Days 139-140: Island Hopping

Stockholm has very interesting geography. I knew there were a few islands involved before getting here, but when you look at a map and wander around you realize just what a jumble it is. The central city spreads over 14 islands, and instead of a central river or bay like most cities it's just a mix of waterways and islands that eventually work their way out to the Baltic Sea. 30% of the city is water, and another 30% parks, so there's a lot of open space.

My hostel is on a big island south of the bulk of the city, connected to it by the small but important island of Gamla Stan. Gamla Stan is the historic "old city", which still looks much like it did 600 years ago in many places. It is also where the Royal Palace is located.

Many of the small islands are covered in parks, museums and restaurants. Yesterday I spent much of the day on the island of Skansen, which is largely parks and woodland, but which also has an amusement park and numerous museums.

The museum I checked out on the island was the very unique Vasa Museum. The story of the Vasa is an eventful but brief one. It was a massive warship that the king of Sweden ordered built in 1626. It was one of the largest and most heavily armed ships of the time, and it was covered with ornate painted carvings to show how rich and powerful Sweden was. Unfortunately the master ship builder who was in charge died before the ship was completed, and the person that took over was used to a wider design. All the canons made the ship top-heavy, and it is suspected there was insufficient ballast to stabilize it, and the result was that the new ship, which was to be the star of the navy in Sweden's war against Poland, tipped over and sank in the harbor 20 minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628.

As is often the case with archaeology - their misfortune led to a wonderful treasure of history. The brackish water of the harbor didn't have enough salt to make a good environment for the worms that eat through the wood of most shipwrecks, so when the ship was found and carefully raised over 300 years later the hull was in extremely good condition. The entire process of retrieving the ship, treating it for preservation and slowly reconstructing it from the pieces found was an elaborate undertaking, and as no ship this size had ever been preserved it was a lot of trial and error. As impressive as the ship itself is, all of the preserved items found on and around the ship are just as important at providing a detailed snapshot of that period.

Old ships isn't exactly a passion of mine, and the fact I've written this much already is an indication of just how impressive the setup of the museum was. It's 6 floors, built around the ship itself. The floors contain a cinema, information on the history surrounding the ship, the items found on board, models, reconstructions, and pretty much anything else you can think of relating to the ship. All together, probably the best organized and most detailed museum I've ever been to.

Today I visited another interesting museum - the Nobel museum. It has history on the founding and information on the modern process for Nobel prizes. It also has lots of information and displays on different prize winners and the work they did to win the award. My favourite part was an exhibition they had where a photographer had past recipients of medicine, physics and chemistry awards come in and unexpectedly got them to draw a big picture relating to their winning work and hold it for their photo. The range of pictures is huge as some would draw elaborate diagrams with complex equations, some would draw a few squiggles, one ignored the science entirely and drew a picture of himself drinking at the afterparty. Additionally, you can listen to audio of each scientiest explaining the drawing and their work, and it becomes clear pretty fast that a lot of the most brilliant scientists are also incredibly characters. Also - one of the cooler museum gift shops you'll run into, at least if you're a bit of a science nerd like me.

My other big destination was Millesgarden - an art gallery and sculpture park created by sculptors Carl and Olga Milles. The park is more than 10km from where my hostel is, but I'm being incredibly cheap in Sweden - partly out of principle since everything is so ridiculously expensive - so I decided to walk there (and back again afterwards). 20km isn't that unusual for me, but that was just one part of the day, and most of it was in a persistent drizzle, so overall not the most pleasant walk.
The park itself was nice, but probably not worth the walk and the cost to get in. The gardens contained sculptures by both Milles (though mostly Carl) and casts of other famous sculptures by other artists. You could also wander around their old home and studio and see more art they had made and collected, and visit an attached gallery showing other artists' work. Carl Milles had a pretty whimsical style, and although his sculptures are pretty interesting, artistically I generally prefer more realistic looking figures.