My brother, his wife, and I went to the Vasa museum. This is a very nice museum in Stockholm with a very big boat. The Swedish king in the sixteen hundreds decided to big the most powerful warship ever and ordered the ship Vasa to be built. When it was finished, it sank on its maiden voyage... which was a big disaster and of course a big embarrassment.
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| A model showing different stages of the salvaging process |
In the 1960:s the ship was found and retrieved. Now it is a museum showing the ship which is in fantastically good condition. The sea outside Stockholm is bad for sea worms, so the tree lasts much longer here than in other places and the ship sank by getting turned over by the wind, not shot to bits in war. In the very old days, the cannons were retrieved (in an amazing feet of salvage!) but the rest of the ship just lay on the bottom for hundreds of years.
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| The face in the middle is me. The wood in the ship is sensitive to heat, so the whole place is checked carefully and kept in proper temperatures. |
Salvaging the ship without breaking it was an amazing feet, and preserving a ship this big is also very difficult. You get to learn about all of these things in the museum, and you get to see recreations of what the people that died in the ship likely looked like (based on the bones found and all kinds of analyses and science), learn about the life of people living and working in ships like this, on the ship building technology of the day, and much more.
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| Sometimes they have tours where some lucky people can go aboard the ship, but that is not very common. |
We also had some food in the museum restaurant. I ordered Swedish meatballs with sauce. A very Swedish dish, and it was very good.
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| Swedish meatballs |
