a spring-loaded mattress and three little piggies

Take the Last Train to Stockholm. We had a bit of an adventure getting to the Swedish capital. After our train from Copenhagen was cancelled, we found ourselves in an overcrowded commuter train going over the border to Malmo. Our car was one of those with fold down chairs along the side facing the middle where wheel-assisted passengers and their wheels -- strollers, wheelchairs, bicycles -- are given priority. The car was filled with non-wheel-utilizing people and their luggage, much to the chagrin (or was it joy?) of one bad-ass train conductor who reminded me of Frau Farbissina. This woman had a thick accent and a strong will. At every stop, she hopped off the train, eager to find on the platform people in wheelchairs, families with strollers, cyclists with oversized recumbent bikes. I'm not sure any of these people actually wanted to get on our train, but the good Frau was all-too-happy to direct them to our car and, all the more excited to order people out of their seats, sending them scrambling with the roller bags. I was relieved to be at the other end of the car with our ridiculously large bags, out of the line of fire.

One other notable item about train travel to Stockholm is that nearly all trains from the south stop at Stockholm South, a station outside the city center, and not directly connected to most of the city. One can then take a separate train to the central train station, at least on days when that line is open, which did not include Wednesday. It is odd that someone would have designed the train service in this way. Perhaps it reflects that most people get to Stockholm by some means other than train. I'm still unsure.

Stockholm is Easy on the Eyes. Stockholm is stunning. It sits on fourteen separate islands and separates a large lake and the Baltic Sea. It dates back to the 13th Century, and is now home to 2.4 million people. It feels much bigger than Copenhagen, but our hotel is centrally located so we have been able to see a good part of the city by foot.

What Do You Mean We Can Flip These Things? We are staying at the Sheraton Stockholm, which is on the water between the central station and the historic Gamla stan. This is the only time in our seven-week trip we have stayed at a large hotel chain. We had two issues with our room the first night -- a bed with springs impinging into various body parts and an air conditioner that passes muster only with someone who does not know how air conditioning works. Keri tried to raise the bed-spring issue with the hotel the next morning, and was told that the problem was unsolvable as that every king mattress in the hotel was purchased at the same time from the same place so a defect with one was sure to be a defect common to every damn one they had. This seemed implausible. Thankfully, a well-placed email led to the intervention of a hotel manager who determined that the mattress was wrong-side up and needed to be flipped. As for the a/c, cold air indoors, apparently, is not of the highest concern in a city this close to the Arctic Circle, but they did find a fan, so we both slept like babies our second night here.

We spent the first day on a small group walking tour through Norrmalm and Gamla stan. We were with another couple who had to leave early to catch a cruise, so our poor French-graduate student ex pat guide Alex was stuck giving us a private tour for the last hour-plus. He pointed out the key historic sites, newer government buildings and helped us decipher between medieval and faux medieval structures.

A Dynamite Museum. We finished our tour in the main square on Gamla stan, where the Nobel Prize Museum is housed, so we gave it a try. A good decision. The museum is not that large, but does an effective job presenting background on Alfred Nobel, his success as an inventor (of stable explosives) and businessman, and his endowment of these awards for those whose work in several areas benefits humanity. The museum displays a number of artifacts from winners, including an original Albert Einstein manuscript, Malala Yousafzai's scarf, and Erwin Schrodinger's steamer trunk, replete with stuffed animal cat (spoiler alert: it's alive). The museum also runs short films highlighting the work on a number of prior winners. Humbling and inspiring.

The Nobel Prize museum currently has a special exhibition on Martin Luther King, Jr., who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. It was admittedly strange, as an American, to go through this uniquely American story in a foreign land. The exhibition is excellent, capturing not just King's life, but setting out for his civil rights struggle the larger context of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The exhibition also touched on King's work post-1965, including his active opposition to the Vietnam War and his focus on the Poor People's Campaign. King has almost saint-like status at home, but that is almost exclusively devoted to his civil rights work, and often only his transcendent 1963 I Have a Dream speech. King was so much more than that, and kudos to this museum for documenting that.

Vasa Ship, I'm Telling You (said with Yiddish accent). I promise you have never seen anything like the Vasa Museum. Long story short -- the Swedes built a massive ship, Vasa, which set sail on its maiden voyage in August 1628. A few minutes after it left the dock, a light wind pushed the ship to one side. It started taking on water through the gun ports on the lower of its two gun decks. The ship began to tip, taking on more water and, within minutes, it capsized and sunk. An inquiry found no one at fault, as the true blame likely lay with the king, whose specified dimensions and specifications for the ship were a primary contributor to its lack of seaworthiness, In any event, the Vasa sat where it sank until the 1950's, when it was located and Swedish archaeologists began the delicate process of recovering it from the bottom of the harbor. The brackish water left the ship incredibly well preserved, and allowed the crew to recover and later place in a museum a largely intact 17th Century war ship. It is really amazing. The story, the ship, the museum. If you see nothing else in Sweden, see this.

"That Was Kind of Boring." Keri Eckstein, on leaving the ABBA Museum. Perhaps it was that we had just seen a fully-recovered and preserved centuries old massive ship. Maybe it was the comparison to all the great museums we have seen over the last seven weeks. Or, maybe, it was just an objective recognition that it is hard to build an entire museum around a pop group that wrote and performed a few catchy tunes over a five-year period, now more than 35 years ago. One may quibble over the merits of ABBA. I find their stuff enjoyable, for sure, but not horribly significant or influential, which makes the museum slightly awkward or, boring, as Keri found it. Lacking a broader context, the museum focused entirely on the personal biographies of the four seemingly decent people who made up the group, as well as their songs and costumes. The museum includes some interactive exhibits which museum-goers seemed to be enjoying but, unless you are really, really into ABBA, you need not put this museum at the top of your list. Let's just say if I had told Keri before visiting the ABBA and Vasa museums that she would have vastly preferred the recovered war ship, she would have called me an idiot. I'm speaking in hypotheticals, of course.

Reindeer, Mini-Pigs and Bears, Oh My. The Skansen Museum described itself as the world's oldest open-air museum, whatever that means. The description reflects, in large part, the strange but effective mishmash of things that fit into Skansen -- part old-town living history museum (featuring a replica 19th Century town with traditional craftspeople happy to tell you about their work), part amusement park, part botanical gardens, part zoo. Whatever it is, the place has been around since 1891, so they are doing something right. We, and by we I mean Keri, were most excited about seeing some of the animals. Most of them were sleeping in the late afternoon, but we did catch a few minutes of a brown bear eating some greenery, a reindeer walking around and a moose hanging about. Keri's highlight was three adorable baby mini-pigs. Keri has several hundred photos of the three little darlings, which I am sure she would be happy to share. Our Skansen visit was cut short by an unexpected rain storm. By unexpected, I mean not only was the weather forecast for mostly sunny skies and a zero percent chance of rain, I mean that, thirty-minutes into a fairly strong downpour, my phone was still telling us that the weather, in that moment, was sunny with a zero percent chance of rain.

The clock is ticking down, as we have only two days left in Stockholm, the last stop on our trip. Plenty more to see, to do, and to eat.