Out into the wilds of Sweden

Greetings from a gray and drizzly day in Sweden. It reminds me of home, in a good way.

In the morning, we will leave Stockholm, a safe and fairly friendly city where most people speak English very well (I hate to be an Ugly American, but it's so nice not to have to resort to hand signs, gestures, drawing pictures, and using the few words of whatever language I know to get directions or order food--is that so wrong?--but in my defense, I always try to ask if someone speaks in English in their own language, or at least say excuse me in their language before I launch into English). We are leaving for...well, I am not exactly sure where.

We are going tomorrow morning to pick up our rental car from the Stockholm airport, the first time we will have our own transportation on this trip. This is both good and bad: potentially less walking with our luggage, especially for my mother, and we are not at the mercy of bus times or unscrupulous taxi drivers. But it also means we have to navigate streets, learn parking (and no parking) signs, and find our own way in the world. We also have to pay for our own gas, which I understand is perhaps the equivalent of $15 a gallon. Feel better about paying $4.50 at home now?

Today we saw the Vasa, a ship that sank 380 years ago on this very day in Stockholm Harbor: August 10, 1628. It was a coincidence that this was the anniversary of the sinking, and no one at the museum even mentioned it, but my mother noticed the date of the sinking. It was even a Sunday. I told her that if this were a young adult book, we would have been transported back to Stockholm in 1628. She said not to even think that! (By the way, if you're reading this and steal my idea, I will find out and demand royalties.)

The ship was pretty interesting. It is HUGE and impressive-looking, made of black oak and massive ropes. Sadly, it only sailed for 20 minutes on its maiden voyage before it tipped to one side, righted itself, and then sank right in the middle of the harbor. The king had given everyone the day off to watch his prize vessel sail, so there were hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses.

A team of divers was able to raise it from the harbor in 1961, but it spent over 300 years buried in silt below the water. Consequently, it was very well-preserved. They even recovered many human remains, some of which were used to reconstruct what several of the passengers and crew may have looked like. It was eerie to see the model heads in the museum; it really brought the events to life, so to speak.

Tonight we had Mongolian barbecue for dinner. Yes, you read that right. We went to a restaurant near our hotel, and recommended by our concierge, which had a genuine Chinese buffet and Mongolian barbecue (where you fill a bowl with raw meats and vegetables and noodles, and a chef cooks it for you on an iron stove). It was delicious. We all inhaled our vegetables, and then we had fruit and ice cream for dessert. It is the first buffet I have been to in Europe, except for the spread at our hotel breakfast every morning. That is good, too. I had cornflakes this morning, with dried apricots and prunes and hazelnuts; and Swedish meatballs, and grapes, and sweet bread with cardamom, and orange juice, and a cookie. Yesterday I had all that, and some cheese.

We are not exactly starving in Sweden.

This is our last night in the land of free hotel internet, so I may not write again for a few days. I don't really know what to expect when we are away from the city. Tomorrow we will tour the home of Carl Larssen, a famous Swedish artist and designer (who once painted a picture of his daughter that looks exactly like I did when I was ten, braids and all). And then we are going to a farm near where my father's side of the family lived, in the hope of doing some ancestral research and perhaps locating some long-lost cousins.

Write to me!