Yesterday morning, having the hindsight of not writing my morning post until after completing my day’s activities, I told you that my left foot, which has been hurting me to varying degrees over the preceding few days, wasn’t hurting me as much. I also said that it got progressively better over the day and wasn’t too bad at the end of it.
In that post, I expressed optimism that my foot was on the way to full recovery. I’m not normally an optimistic guy. On the rare occasions when I am, life often roars up and shows me why that is a mistake.
When I woke up this morning, my left foot hurt badly again when I walked on it. I thought about walking on my hands, but I’m not physically capable of that, or of a great many things. Besides, it would have been embarrassing to walk through Stockholm on my hands. Then again, it might have garnered significant busker tips to help cover the cost of this trip.
Instead, I treated myself to a taxi to my first destination, the Vasa Museum. Apple Maps told me that it should take less than 25 minutes to walk there. Apple Maps didn’t know how slowly I was walking today. And while 25 minutes is short enough that, under normal conditions, I wouldn’t consider any other form of transportation than walking, these weren’t normal conditions.
My second destination of the morning, the Nordic Museum, is across the street from the Vasa Museum, so a taxi wasn’t necessary for that.
Vasa Museum
The Vasa Museum—in Stockholm, Sweden— because it couldn’t possibly be anywhere else—is an extraordinary museum that houses a single, colossal artifact, as well as various sub-artifacts and models related to it and its recovery. The museum also provides extensive textual and visual documentation about the artifact and its history.
After paying your admission, upon walking into the museum proper, the massive Vasa looms before you. If you don’t already know, the Vasa is an old naval vessel. Launched in 1627, it was intended to be the largest and most powerful of Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus’s fleet.
The ship was named after Gustav Eriksson Vasa, also known as King Gustav I. During the War of Liberation to free Sweden from Denmark, Vasa declared himself Protector of the Realm. He became King of Sweden in 1523 and remained so until he died in 1560.
Vasa was considered to be a hero for his role in liberating Sweden. Hence, the honour of naming this mighty warship after him.
On its maiden voyage, in 1628, in Stockholm Harbour, still within sight of the shipyard where it was built, it listed in a wind and sank quickly. That maiden voyage included the crew and 40 guests, including women and children. About 30 people drowned in the sinking.
Back then, the launch of the Vasa, the biggest, most powerful ship in the king’s fleet, was a really big deal. Most of Stockholm’s then 10,000 residents came out to watch the maiden voyage in the harbour. They all witnessed it sink.
After the Vasa went down, the king ordered a royal enquiry into why it sank. At first, some people thought that the cannon carriages weren’t properly secured, and they rolled in the first wind, shifting their weight to one side rather than being balanced around the ship.
However, at the enquiry, an eyewitness testified that he’d been down to check and all of the cannons had indeed been secured.
There were several theories. King Gustav ordered that the ship have two rows of cannons and the necessary cannon portholes, one row above the other. It has been suggested that the lower row was too close to the waterline, and the Vasa took on water there when it listed.
The enquiry lasted two weeks and never came to a conclusion. It’s been rumoured that the king ordered an end to the enquiry because he shared responsibility for the sinking. He was the one who ordered the double row of cannons. And he went to the shipyard regularly to supervise the construction.
For more than three centuries, no one could find where the Vasa sank. It’s possible that while King Gustav was alive, nobody looked for the Vasa because nobody wanted to find it. The Vasa’s sinking was a major embarrassment.
It was only in 1956 that the Vasa was finally located. After considerable preparatory work, it was raised in 1961 and then towed into a dry dock. Then the restoration work began.
When the Vasa was brought to the surface and was seen for the first time since its maiden voyage, they found that the witness who testified about the cannon carriages was telling the truth. All of them were in place.
Fortunately, the Vasa was well preserved. The water in Stockholm harbour is quite cold. And Stockholm used to dump raw sewage into the harbour. Normally, one would think that’s a bad thing. But the Vasa benefited from it.
When the waste rots, it creates hydrogen sulphide, which consumes the oxygen in the water. Oxygen is responsible for considerable degradation of wood. So, with little oxygen, the wood was preserved and the fungi and microorganisms that consume wood can’t survive without oxygen. Plus, the hydrogen sulphide penetrated the Vasa’s wood, helping to protect it directly.
After towing the Vasa into dry dock and pumping it out, they first continuously sprayed water on it to keep the wood from drying out. After that, they sprayed polyethylene glycol on the Vasa for 17 years to replace the water in the cells of the wood, thereby preventing it from shrinking and cracking.
Next, the Vasa dried out for nine years, and the polyethylene glycol was heated into the wood with hot-air guns.
The Vasa wasn’t in one piece when it was raised. The people who restored it threaded wires through the nail holes in unattached pieces of wood. They then used that to match it up with nail holes on other pieces and in the portions of the ship that were intact to find where the pieces fit.
Today, 95 percent of the Vasa on display in the Vasa museum is from the original.
I don’t know when in the process they did this, but at some point they built a museum around the dry dock where the work was done on the Vasa, hence, the Vasa Museum.
Conservators are still working to protect the ship. Iron nails are slowly being replaced with stainless steel nails because they don’t rust, but iron nails do. They don’t know how long they’ll be able to preserve the Vasa, but they don’t think it will be forever.
A sign in the museum pointed out that, had it not been for the sinking and the natural preservation in Stockholm harbour, there wouldn’t be a Vasa today sitting in the museum.
A lot of artifacts that were in the Vasa when it sank are now on display in cases scattered around the museum. These include dishes, clothing, equipment, weapons, and more, yes, including some skeletons.
The Vasa was decorated with several colourfully painted wood sculptures on its prow and on the sides close to the bow. Those sculptures are still on the Vasa, but with the paint long gone.
The museum recreated many of the sculptures. They studied the ship’s colour scheme and found paint flecks on much of the wood. They then painted the replicas with the original colours. In areas where they couldn’t determine the original colour, they left it grey. Those replicas are in the exhibit area, and visitors can get up close to them.
Information about the Vasa, its history, and its recovery is conveyed through a film in a theatre that runs in different languages at different times. When the audio is in other languages, there are English subtitles.
Throughout the museum, there are text panels, along with touchscreen video screens where you can call up information, in either Swedish or English.
There are viewing balconies on a few above-ground levels, in addition to the space around the Vasa at ground level, allowing visitors to view the Vasa from different angles. You can also go down a level to see the hull of the ship. However, the public is not allowed to board the Vasa, or even get anywhere within close touching distance.
The Vasa Museum has a café and restaurant. I went into it at one point for a coffee. I didn’t need a coffee, but drinking coffee provided an excuse to sit down and rest my feet. The mainstream media have carried reports over recent years of studies that have found that drinking three to four cups of coffee a day is good for your health. I have no idea if that’s true.
Normally, I drink two double espressos a day. Because of my sore foot, I’ve been drinking more coffee as a reason to sit down. If the reports about the health benefits are true, ironically, my sore foot may be responsible for improving my health over the last few days.
Getting back to the museum rather than its cafe, even if you’re not the least bit into marine military history (I’m not), if you’re in Stockholm, be sure to visit the Vasa Museum. You’ll be overwhelmed by it in a good way.
Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum)
The Nodiska Museet (in English, the Nordic Museum) is in a grand old building that looks quite huge on the outside, but there’s not a lot of room for exhibits on the inside.
I’m not suggesting that the Nordic Museum is a reverse-TARDIS, smaller on the inside than on the outside. Why would anyone want a reverse-TARDIS? It would be so impractical and pointless.
The ground level contains mostly restrooms, lockers, a small ticketing desk, an assembly room, and the museum gift shop. There’s always a gift shop. I think there’s an international law governing that.
The next level up is the Great Hall. It contains the main ticketing desk, a café, a small exhibit area down at one end, and…
Upon entering the Great Hall, even though it’s on the other side of the main ticketing desk, the first thing that catches your eye is a colossal statue of Gustav Vasa, the king whom the ship, the Vasa, was named after.
According to the sign beside the statue, “It was sculpted of oak by Carl Milles and painted purple and gilt by his wife, Olga. It is claimed that part of the sculpture’s forehead comes from an oak planted by Gustav Vasa himself.”
Oh, sure. The sculptor commissioned his wife to paint it. Rank nepotism, I’d say.
Here’s the reason there is significantly less exhibit space than you’d think when observing the building from outside: Above the majority of the Great Hall, there’s an atrium that stretches to the ceiling of the building. The next two levels up, where the bulk of the exhibits are, are just not-overly-wide hallways around that atrium.
The leaflet they hand out at the ticket desk suggests starting on the top floor. Up there, there’s a timeline of exhibits starting from the 1500s and progressing up to the 2000s.
For each century, there’s considerable signage in Swedish and English about that century—the landscape or building-up of towns as appropriate, what life was like, and the political structure of the day.
There are also touchscreens you can use to get more information about the century and descriptions of the artifacts on display in that section. The screens allow the selection of either Swedish or English.
There are also several other video screens that show vignettes of people’s lives at that time. The videos use actors to describe, in the first person, a particular aspect of the person’s life.
I didn’t watch a lot of them, but the vignettes I saw absolutely must be entirely factionalized. The people in them were everyday people, the sort of people who rarely get any more of their personal stories recorded in historical accounts beyond a record of their birth and death, if even that.
Having said that, I suspect there are a great many times when I say such and such must absolutely be such and such when I’m absolutely wrong.
Those videos had Swedish audio with English subtitles. The audio came from speakers, but there were also a couple of headphones hanging on each station. There were buttons for English or Swedish. I tried the headphones once, pressed the button for English, and got a Swedish soundtrack. I tried pressing the Swedish button in case the buttons were reversed. I still got Swedish. I didn’t try the headphones again. I just read the subtitles on the few vignettes I watched.
About half of the middle level of the Nordic Museum was closed, I think for the installation of new exhibits. In the open half, there was an exhibit of tableware from most of the centuries covered in the upper level.
The only other exhibit on this level was one called “British—Ever so Nordic.” Most of the items on display were clothing. There was text explaining that because both Sweden and Britain are trading nations, their styles have influenced each other.
Back in the Great Hall, the only exhibit there, other than the statue of Gustav Vasa, is on the Arctic, not just the Swedish Arctic, but the whole Arctic. It talks about the environment, the ice, and the lives of people who live there. A large focus in this section is on climate change.
And that was the Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum).
My Left Foot
When I left the Nordic Museum after lunch, my left foot wasn’t hurting nearly as badly as it was first thing in the morning. I still had a little limp, and I was not walking as quickly as I did before my left foot took it upon itself to punish me for my sins. (I’m innocent, I tell ya. Innocent! I’ll get you ya dirty treat rat, I mean foot.)
It was better enough that I felt confident I could walk with minimal discomfort to my after-lunch destination (had lunch in the Nordic Museum cafe), which Apple Maps told me I could do in less than 15 minutes if I were able to walk at a normal walking pace.
The point is, my left foot improved as I continued with my activities. I have a hypothesis that I’m not going to test. If I were to not go to sleep, but rather stay awake and just keep walking all night, my left foot will be a left foot of a 30-year-old in no time. I pity the poor 30-year-old.
And then there’s the question of whether my new 30-year-old left foot will get along with my still 72-year-old right foot. It’s a conundrum.
I’ll give you a status update after I’ve walked to and through my next destination.
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