vampyresheep

Leaving the Town Hall, I looked up directions on my phone to work out where to get a bus/tram over to Djurgarden. Unfortunately, didn't bank on lots of road works, also split level streets, where the road you wanted to be on was actually up there in the air - not really depicted on my tiny map! The sun had now come out too, so I started to get a bit stressed and wound up. We finally ended up retracing our steps back to the Central Station to catch the metro we were quite familiar with by now - eventually ending up back at the previous morning's tram stop and finally on our way to Djurgarden and on to the Vasa!

Beautiful museum building on the island

too early for icecream!

and the first queue of our weekend, a bit more organised than our City Hall experience! Thankfully the queue didn't last long and we were soon inside, albeit slightly distracted by a lady running out screaming that her bag just got stolen ... leading us to be a tad cautious whilst in there.

(and yes, i did think those sails were part of the actual ship before we went in!)

The Vasa is a Swedish warship which set sail in 1628 and sank around 1000 metres from shore, resulting in a perfect time capsule of the era when it was raised in the 1960s. Its pretty immense - the reason why it sank in fact, so much height and not enough ballast to keep it stable - and it was incredible just how much detail could be seen all over the surface, covered in intricate carvings which at the time would have been brightly coloured too.

a replica of how it would have looked at time of construction

it was pretty immense and the museum was designed to see it from various angles as it was too fragile to allow the public to actually board the ship
around the ship was a series of museums about the artefacts recovered, the recovery process and its restoration and conservation - even the act of allowing the public into the same room is effectively causing the structure to slowly decay, exposed to CO2 and moisture in the air.

with added Rob for scale

replica carvings painted how they would have been originally

so much detail everywhere - this was a manhole cover within the ship

not much ballast here

a replica of the deck so that you could feel you were on the ship

and here is that manhole cover (not sure what its actually called!)

some of the recovered bodies, with an exhibition showing reconstructions of their faces and descriptions of their backgrounds/roles on the boat

by the time we'd finished, the sun had well and truly come out and it was a beautiful afternoon.

we had a final stroll along the waterside to get the ferry from Grona Lund for the last time, to head back to Slussen to find somewhere for dinner, ideally al-fresco.

still so much we'd not had time to visit on such a flying visit!
all the cutes:

whimpers bye bye to the (too damn expensive) fairground

final view of the harbour - somewhere around here is where the Vasa sank

headed back to Sodermalm for food, being that odd time of day between lunch and dinner, our options were limited but we found a bar that was doing fish and chips, which was nice enough if eye-wateringly expensive. Remembered one place we'd not been back to yet and that was the icecream cafe at the Fjallgaten viewpoint above our boat, so we headed there for delicious icecream and chill out in the sunshine and beautiful view.

why does this always happen on the last day! Beautiful weather, we just didn't want to leave but sadly had to, so went back down the stairway of hell to our boat to collect luggage and head for the airport. Probably the easiest airport journey ever - even the airport itself was deserted, so we pretty much just strolled through.
We still had a fair bit of kronur left, as we'd been warned, cash is hardly used here and everywhere takes card. Still it was an excuse to stock up on sweets and a cute little wolf came home with us. :-)

final views of the water and a beautiful country