Thursday, July 24, 2008

Gamla Stan

I took off from my conference in Stockholm early this afternoon so Sandy and I could go play a bit. First stop was Gamla Stan, the old city. Walking in from the subway stop, we found this corner, which was on Sandy's list of things to look at. When the building was built in the 1400s, someone put in a piece of a genuine Viking runestone as part of the foundation. It is a busy corner, so someone in the 1600s planted an old cannon barrel in front of the wall as a sort of bumper to protect the building against the bigger wagons that were starting to use the street.


Then we headed for the palace area of the old city to see the armor museum, which had an interesting sounding special exhibition on war booty that Sweden had "won" or taken from several countries over the centuries, particularly Denmark, Poland and Czechoslovakia. There is a controversy between those countries and Sweden over whether some of it, at least, ought to be returned. 

Here is Sandy at the entrance to the museum, with a huge carved representation of the Swedish arms. 














After the museum and palace, we went into the main cathedral nearby, which you can see below. 

After that, we walked to the end of the island that the old city is on and caught a ferry across the harbor to another island, which has the zoo, an amusement park, and a folk museum or living history village, full of historical houses, farm buildings, churches, etc. right next to the zoo. In fact, it was really fun to wander between the folk village, 
where we paused to watch some Swedish folk dancers, and then the zoo, which has only animals from Sweden, like moose, which they call elk -- you can see one in the next photo -- and reindeer. The most exciting was a couple of wolverines, which I had never seen live before, unless you count comic-book based movies ;), but they moved around too fast to get a good picture of them.


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