Stockholm. Bench outside Medieval Museum. 11.50 14/12/2016
It feel good to sit. Green slats of wood underneath me. My journal resting on a crossed leg wearing Black Levi’s 511s. A few other people mill around, also apparently waiting for the 12.00 opening of the free Medieval Museum. Ten minutes to rest. Hunger pangs and dogs bark–I’ve spent the last 1 ½ hours touring the Castle Palace. Pretty decent, but not worth $20. The interior was very Roman. I’ve been snapping away with Falco’s camera. We rode the subway together from his place. He got off at T-Centralen, or “T Central” as you would say in English. I rode it another stop to Gamla Stan AKA Old Town.
Breakfast was beautiful, humble, and almost romantic. Matt made some scones from scratch, and him, Sofia and I sat around the Smörgåsbord of cheese, cucumber, vegan butter, and marmalade. The cheese slicer brought back memories of Denmark and my German hall-mate Gerhard. He loved cheese, and he had a slicer just like this, albeit blue and plastic–not metal.
We cut our scones in half, and made open-faced sandwiches–Smörrebröd–to suit our own tastes. I settled on butter, cheese, and cucumber slices with a little Himalayan salt on top. I was shocked you could use the cheese slicer on the cucumber for perfect paper thin slices. The cucumber really makes it for me. How quintessentially Scandinavian.
It’s 12.00 and now a marching band is marching down the street just over the water. How bizarre. It makes this scene so much more memorable–and beautiful…Ah here they come.
Medieval museum was kind of cool. It’s actually excavations made underneath the courtyard of the parliament building and then reconstructed as some sort of representation of old town life. It had a somewhat creepy element to it–decent.
Just had my first go at authentic Swedish meatballs, complete with gravy, lingonberries, mashed potatoes, and a sliced pickle. The meatball on its own is delicious, a nice conservative flavor. The gravy adds a little more flavor to it. A side plate featuring little bowls of pickle, lingonberry, and mashed potatoes allows you to add extra flavor as desired so that each bite tastes a little bit different. Ultimately, you get to customize the dish to your liking–not unlike Vietnamese pho eaten the traditional way. A+++++++++ would eat again. I especially loved the lingonberries.
The Vasa was a giant Swedish warship that sunk only 1500 meters out from its maiden voyage. The Swedish dug it up and placed that behemoth on display in its own museum. I underestimated it–It’s just a big ship after all. Wrong, there’s like six different levels with a ton of exhibits all around the ship. It took me at least an hour to get through it all. My favorite part was in the basement they had a little thermal camera setup to illustrate your body heat. The ship was cool and all, but I’ve never seen my body on a thermal camera.
The ship being in one piece and on display is amazing in itself. It’s a giant 300 something year old wood ship that they were able to get up to the surface and put in a museum. In a somewhat ironic moment it seems that only the rampant pollution of the Stockholm Harbor saved the ship. The effluent and sewage dumped in the harbor created an anoxic environment thus not allowing ship eating organisms to survive.
Now the harbor looks pretty damn nice.
Four museums in and now I’m falling asleep. I barely make it home awake on the T-bana. I laid down to nap but Matt made me some coffee, saving me from falling into a poor sleep rhythm.
For dinner we decided to get pizza. Feeling adventures, I ordered something really popular in Sweden–a curry pizza. There’s not really much tomato sauce, just curry with banana slices, peanuts, and some shredded chicken. It sounded so crazy it has to be good right? Not so. Also, did you know that pizza doesn’t come ‘pre-cut’ in Sweden? You cut out a custom slice with a pair of scissors.
I’d still order it again 
