Stockholm

Our first day in Stockholm was an early one, we got up at 7.30 in order to make it to the vassa museum by 8.30-9.00 because I read on the internet (trip advisor – which hasn’t seemed to be wrong so far) that the crowds there are quite large, having some experience from paris about crowds it turned out to be a magnificent decision. As we were leaving  the museum at 11.20 – the line was hundereds of meters long, with busloads of tourists bypassing the line – which means it would have been even longer! We had about a 10 minute line up till inside time. The first time that you walk into the  museum, the huge preserved ship that had been recovered from the bottom of Stockholm harbour in the 1600’s hits you in the face. It is pretty impressive, not to mention the funny side (it sailed for a total of 20 minutes before it sank!) They had worked tirelessly to recover it from the harbour, and the most impressive thing was that the ship had survived! (it was only 30m deep the water it sunk in) But it was worth the price of admission. When we had finished there we went to see the other major tourist attraction – the changing of the guard. It was pretty cool, considering that we just don’t anything like that in austrailia. The pipe band came out, had their little play, and then did some marching, some yelling salutes and then promptly left. The whole changing took about 20-25 minutes I suppose. We ate lunch then headed to the army museum which was cool. They had a list of all the wars/conflicts that have been recorded in history. I will put the photo in – but the writing was so small, and there was 2 boards full of them. Stupid humans… They had there a lot of history about Swedish war times from the 1300’s all the way through until the cold war, and then a small mock exhibit of the American rifle code. The most interesting part that I learnt was the role of Sweden in WW2. Neutral… yeah very funny.. The only neutral part of Sweden was that they didn’t fight. Selfish that they didn’t help both their neighbours (finland and Norway) from being obliterated and also provided Germany with iron ore and other supplies that they needed. They also agreed to transport troops across to the Norwegian border! Ok, they did originally only allow Red Cross personal, but they ended up making massive troop transfers across Swedish land. We left and did a bit of shopping, walked through gamla stan and then headed back to our hostel. We walked around most of the day, and were totally spent by the end of the day.  Bed early.

The next day we went to the teknic museum in Stockholm before heading to our couch surfing hosts (Stefan and Jenny) the museum started with an audio tour about the space race and everything else to do with space travel. Very interesting, suits, replicas of the various types of shuttles, history about who helped in the technology creation and all sorts of other interesting things. The rest of the museum contained exhibits about women inventors, (they invented kelvar) and some exhibits for kids that we had a go on, but skipped through quite quickly.