A Nerdy Weekend with the Vasa

The appeal of just boozing it up Stockhom style is strong but I guess the call of the nerd is stronger. During my first week in Stockhom (which makes this an apparent overdue post), Purple Turban took me to the city for some touristy stuff.

The ride from Jakobsberg to Stockholm Central took 30 minutes and some getting used to. Back in Manila, MRT rides usually mean instant wrestling matches where the person with the meaner elbow moves wins. Here, however, no such behavior occurs, people keep to themselves and treasure personal space and opt to keep their extremities to themselves...at least this is my experience so far.

Normalmstorg has a lot of seemingly uninteresting buildings. However, the one on the left was the Kreditbanken building where armed robbers held bank employees hostage for five days. Later on, the hostages took to their kidnappers and became attached to them. Thus, the Stockholm Syndrome was born.

Kunglinga Operan or the Royal Opera House is right smack in the middle of the city (I think). From here, you walk for about 3o minutes to get to two major museums: the Nordic Museum and the Vasa Museum. Since I was fascinated by the history of the Vasa, I decided to go there first and check out the Ship of Fail.

There you go.

The Vasa was built while Sweden was in the mood for war and conquest. This ship was built to show that Sweden was a rising power in Northern Europe. The ship was to slaughter Catholics but then, the wind blew and the mighty Vasa sank. It was weird how no one noticed that the ship looked a bit strange and no one questioned whether the port was stable enough to support the ship's massive height and weight.

At the back of the Vasa

Parang may mali, no?

Anyway, the ship sank when it was barely 2 kilometers from the shore. Say it with me: FAIL. Then, it lay under the sea for more than three centuries. There were efforts and plans of recovering the ship but the amount of work and planning was too massive. Then, in the 1960s, recovery of the black cherry oak ship started and then, thrity years later, the Vasa Museum opened.