eight.

One of the more random features of the garden was encountered as we came along a road on the back of the public area:  we saw some small gates set up in a circle that looked like a mini show-jumping ring, like in the Olympics. I joked that it was for horses, and then we saw that there was a rack of hobby horses for little kids. The course was for them, so of course we tried it, stepping over the taller gates so as not to fall over ourselves. Mer decided that the hardest thing was keeping the horse stick between her knees.

The last major exhibit in the garden was a series of photos of the royal family, mostly at Solliden. The king and queen have been married for fifty years and the king turns eighty this year, so it was a celebration of the family. Many of the photos were taken by the family or even the king himself. From an outsider’s perspective, the family seems to be fairly normal, if a bit richer than your average Riordan.

After the gardens, we went back to the car and drove back to the ruined castle. It was now almost 4:30, so there wasn’t any point in paying for admission, but we did get closer to the walls, and also looked out to sea some. We investigated a huge cairn that was put up as a memorial to a king from the 1800s by his hunting buddies. We then drove on to town.

It turns out that Borgholm is a very quiet town of a Sunday. We parked by the sea and then walked up to the four-block-long main pedestrian street. There were a few restaurants open, but that was it; no shops were open. There was only a handful of people about. It was a cute street, and the city hall was a cheerful bright yellow. We liked the walk, but it was strange to see a European shopping area so nearly deserted.

Sadly, toward the end of the walk, I started having stomach cramps. I have no idea what I ate today that made me sick, but I found a pay-for bathroom and was in there long enough that Meredith came over to the door to ask if I was okay. Once I was fit for traveling, we drove the forty-five minutes back to the hotel, where I was cramped up again for a time. And then again after supper while still at the restaurant. It wasn’t food poisoning, which I had last year, but it was a reaction to something I ate, or possibly dehydration (I probably didn’t drink so much as I normally do today). It was a bit frustrating, because I’d wanted to wander around in Borgholm or at least back here in Kalmar, but I felt I needed to stay near a bathroom. And the worst of it is is that I don’t know what caused it, so I could end up doing it again tomorrow when I have the same breakfast options.

Still, a rough ending of a day doesn’t negate the good of the rest of the day. Church was excellent ,and we got to meet some locals, and then the gardens on Oland were a happy place to wander around in. Tomorrow I take over again for the next several days, and we head further south in Sweden.

When Meredith and I tour a country, we like to see as much of the country as we can efficiently manage while still actually seeing sights – no pulling up and taking a photo and driving on to the next place. But when you have large countries, say, like Sweden, you sometimes have days made up largely of travel. Especially when you pin yourself out on an island two-and-a-half hours from Stockholm, where the rental car is. Today was a fairly long in-motion day, but we managed to interspace some touring into the boat, bus, foot, and car travel.

We got up early at Sandhamn to catch the first ferry out, which left at 8:40. The only ferry that goes all the way to Stockholm leaves at 3:00 p.m., so we couldn’t wait for that. We took the fifty-minute ferry to an island that had bridge connections all the way back to Stockholm so that we could take a bus back, getting to the city about 11:00. It was raining in the archipelago, but only lightly. Mer found that the back of the boat had a very small outside deck that was covered by an open upper deck, and that there were two dry chairs back there. So we sat out on the deck and watched the islands and the sea roll by. Even with the rain, the water was calm, and the trip was still beautiful. That counted as some tourism on a travel day.

We caught the bus and rode fifty minutes into the city. The bus was really hot, and I had awakened with a stiff neck that sometimes can trigger stomachaches and migraines. I treated the neck, but was left feeling fragile, healthwise. Between the bus’s heat and its swaying, my stomach got really upset. Mer saw that and suggested we ride an extra stop to get close to Gamla Stan, where we could walk outside rather than take another bus to the train station to the car rental building. I quickly agreed.

So, even though we were schlepping luggage with us, we walked back into the old town of Stockholm. That was some touring in itself, but we got a light lunch outside of a bakery on the main square, where we sat across from the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prizes. That was fun. As we left the bakery, we heard music and investigated, and saw some helmet plumes over the heads of a huge crowd; it was the ceremonial changing of the guard at the in-town palace. We didn’t stick around, since we couldn’t see very well, but that was cool to almost see.

The walk to the car rental place wasn’t too exciting, but we did manage to see a small square near the main square that we hadn’t seen before. We had left the rain back on the outer islands, and the day was a pretty one for walking. The food and walk cleared up my head and stomach nicely.

It took about thirty or forty minutes to get our car (there was a line of people being helped by only one worker for a long time), but we got the car and got underway. It wasn’t a terribly scenic drive, but it went smoothly, and we finally pulled up to our hotel in Kalmar, about five hours south of Stockholm, at 6:30.

You would assume that at 6:30, after about eleven hours of our being in motion, we would get some food and go to bed. But, as readers know by now, I travel with Meredith, and it doesn’t get dark here until about 10:15 p.m. We did get some fantastic food, at a restaurant in the city center called Symposium, but then we toured another two-and-a-half hours. Make hay while the sun shines.

It was a perfect evening – cool and with a few puffy clouds. Kalmar is right on the Baltic Sea, and so there are water views from all along the park on the eastern side of town. The town also has a castle, with a dry moat and a water-filled moat, so this is a fun place to wander. Which we did. We saw a small glassed-in gazebo operating as a small art museum showing the works of an artist who worked on the nearby large island, Oland. We popped over to the castle and looked in, but decided not to crash the very swanky-looking wedding reception going on. We did walk up on the outer walls and look out over the sea, which was quite pretty.

From there, we trekked out to the pier, where we were surprised to find several teen boys swimming in the sea on this sixty-degree day. Carpe swimming – swim while you can, I guess. We then wrapped up the touring of the day with a long stroll through a park out to the island park of Stenso. Between the sea on one side and the park on the other with the cool evening, it was a pretty wonderful stroll. On the way back to the hotel, we went through the town instead of going along the shore, and we admired the red and yellow homes, the well-kept yards, and the flowering trees and shrubs.

On a day of about seven-and-a-half hours of travel, we managed to do some five hours of touring, That’s not something I’d want to do every day of any trip, but it does get us to see more of the country. Welcome to the far south of Sweden!

When we tour, sometimes the journey is a large chunk of the touring . Such was today as we headed out to the far eastern end of the Stockholm archipelago, to the small village of Sandhamn.

We checked out of our hotel in Stockholm and started walking to the ferry landing. The forecast had shown it was raining, and it was, but it was only a light sprinkle, and by the time we got to the boat, it had stopped raining. That was a huge blessing for us, since we wanted to sit outside on the boat (for two and a half hours) and walk (outside) all around Sandhamn.

The ferry is on a main street in Stockholm, and walking in, I had noticed that the police were blocking intersections onto the street. While we were waiting in the line for the boat, the traffic dried up on the road, and some police cars went slowly by. They were followed by fifty or so horses ridden by (presumably) soldiers in golden helmets and with drawn swords. They were followed by two horse-drawn carriages with some people in them, and then three black sedans, a large van full of soldiers, and then more police cars. I have no idea who or what this show was for, but it was clearly important and sure snarled up traffic.

On to the boat! Mer and I sat in the small open section of the back, and we got underway. The boat took us past several places we had been, but it also got us our best look at Grona Lund, the city’s amusement park (fun fact – the local people who live near the park get a subsidy to make up for the noise from the park). They’ve managed to squeeze four or five roller coasters onto a small plot of land, and even have a spinning ride floating on a barge.

We headed out into the not-really-open water as we started navigating the islands. There are 30,000 islands in the archipelago (counting even the tiny ones), but only 150 are inhabited year-round. It takes a long time to get to open water from Stockholm.

On the whole, the landscape reminded me strongly of the Maine coast. It’s rocky and forested in many places, but it still has differences. Here there are more mini-islands than Maine has, and a surprising number of them have a few houses built on them. The houses seem to be painted in cheerful colors, and, not surprisingly, many of them are really nice. There are also fewer pine trees here than along the Maine coast – still tons of trees, but fewer of them are pines.

And so we had a pleasant and scenic, if increasingly chilly, ride out to Sandhamn. The temperature dropped as we kept going east, and with the wind on the boat, it was cool (probably in the fifties).

Sandhamn is a very cute village. There are only about 450 homes in the village, and only about 50 of those have people who stay the winter. There are no cars and only one paved street (a hill is paved, probably to prevent erosion). People here do use four-wheelers and electric carts to move people and good in, but no cars. Most of the “roads” are really just large paths between houses. The houses are brightly painted, and there are lilacs everywhere, and they’re still in bloom. I’ve never seen anywhere with so many lilacs, which I love, since it’s my favorite flower.

We got off the boat and dumped our luggage at the hotel (our room wasn’t ready at 12:30), and we walked across the village to the local bakery, which is still only open Friday to Sunday; it opens every day once the school holidays start on June 15th. We ate lunch there, sitting outside, and then we wandered around the village. We found a large outcropping of rock overlooking the sea that used to have a windmill on it. We found the local beach and then the chapel on the island, which is on a rise of land with good sea views. We stopped to smell lilacs all over town, and took back lanes as we wanted until we ended back on the waterfront.

It was 2:30, so we checked into our room, and then went back out on the island. Across the island, about a mile away, is the other small settlement here. Back in the mid-twentieth century, a developer built a bunch of small cabins (about 170 square feet) so that middle-class people could have a summer cabin on the beach. We walked out to it. A few of the small cabins remain, but most of the places with sea views are no longer 170 square feet. We were the only ones on the beach – it’s on the Baltic Sea side of the island, and the breeze was quite strong, making for a cool day to be swimming, We sat and watched the sea for awhile, and then walked back to Sandhamn, going back a different way that was longer but wound more around houses. They were pretty nice with lots of large windows.

That got us back to town and our hotel. We swung by a local bar to order bar food, and then decided to call it an early night. We’ve been touring pretty hard for a week, so an early night is quite welcome. This is certainly a great place to slow down.

Today was my one and only day to plan things in Stockholm (by my own choice, since I wanted my additional time spent elsewhere). So I was a little sad that the forecast called for rain showers and full-on rain in the afternoon, but the morning was beautiful. I wanted to take full advantage of that.

Usually, I’m a last-minute-planning kind of tourist. I like to get in the city and see what’s around before I start planning too many things. As I did my research this time, I found a bunch of things I wanted to do, so I actually reserved ahead. For four different things. Busy day today.

We walked down to the old-town island of Gamla Stan, past the in-town palace and along the harbor. We got to a small open square, where we met up with Max, a Ukrainian who has been living here for two years, and he was our street-legal golf cart  driver today, to take us on a two-hour tour of Stockholm.

It was a fun tour. Max took us all over the areas around Gamla Stan, crossing something like eight of the fourteen islands that Stockholm is built on. Max showed us (not exhaustively) –
– Several high points to see the city from, including a clifftop park.
– How you can see one neighborhood where it straddled the before and after of dynamite; one side was built on visible rocks, and on the other side, the rock had been blasted out of the way.
– A very pretty building that was actually an elevator built to bring supplies up to a wealthy noble’s house on the cliff.
– An easy-to-miss grouping of Picasso sculptures.
– A statue of an actress that is heated to body temperature, since the actress had complained that statues were cold. People warm their hands on the statue during the winter.
– Where the ship the Vasa was built and roughly where it sank.
– He also told us that between private and public museums, Stockholm has over 350 museums.

The tour lasted two hours, and the weather was still very fine, so I decided to press my luck to go to a fairly far-flung attraction that I had flexible tickets for. It was 11:00, and we had 1:00 tickets for another sight, so I knew that it was going to be tight, but the weather was good, so off we went.

We took the subway south about four miles, emerging in a random tower-housing area. Meredith was a bit confused, and I was really trusting my phone-given directions. It didn’t look promising. But then a large golf-ball structure came into view, and we were good. We were here to do the SkyView at Avicii Arena. The arena is used for large events, like concerts, but about fifteen years ago, glass compartments were added on the outside of the sphere, and you can ride it up to the top of the arena at 280 feet for views of the greater Stockholm area.

We had a few-minute wait, which made me think I was going to miss my 1:00 entry at the next sight, but we were here. We watched a movie on how extreme construction workers used helicopters to build the ride, and then we got to get on the gondola. The ride up follows the curve of the surface of the arena, and goes at a moderate pace. We sat at the top for several minutes, which gave us a chance to look around some. I had a couple of height-related moments of fear, but generally, if I was sitting and looking out, I was okay.

We got off the SkyView about 12:15 or so, and I began to think we had a chance. We walked purposefully back to the subway, took it to the central train station (north of Gamla Stan), and walked over to city hall, which is on the water facing Gamla Stan. We made it with about fifteen minutes to spare for our 1:00 entry time to climb the 365-step tower to the viewing platform on top.

There is an elevator that will take visitors half of the way. Mer asked me if I was going to take it. She’s so droll! My patient wife joined me on the climb up. I loved it. The interior of the tower is almost all red brick, and at the half-way point is an open area for the interior dome for city hall. The space has been made into a small museum of busts of various people, including some of ordinary workers who helped build city hall. From there, the passageway wound around the tower, going up on slightly sloping ramps that had some steps along the way. The overhead brickwork was artistically done.

We made it to the top in about fifteen minutes, and the views in all directions were great. The view down to and over Gamla Stan was especially magnificent. And while I’m terrified of heights, the wise folks of Stockholm put up a cage all around the platform, even over the top. That somehow made me feel better, and I was able to stay up on top the full allowed fifteen minutes, albeit with my sitting as far back as I could manage. Usually, I leave Meredith on towers like this one, so she was happy I was able to be companionable.

That wrapped up my pre-arranged plans, except for a 7:00 supper reservation. We grabbed a light snack in the city hall cafe, and I checked the weather. It did seem as if rain was moving in very soon, so I decided to go to my backup indoor plan, to go see the Vasa Museum.

The Vasa Museum is dedicated to a ship that sank in 1628 on the day it launched. I thought the museum would show the ship and tell a little about it and we’d be there an hour or so. It turns out that the museum is one of the best museums I’ve been in anywhere. When you walk in, you are confronted with the entire Vasa sitting in front of you. It was a ship built to impress enemies of Sweden, and it still impressed me and Mer.

The museum has a film on how the Vasa sank, was found, was floated again, and was preserved. Then there are four viewing floors at different levels that highlight parts of the ship. One floor has a recreation of one of the two gun decks of the ship so you could feel how cramped the space was, and this was where the regular sailors and soldiers slept, as well.

The quick story – the king of Sweden wanted to get control of the Baltic Sea from Poland, and so ordered a huge ship to be built to go fight the Poles. He insisted that the Vasa have two gun levels, which the ship builder had never done before. The final product put the lower gun level only three feet above the waterline, and the second-level guns were higher up than normal, making the Vasa top-heavy. The Vasa was also a fairly narrow ship. Being top-heavy and narrow is bad for a ship. When the Vasa was launched (under pressure from the king), it got broadsided by a breeze and tilted over enough for the lower gun ports to start to take on water, which made the ship list more. It eventually sank after only twenty minutes of sailing, killing thirty to forty people who couldn’t get off.

The navy tried to raise the ship out of the ninety feet of water it sank in, but didn’t succeed, so the Vasa sat on the bottom of the harbor for over three hundred years, until the late 1950s, when a man who dreamed of finding the ship did actually find it, using a weighted, pointed metal cone to bring up samples from the sea floor. When he found a sample of oak (not native to Sweden), he guessed correctly that he had found the ship.

It took years to raise the ship and treat the wood so that it wouldn’t dry out and split. The Vasa was wharfed and opened to the public in 1961, and was moved to the new dedicated building in 1990, which was renovated in 2013.

Meredith and I spent almost three hours at the museum, admiring the ship from multiple angles and heights. We managed to catch an English-language tour, which showed some of the decorative touches on the ship and described the sinking in more detail. The ship cost about two percent of the national budget, so it was a severe loss.

The builders learned from the mistake – the sister ship was torn apart and made three feet wider than the Vasa had been. The other ship sailed for over thirty years. What a difference a few feet can make!

That wrapped up the museum, so we went back to Gamla Stan, where we wandered around for half an hour to see the sights, and especially the views across the bay to the city hall. We then went to our restaurant for the evening, Aifur.

Aifur is a restaurant that serves food that is the best guess of what Vikings ate, and it’s Viking-themed. You are publicly announced to applause and hearty shouts from the other diners, and you are seated at a long common table. There is live music (a lute-like instrument and a bagpipe for our evening), and there is an extensive list of meads you can buy. I got a Sprite, but it was served in an earthenware glass. The place was joyfully loud and chaotic, and we had a good time. The food was good, and the experience was even better.

That finally wrapped up my day in Stockholm and ends our touring of the city for this trip. The rain was good enough to be heaviest while we were in the museum, and the slight drizzle we walked home in was warded off by our just wearing hats. Stockholm has been good to us, and we’re looking forward to the next part of our trip.

Students are convinced that teachers spend all summer thinking about school and maybe even living at school and counting the days down until school starts. That’s obvious nonsense, as this vacation gives testimony to. For instance, today we went to Uppsala, home of Sweden’s oldest, um, school (university).

Meredith has been good to me this front end of the vacation by letting me be car-free. We took a boat two days ago, a train yesterday, and another train today to get to places outside of Stockholm. It probably would have been more efficient and more or less a wash on cost if we’d had a car, but then I’d have to keep dealing with Stockholm traffic and parking. I’m grateful for the peaceful transportation options we’ve been using.

We arrived at Uppsala right around 10:00 and set off walking into the town from the train station. We very quickly hit a pedestrian-only street that led to a large main square area. The town was a bit larger than I had anticipated, but the walk through the center of town was pleasant. We kept going, and suddenly a huge church hove into view. I said, “Whoa!” and Mer replied, “That ‘whoa!” is what we’re here to see.”

We were looking at the towering red-brick Uppsala Cathedral, tallest church in the Nordic countries, which was started a little before 1300. It has two front spires that are each over thirty feet tall, reaching over 380 feet in the sky. The spire over the transept of the church isn’t much smaller, which makes it a “whoa!” sight to see.

Happily, the cathedral is free to enter, even on a weekday. It does cost a fee to go see the treasury, which we did later, but I have no issue with that if it helps with the maintenance of the church. The interior is decorated, especially the pulpit, which is wildly ornate with Biblical stories and various cherubs about.

There are side chapels along both walls. One has the tomb of an early Swedish queen, and one has the tomb of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. There was a chapel used as a children’s teaching area, and one was set up as a comfortable office for drop-by counseling. My favorite was an installation of a simple representation of Jesus surrounded by several children and some parents. It was clearly from the “Bring the little children to me and hinder them not” passage of the Bible. It was cheerful and colorful and well done. And there was a barricade across the entrance. These things make me smile.

One chapel was set up to display a video from a video artist. The church had bought the piece, and I had never thought about video art being sold before. It was a moving video of two women, out of focus and filmed in black and white, crossing through a sheet of water. Once through the water, they were in color and in sharp focus. They were both joyful and then started looking sad, and then went back through the water to the grey. Mer and I thought it represented moments of being very close to God but then having to come back to being in this world every day to keep doing God’s work. As Paul said, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” – serving Jesus here is important, but being with Jesus after death is actually a gain (is better). It was a thoughtful exhibit, and I love that churches are still buying art.

Toward the back of the church was a tomb of one of the kings of Sweden, buried along with his two wives (the first one died relatively young). Outside the tomb was a representation of a normal-looking woman who looked a bit worn and sad. This was a work by an artist who wanted to show Mary looking in on a chapel after seeing her son die. Again, a very effective work. No crown of heaven or being borne on angels to heaven – just a woman who was in pain.

Having wrapped up seeing the church, we paid to see the treasury, which was in one of the spire towers, seven floors up, and then coming down to the six and then fifth floor. We took the elevator up, and we were given flashlights so we could see the artifacts more closely in the dim light.

Most of the objects were fabric – old church vestments, mostly. But they were incredibly elaborate and decorated with gold and silver thread and sometimes pearls. It had to have held poor illiterate peasants in awe to see a bishop come out in these clothes. Almost all had some story from the Bible woven in to them, so they could be used to remind people of the important messages of the Bible.

There were also some standard church objects – crosses, chalices (including the most heavily decorated chalice I’ve ever seen), swords and crowns from royal tombs, and so on.

After the church, we crossed the street to go look at the university museum, the Gustavianum. But we got distracted at looking at five rune stones in the park in front. And then we discovered there was an English-language tour in forty-five minutes at 1:00, so we beat a hasty retreat back to the cathedral cafeteria for lunch.

After lunch, we still had twenty minutes before the tour began, so we looked in on the museum’s pre-Viking exhibit on the Vendel culture that lasted a couple of hundred years before the Vikings (from about 500 to 800). The most important objects were for us four Vendel helmets recovered from graves. Vikings didn’t bury helmets, so they are quite rare, with only five known. We saw four today, and the fifth is in the British Museum, and we’ve seen it too, so we collected them all. The British Museum one is pictured in Meredith’s British literature book for her classes for when she teaches Beowulf. Now we’ve seen them all.

There were only four of us on the tour – us and a British couple who now live in New Zealand. That was a fun-sized group. We were taken around by Sara, who is studying Museum Studies at the university. She took us to a case of banned hazing tools from the 1600s and told us about the history of the school (and how it was founded two years before the rival Danes’ school in Copenhagen). From there, she took us up a floor to the art wings.

The Gustavianum has the second-largest art collection in Sweden, after only the national museum. They can only have about five percent on display at any time. One piece that is always on display is a huge curiosity cabinet that had been used to store thousands of items from nature and cultures around the world. It’s about ten feet high and weighs almost two thousand pounds. Most of the items that had been in it are on display, except for some of the natural specimens that eighteenth-century scientists lost track of. Oooops.

From there, we went to the operating theater. This was a reconstruction (in place) of a 1600s lecture hall dedicated to dissection of human corpses to teach medicine. Mostly. It seems some tickets were also sold to the public to help defray costs. Because cutting up human bodies was controversial, the university and church agreed that they could only dissect criminals, suicides, and bastards. The university did give the body a proper burial on university grounds when they were finished with each dissection.

After our tour, we went back and finished all the rooms we had skipped. The university has Celsius’ first thermometer, which oddly had zero degrees as the temperature of boiling water and one hundred degrees as the temperature of freezing water. I’m not sure of the reasoning there, but it got fixed at some point. There were many other scientific instruments in that wing, including early telescopes and microscopes, and various early instruments to study electricity. I quite liked it.

We finished up with the two art wings. A Swedish playwright that Meredith knows of also turned out to be a pretty decent painter, and Carl III was a very good painter of landscapes himself. The museum had one small Rodin work, and an eclectic collection of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits.

From the museum, after a false start on finding where to buy tickets, we got on the bus out to the very edge of town, to go to Gamla Uppsala. We got out, and I saw a large hill, and Mer said that that was where we were going. The large hill was joined by two other hills and several smaller ones as we came up to them. These were all ancient burial mounds, from around 600. With enough money and influence, local leaders could have seventy or more serfs pile up a hill over the gravesite. Since these were visible from all over the area, it was a display of wealth and power. These hills also became the site for the local sort-of parliament (“Thing”) to gather once a year to make decisions and give out justice, during festivals. We walked around all the hills and read all of the info placards.

The placards kept cracking us up. They would make unsubstantiated claims, and then put a question mark at the end to over their bases – “Could it be this flat area was used for horse races?” and so on. It amused us.

And so we headed back into Uppsala, then to the train station, and back to Stockholm, where we got a late supper around 8:00. We learned a bunch of things to day. The students wouldn’t be shocked.