Cardamom Central

It’s easy to tell we’re in Sweden – everywhere we turn we find cardamom bread and cardamom buns: at the breakfast buffet, at restaurants and cafés. And it’s not the mild cardamom flavor of the cardamom buns in Oslo; they’re serious about it here. It tastes like they use the whole pod, not just the seeds. Even the cinnamon bun we tried had cardamom in it.

We’re also back in the land of hotel doors that automatically lock. None of the hotel doors in Norway locked on their own – you had to use the keycard to lock them when you left or turn a knob when you were inside. Good for not locking yourself out. Not so good if you expect it to lock and walk away without checking, as we did on our first outing in Bergen.

We kicked off our Stockholm visit with another free walking tour. This one was in Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town. Very scenic…and filled with tourists, at least on the main streets.

Some buildings had old fire insurance markers. It wasn’t today’s kind of insurance; being insured meant the fire brigade would prioritize your house, not that you’d be reimbursed for a loss.

So many narrow streets tempting us to take more pictures… And then there are the ever present Swedish tchotchkes: Vikings and horses.

The difference in historical perspective from Norway to Sweden has been interesting. In Norway, they talked about Sweden a lot; they were unhappily ruled by Swedish kings for centuries. They also noted that if they were in a sporting event and Norway came in 48th and Sweden was 49th, it was a win for Norway. In Sweden, they barely mention Norway. Here the historical rivalry was with Denmark and the Swedes were off fighting wars in mainland Europe.

On Thursday we went to Djurgården, a large island, and rented bikes for the day. It was great to use different muscles to get around! Most of the island is a park, but there are museums and other attractions along one side. One is the ABBA museum, which was the only one with a long line outside. (Though we didn’t go in, we (okay, maybe just I) have learned in our time here that ABBA is properly pronounced “ahb-BAH”.)

We saved museums for a drizzly Friday. The first was the Vasa museum, built around a ship that sank in the harbor in 1628 and was raised in the 1960s. A definite cautionary tale for naval architects, it sank pretty much as soon as it left the dock. Wikipedia says that prior to sailing, they tested the stability by having a team of men run from side to side. After the third run, the admiral stopped them because he was afraid the ship would capsize. But did they change things? No. The king was away fighting in Poland and kept sending letters telling them to take his new royal flagship to sea as soon as possible. No one was willing to tell him no. They left the dock and a light breeze came up. The ship heeled over, water came in the lower gunports (which really should have been closed), and down it went. Oops.

Perhaps less money on ornamentation would have helped? Probably not. The principles of naval architecture weren’t very well understood back in the 1600s. Though they did know how to fix it – they built another one with increased beam that successfully went to war.

The second museum was in a prince’s former home, Waldemarsudde. In addition to showing some of the prince’s collection (and paintings he did himself), they had an exhibit of art by Christian Skredsvig. Two of his large scale paintings particularly appealed to me.

And who knew – he was painting waterlilies before Monet.

A few random things from our walking around town:

I’ve read that the Chinese firm BYD was making inroads with electric vehicles in Europe, and we finally saw one among the many EVs here.

Most of the historic-looking ferries have birch logs tied to their bows: