Stockholm was not what I expected. My view was colored by the way it was depicted in the Millennium Trilogy--gritty and 60s looking glass and steel. But it's not like that at all, except in a few places where the city fathers purposely tore down historical buildings and put up exceedingly ugly high rises. The town at large is made up of pastel neoclassical buildings of four to six stories, very similar to St. Petersburg. The oldest section has narrow streets and is very picturesque. There aren't as many churches as in St. Petersburg or Helsinki, but like both of them the whole city is on the water. It's a place I'd like to come back to some day.
The Vasa museum: they built the museum around a ship that was raised from the Stockholm harbor in 1961. The ship sank in 1628, minutes after it was launched. The king at the time, one of many Gustavs, had repeatedly changed the original plans until the ship was not seaworthy. The builders told him it would be unstable at sea, but he wanted a second gun deck and enormous carvings around the top of the ship. A slight breeze caused the ship to tip on its side and water poured in through the gun deck and it sank in minutes, before it could reach the Baltic (where there was some real weather). The king was trying to impress his enemies (the Polish) with a really big and powerful ship. Instead it was a powerful embarrassment.
Here are some pictures:
Street scenes.
The national museum.
A shot of the Vasa (a little blurry because it is kept in very low light).
A model of what the Vasa looked like from the back when it sailed.
Two weary travelers.
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