Europe 25: Stockholm, Day 5

Some days you just have one goal and once you’ve hit it the day is yours. This day’s goal was to go to the Viking Museum in Stockholm because hey – Vikings.

We’ve explored Vikings before on previous trips to Sweden. We know it was a job category rather than an ethnic group, we know they didn’t wear horns on their helmets, as a rule – that was a look largely created by 19th-century opera costume designers – and having been to Birka we know what their settlements looked like. But you can never have too much Viking lore, so this was a museum we wanted to see.

Mats, Kim, Lauren, Frieda and I went down to the Huddinge train station to get the 41 into Stockholm. Frieda wasn’t coming to the museum with us – she was traveling a bit further up the line to visit friends – but the trains leave when the trains leave and rides to the station work much the same way, so we all went together. Once on the platform we had some time before the train arrived, and at that point Lauren decided that she wanted to get something to drink from the vending machine. This turned into quite a project since it took us several different payment methods to find one that the machine would accept and when it finally spit out the can it did so with enough force that it created a small hole in it, out of which came a pressurized jet of beverage that couldn’t really be turned off. This made drinking something of a challenge.

We tried not to see that as an omen and in truth the day turned out just fine so it probably wasn’t.

Once in central Stockholm we found our way to the 69 bus that would get us closer to the museum and waited for a few minutes until it arrived.

And when it let us out, we walked. Stockholm has some lovely architecture and water and it was fun to wander around it for a bit. We also walked by the Museum of Nordic Life, which perhaps we will get to on our next visit. It took us a while to figure out how to get to the Viking Museum, which is shielded from the street by a long stone wall that opens periodically onto pathways, but eventually we picked one and found our way over.

The Viking Museum is one of those places that you can cover pretty thoroughly in about an hour and a half. There aren’t a lot of actual artifacts there – mostly the museum is set up as stories and displays designed to teach you about how Vikings lived rather than as a collection of historical objects. You walk in, pay your admission, climb the stairs, and off you go, following the saga of the Vikings (ha! I kill me) on a fairly set trail through the place. Some of the exhibits are interactive – there’s one where you can write things in runes on a blackboard, for example – and some are just there for you to see. It’s worth visiting if you get the chance.

At the end there’s a little tram ride that spins you around on a small track and stops in front of various dioramas and screens, taking you through the story of a specific Viking and his adventures, and you kind of root for him to succeed until you realize that in order for that to happen someone else has to be robbed and/or killed. It’s pretty well done, and you bump along from stop to stop looking forward to finding out how it ends. We had all split up as we walked through the museum so it was just happenstance that I met Lauren in the line for the tram and we went through together.

Mats and Kim went through separately after we’d finished, and we all met in the gift shop, where you can buy pretty much everything to satisfy your Viking needs, much of which is ahistorically but adorably fuzzy. It is a damned shame that here in the US right-wing white supremacists have tried to co-opt the Vikings and claim them as their exclusive property – if you tried to write anything in runes on your school blackboard in the US today you’d immediately find yourself surrounded by a bunch of unsavory new acquaintances mansplaining your politics and complaining about not being able to get a date with a flesh-and-blood human woman – and I refuse to let them make that claim unopposed. The Vikings were their own thing, fascinating in their own right, and they are not owned by losers.

It was getting on lunchtime by this point and while the Viking Museum has its own restaurant attached to the place it looked a little higher end than we were really interested in at the time – seriously, it was a pretty nice establishment – so we headed out the way we came in, passing by the Nordic Museum and back over the bridge, and from there further into the heart of the city. Mats had to get back home at this point as he had a prior commitment, but Lauren, Kim and I continued on in search of lunch.

We ended up at a little hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant called Sushi Maru – the sort of place where you have to go down a flight of stairs to get there, and the whole thing is wide enough for maybe two or three small tables once you get past the counter where you order. Kim and I ended up with a spicy Tam Tam Ramen while Lauren had miso soup, and should you ever pass by the Sushi Maru in Stockholm we can heartily recommend stopping in.

Walking through cities is one of my favorite ways to spend time. Cities have an energy to them that I just don’t find in rural areas – they are full of stories and activities, and even if I am just passing through without actually being part of any of them, it is a lovely thing to know they are there.

Eventually we ended up at the Östermalms Food Hall, a large indoor market full of various stalls selling all kinds of food.

Pretty much anything you see in this place is going to be worth eating, and that’s exactly the sort of place that draws me in these days. At this point in my life I am deaccessioning objects rather than acquiring more, and mostly what I end up spending money on are experiences and food. My prize purchase from the Östermalms Food Hall was some braseola – something I’d been thinking about since Lucca and was eager to share with everyone because it’s hard to describe a flavor until you’ve tried it. We ended up eating it with breakfast over the next few days.

We also hit the pastry stall, where I got a Swedish chocolate ball and Lauren got an Estelle – a tall sort of raspberry cake.

This is also where Kim discovered the disappointment of Swedish espresso. There is nowhere to go but down when it comes to espresso once you have been to Italy and Portugal, and while the Swedes have very good coffee (or so I’ve been told by people who actually like coffee) this does not extend to espresso nor was Kim ever really able to explain to the person who made it why the liquid that she was served was just was so … not espresso.

From there we walked back to through the city the train station, which is itself quite an experience, and took the 41 back to Huddinge.

The evening was fairly low key, as vacation evenings should be now and then. Kim and Sara made dinner, and afterward we all cleaned up and played Phase 10 for a while and this time someone not named Sara actually won so congratulations to Kim! Lauren put her bartending skills to work and created a very tasty drink from things we had on hand, and after a while there was bracelet making and photo trading.

And this is as good a place as any to note that if you plan to do any after-dinner cleanup in Sweden you probably should spend some time studying for it. It takes eleven bins – ELEVEN! – to do your trash and recycling properly in Sweden. There’s a bin for compost. There’s a bin for plastics. There’s a bin for metal and glass. There’s another one for deposit bottles (whether plastic, or glass) and another for paper, and one just for things to burn. On and on with the bins! Speaking as someone who lives in a country where we’re just happy if people don’t toss their garbage into the water supply, I’m very impressed with this level of commitment.