[Photos taken 29 – 30 March 2024, posted online 18 August 2024. Last night was decidedly chilly, fall is approaching.]
Black Friday is a public holiday in Sweden so everybody was available for a trip into Stockholm. We found a fun museum to visit, and once that was done, I dragged the kids and my brother to the Vasa museum, just because it’s cool.
The following day, we cleared out of our AirBnb, drove to the airport, and flew back to Iceland.
Friday 29 March 2024
Temporary Stockholm-ers, freshly out of the train-station.
I started the day by going to the mall to charge the car with electricity, and myself with coffee. In Sweden you need to return fully electric rental cars with 80% charge on it. It required a tiny-bit of planning in advance, but I still prefer that to driving smelly, vibrating, noisy, sluggish gas-cars.
At 10:40 we set out walking to the train-station, to take the train into central Stockholm.
The houses along the way kept fascinating me with their Swedish-ness.
Walking past a pre-school and school, right next to the train tracks.
About to enter the tunnel under the rails leading to the platform.
Another Swedish house specimen.
We met the others on the train-platform, they’d arrived from the other direction.
Chilling on a train for 20-30 minutes.
First cousins by the window.
Impressive escalator.
Impressive ceiling!
Photographing a photographer photographing a church tower.
I was glad I’d looked up the details of how to find the Paradox museum, it was hidden in a basement, like so many other things in Sweden!
The entry to the museum, well hidden in a basement, that leads to a subway train or something. We’d already booked tickets, at a certain time.
Finnur on a plate.
It’s basically a long maze, with photo-opportunities galore. They stagger people/groups on entry, so it wasn’t too crowded.
Walking through this tunnel without losing your balance is remarkably tricky.
The animated gif version (wait for it to load).
The magic of colored light.
A sculpture that is NO or YES depending on your point of view.
Acrobatic Finnur.
Funny how gravity ignores hair…
Kaleidoscope-Finnur.
A lightshow with mirrors and timed LEDs.
Floating?
Looking into infinty-by-mirrors.
Infinity-by-mirrors.
They had a bunch of mirrors that moved.
Classic.
Never gets old! Grr!
A Bjarki-Finnur face-mash-up.
No falling!
Oh….
The museum end! (I kid, of course there was a gift shop after this.)
Rejoining civilization.
We emerged close to this square, and went hunting for lunch.
There were so many of us, with different needs, that we decided to split up into two groups.
Everyone feeling better after getting some food.
Walking along a big shopping street.
Bjarki Freys’ hotel’?
Not everyone wanted to go visit the Vasa museum, so we split up again, some took the train back north, the rest of us took a tram towards the Vasa ship museum.
The two rows of cannon-holes, some of which were the cause of it taking on seawater and sinking shortly after launch.
The ship is being continually maintained.
A note on the new bolts.
Back in the day, this was super-colorful.
At the back.
The pigments they’ve found.
The true colors of all the various sculptures.
Imagine just how garish this looked back when it was fresh?!
Baby’s got back!
The story of the fateful launch-day, when the ship went down, and hundreds of people drowned.
Also included: how the ship was raised.
The work started for real when diving equipment looked like this. Before then, relatively shortly after the ship went down in 1628, they’d gone down in diving bells to hook the cannons and haul them up.
A fully colored replica.
Those lion-heads were scary above the cannons.
Cannons. Most of them were retrieved shortly after it sank, using diving bells, but a few remained in the wreck.
This was new: a cross section of the ship, with people for scale.
All these flourishes were a large part of the total cost.
The upper deck needed the most reconstruction, it was mostly gone when the ship was hauled up.
The colored beakhead-figure.
Everything signified something.
Skeletons were also retrieved.
A small break.
I’d agreed to ice-cream afterwards, and we lucked out in finding a shop 15 minutes before it closed, as the shop that was supposedly outside the museum (according to maps) was nowhere to be found!
