Only one of the most amazing museums we’ve ever seen!

As we meandered around the harbor in Stockholm on our Hop On Hop Off boat, one of the stops included a a sign pointing to something called the Vasa Museum. Now, you have to understand, we have visited approximately 3,413 museums during our time here (give or take), so let’s just say we don’t get all twitterpated at the idea of seeing yet another one.

The Hoppy boat arrives at each stop every hour, so we knew we’d be killing an hour to check it out, but we figured what the heck, let’s peek inside the building and see what’s what and maybe get lunch anyway. Three hours or so later we walked out of that museum, eyes blinking in the sunlight, completely amazed at what we’d just seen. Screw the Hop On schedule, we were hopped up on history at that point, and we completely understood why that is the most visited museum in Sweden.

The story is that In 1628, on the 10th of August, Sweden launched a brand new warship named the Vasa. Bristling with cannon and colorfully adorned, she was one of the most powerful vessels in the world at the time. The townsfolk came out to send her off with much fanfare and popping of Swedish meatballs (or whatever they used)… only to watch it sink after traveling a total of 1,300 meters (1,400 yards).

Bummer.

(In fact, I think that’s when the word “bummer” was first used, except in Swedish it’s pronounced “Hølie-shȅit.”)

So there it sat for 333 years until they finally figured out how to lift it up out of the water. What they recovered was a nearly complete example of a 17th century warship, plus a few flounders.

They also found thousands of artifacts as well as the remains of at least 15 people, who by then were definitely thoroughly drowned. The Vasa is known as the world’s best preserved 17th century ship, although I gotta think it’s gotta be one of the best preserved ancient vessels ever, other than Keith Richards.

Here’s the ship-building harbor where the Vasa was constructed. I am amazed that they had photography back then. What? Oh. Carolyn is telling me that’s a diorama, apparently so-named because lots of people died-a-rama after it sailed three quarters of a mile.

We’ve all seen sailing vessels in the movies (and seeing this made me feel as if they are generally pretty accurate), but it’s really something to see the real thing in real life. The ship is approximately 98% complete and original, and it’s rather huge.

This might give you a little perspective as to its size. It is 69 meters (226 feet) long and 52.5 meters (172 feet) high, which means it traveled only about 19 times its length before it glug-glug-glugged to the bottom of the harbor.

To think of it another way, the ship is 140 cubits long and 106 cubits high, whereas Noah’s Ark was 525 cubits long and essentially the same height, meaning Noah’s Ark would’ve been about 3.75 times longer. Since the Vasa didn’t fare as well as Noah’s Ark seaworthiness-wise (probably smelled about the same though), they would’ve been well-served to have boned up on God’s own measurements before they finished the craft. Anyway, cubits have fallen too far out of fashion, I’m gonna start measuring everything in cubits from now on.

One of the most fascinating parts of the exhibit were the bones of some of the people they found. They note above that this guy was 5’8″ (173 cm or 3.78 cubits) tall, making him one of the tallest on board. Fortunately, basketball hadn’t been invented yet so this didn’t bother them.

What was striking in the descriptions they provided after analyzing every set of bones with a magnifying glass, a microwave oven and some dental floss (you’d be amazed what you can do with that combination), they determined that, in summary, almost no one alive today with normal aches & pains, diseases, hemorrhoids, swollen cubits, or the heartbreak of psoriasis should complain about any of it, because those guys were beat up all to hell, even in their thirties and forties. Most of them had badly-healed broken bones, horrible teeth, signs of various diseases and probably pretty bad breath too. Just be glad you’re alive today, and weren’t back then.

One of the things we’ve learned during our travels is despite everything historical looking black & white, many of the statues and other decorated things were really quite colorful.

For instance, here is a depiction of an ancient statue portrayed as it probably looked like way back when. The results are quite striking, actually, although the guy on the left looks a lot like the spoiled antagonist in a teen comedy, whereas the guy on the right looks he is spending way too much time inside on his iPad.

Anyway, this is how they figure the Vasa looked during its maiden voyage, which lasted just a little bit longer than the first time maidens stop being maidens, if you catch my drift, which the Vasa clearly caught too much of, if you catch my drift about drifts.

(Say “drift” quickly ten times and it starts to sound very weird, if you catch my drift about saying drift.)

Speaking of maidens, what man could keep his hands off of this beautiful maiden, even old-fartished ones? Although she’s clearly enjoying my pinch on her bum. Cheeky!

We walked around the ship multiple times, snapping photos and marveling at what we were seeing. I mean think about it, in the 1600s, the first permanent English colony on American mainland in Jamestown was established, Galileo showed the Copernican system in which the planets circle the sun was correct (and thus was declared a heretic), William Shakespeare dies, no one knew how long a cubit was, and Joe Biden was born.

In other words, it was a long freakin’ time ago. It truly felt like a time machine to be in the presence of that ship. If you ever get to Stockholm, don’t miss it!

Our Swedish adventure wrapped up shortly thereafter. Here are just some final photos. The above was taken simply so I could ask the question: why do most of the school buses in the U.S. still not have seatbelts? As a bit of trivia, they don’t even have school buses in Portugal and many other countries, maybe because they saw the seatbelt-less buses in the US and said, “What the––?”

I love it when cities provide art just for beauty’s sake. The Stockholm subway system has a whole series of beautiful artworks scattered throughout. We almost rode the subways just to see the art, but we ran out of time so I stole this off the internet. You can read up on it and see more here.

Speaking of beautiful art…

And so we packed our apparently too-long legs into the sardine cans they call air transport (apparently designed for Swedish sailors from the 1600s) and sailed off into the sunset, basking in the memories that the fantastic countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden provided.