Sweden Day 2

I was out cold by 8:30 last night. All this walking all day long and little sleep and water makes for some tired travelers. Anyway after awaking around 7 I got ready and dilly dallied around until my roommates awoke. Once we were all ready we departed and of course it was still raining.

We decided to start with the sky view which is a giant spherical building and on the outside of the building are these spheres that you get in and they go on the building like a ride. Anyway we head to the Tube and after a 15 minute conversation with the ticket lady, while ticking off eveyone in line we finally get the cheapest way which is buy a card and then load it with youth prices. I'm 18 at heart right? 

Get on the tube and get off. It is SO windy! Like walking into a wind tunnel wind. By the way never put on lip gloss if you are going to walk I to a wind tunnel.

We get to the sky view and no one is there. Hint number one that something is up. Then we get inside and the lady says she needs to make a phone call. Hint two. She finally comes to us and says the wind has to be at a level ten to run the ride but it is at a level 18. No sky view today. MAJOR bummer. No sky view and we are now far away from the city and a lot of kroners poorer lol. Okay so we take the tube back to central station and then decide to head to the open air museum. After asking a few people it is apparent we need to take a tram. Tram 7. But how do we get tickets? We jut get on. Of course as soon as it starts moving a guy gets up and starts scanning tickets.

Shoot.

Many options here.

What to do.

I tell Mikele to just hand him the card from the train and okay stupid American and please everyone look cute while doing so. So she hands him the card and we are all expecting a mess but he scans it and moves on. What the heck. Then we all burst out laughing. Don't know how that worked. I decided we best make friends with this guy if we are going to have that work again. So Mikele and I go and talk to him about the museum and ship we want to go to and ask which to go to first. Yada yada. By the way at this point it is pouring rain. Pouring.

And the Skansen. What is it? And outdoor open air museum. They took buildings from many years ago and took them apart and then rebuilt them in this gigantic open air museum so people could come and literally walk through Swedish history. They also have a Sweedish animal exhibit Zoo thing which we know I'm not keen on but hey this place sounded awesomeness. But in the rain?

It's decided that even though it's raining we still need to go. We knew it was going to be bad weather so suck it up. 

We get off the tram and immediately umbrellas and flipping inside out rain is shooting up underneath the flipped umbrella and it's coooold. We thought there should be a great rain discount since it was just us and a school group in the whole place but they didn't agree.

We walk in and then Hannah's umbrella breaks and is a half flap now. She is also in lace toms. Paige doesn't want to be there. Rachel's umbrellas handle falls off and she's left with hand holding up just the top and Mikele and I are laughing so hard we just may pee our pants but it wouldn't show because we are all soaked. 

Paige and Hannah decide to high tail it outta there and get their money back. The rest of us decide this is just going to be an experience to remember. 

So this is how we looked. Half running, half laughing, half crying, holding broken pieces of umbrellas. It was special but we had a great time. Trying to take pictures was funny:

We found this shelter and one would run out and take pictures of the other and we would rotate so no one got any more wet than the others. Thank goodness my mom got me that waterproof case for my birthday.

While here some of the houses were open and we watched glass blowing. Which me armories is all and made us want to take a class.

We ate at a little bakery. Huddled near fires in the house stoves and enjoyed the pure beauty of the park while laughing like crazy because of the mad storm we were in. We found some red traditional Sweedish horses to get pictures on. 

Look how beautiful this. I wish we could have explored more of this place. It is so pretty and in two hours we only saw a tiny part of it.

And the views... Oh how gorgeous of course you can't see it here because the camera can't capture even 1/100th of what we were seeing:( 

At 1:00 we met Paige and Hannah at a cafe across the street and had lunch. While we were in the Skansen they went to this ship museum. So now they went back to old town and we went to the ship museum. It was INCREDIBLE.

We finally were able to take a guides tour and watch a movie which is essential for museums and enhances your experience a million times over.

Here are some notes I took on this tour.

The Vasa Ship Museum

Vasa

700 carvings very detailed and expensive to show the wealth of Sweden 

They built this to replace their flag ship that Poland had captured during the war 

Trying to be very impressive they doubled the size and amount of guns by adding a second gun deck 

Was fourth twin decker ship built and first in Northern Europe and first outside of the Netherlands built in 1625 

Largest and most powerful ship in the world at the time 

Building really fast something they had never built before should have taken 4 years they were given 2 

Took 1,000 oak trees to build it 

55m tall 63 long 

Ship was top heavy because they added the second gun deck 

Invited thousands of people and ambassadors to come and see the launching of this ship 

Huge party. Sets sail. Captain wanted to show fire power of Vasa and show off for the crowds.

Normally you fire one gun when you leave but they decided to fire every single one of the 64 guns 

Had to open all gun ports and by the time they left the harbor they were still busy firing and they lost the shelter the harbor provided and the wind started to come and tilted the ship so much that within 45 minutes the lower gun ports were below water and water started to rush in. They can't close the doors or move the guns so in twenty minutes it was sunk

250 people on board most survived about thirty died 

One captain went down with the ship one didn't 

Aftermath: the king had already won the war so it wasn't such a big deal that it sunk

The shipbuilders were put on trial and then were freed and even used to build more ships 

They built another one correctly that was wider 

98%original 

No other ship preserved  this size in the world 

For 17 years it had to be foraged with a chemical found in lipstick and lotion to replace all the water in the wood 

This ship is gigantic. GIGANTIC. And the museum was neat too! 

They had interactive tables and walls and I found my house. That was fun. Anyway you should go to this museum and make sure you do the tour. It's worth it if you are ever in Sweden. But the museum is cold so don't get the wrong idea that by going inside you will escape the freezing air. You will however escape the rain :)

At this point we got back on the tram and guess who the ticket checker was. The dude! Thank goodness because he didn't check our ticket Infact when he came to is we just talked to him the whole time. 

By this time we were cold, wet, thirsty and tired so we headed back to our hostel for a refresher. Of course then it stopped raining. Bahahahahaha. We headed out on foot to explore more of old town and just look at the beautiful buildings and alley ways. 

I would blog about that $8 cup of white hot chocolate but it wasn't good. Infact you didn't get many food updates from here because I wasn't impressed with anything.

Well it's 6am on Monday and we are headed to the airport. Need to be ready to teach in a few hours. Goodbye Sweden and Norway. It's been real.