05 The Cruise Part 2

Well, I kept my promise. I did not wake up at 4:30. It was 12:30 and 2:30. At 12:30 Penny gently nudged me and asked me to roll over; something about noise I was allegedly making. I contend there is no proof of this. At 2:30 we both agree that there was a lot of banging going on. The ship had begun to rock and first the door to the bathroom that I left open began to bang. I closed and lashed that and then after getting back into the warm bed and beginning to drift off to sleep there was another loud thump. It was the ladder in the closet used to climb into the upper berth if they were being used. (How do you like all the nautical terms?)

There was one other noise that I could not figure out for a while. Every once in awhile there was this loud noise like someone was rolling a cannon ball down a bowling lane. It lasted about 3 seconds. I thought how rude those other people were. Then I went to the head and when I flushed I heard the same sound. I thought, AHH I guess that is OK for the other folks to do.

After that I slept fine until Penny and I got up for breakfast. We had researched the cost of breakfast on the ship and had decided to forego the cost of the buffet breakfast and grab some food at one of the small coffee shops. They did not mention in the brochure that all of those were closed in the morning. So we wound up back at the buffet; more sandwich stuff for breakfast. There were also several fish things that I skipped. We sat at the stern of the ship and looked out as we came into Stockholm.

After breakfast we went and packed and then sat up on the deck and watched the islands of the Stockholm archipelago float by. If you are keeping score Stockholm wins the archipelago wars. The score is Stockholm 24,000 and Helsinki 6,500.

The islands were beautiful and the skies were blue. There were coves filled with tethered sail boats, private homes belonging to the moderately to exorbitantly wealthy, and business of various sorts. It was just amazing.

We docked at the peer and made our way off the ship. I am not sure if I mentioned this but in Finland at the airport the man at customs just stamped our passports and waved us through. He did not ask how long we were staying or anything else. In Sweden no one checked our passports at all (no stamp – rats). There was just a junction in the walkway with one direction for “nothing to declare” and the other for those with declarable items. The problem is that I never was informed about what might be declarable. So we followed EVERYONE else through the green line. I guess illegal immigration in Scandinavia is not an issue.

Stockholm

We took the bus to the Central Bus/train station and with our trusty map made our way to the Rica Kungsgatan (Kings Garden) Hotel. The hotel has only an entrance to the elevators on the ground floor. You have to go up to the 4th floor reception and the rooms are on floors 4 to 7. A very nice lady told us our room was not ready but that we could store our luggage. We gathered the items we thought we might need (like umbrellas) and put our bags in the store room and headed across the street to McDonalds for a coke and to finalize our plans. Behind the counter were three blond, blue-eyed 16ish girls. Now they were either identical triplets or the gene pool is very shallow here in Stockholm. I could not tell them apart.

Our plan was to go to Sweden House, the main tourist information office, at the Kungsgatan Park. Now do you remember what that means? Well this park indeed was at one time the King’s vegetable garden. Now it is a mall of activity. We have arrived in Stockholm on the first day of the Stockholm Cultural Festival. The park was filled with activities as were many of the other places we wondered during the day. Among the things we saw were

A) Music videos on large screens
B) Two or three large music stages. One had the largest drums I had ever seen. We were not there for the performance but were for the sound check. The volume was working just fine.
C) There were some silver clad youth doing a modern, abstract (at least to me) dance performance as we waited to get on the tour bus.
D) There were people pretending to be cat burglars and climbed up and out of a third storey window in Stortorget, the main square on Gamla Stan Island where the Royal Palace is located. The act was really funny. They were trying to avoid breaking the windows on the bottom floors as they repelled down the side of the building. One poor fellow had trouble with a “plumber’s crack” and ultimately wound up inverted and minus his pants. It was funny.
E) There were people juggling, and others taking people’s money in a game of “which box is the ball under.”

We then took a bus tour. We were there early so we got on first and got a front row top level seat. This was very good for picture taking and also very funny to watch the pedestrians and the look of fear in their eyes as the bus made its way through the narrow streets and the hair pin turns. I would have wagered good money that the bus was not going to make it through some of the places or around some of the corners. The driver sometimes had to make the corners by going up on the sidewalk. Now when he did this of course he was going very slowly and as the engine in the bus is in the back the people in the street often did not hear the bus if they, oh let’s say, were reading a map and walking. The driver was very kind and refrained from blowing his horn. So one of the people would look up or turn around and be nose to nose with the front of a bus sharing the sidewalk with them and wanting to take more. I did not know that people could show that much of the white’s of their eyes. We have really enjoyed the city bus tours in Helsinki and Stockholm. It is a great way to drive by the sights and get a lay of the land perspective.

After the bus tour we opted to forego the ice cream lunch and to not try to walk across Stockholm to find the perfect Swedish food. We ate at TGIF Fridays. We sat outside as the whole back of the restaurant opened up to the Park. I went to bathroom and back out the non-existent back wall onto the patio. This was, I am confident, the reason that my brain decided to ignore the fact that the front door was not open but it was very clean glass. I walked smack into it. No harm, my knee hit the glass first.

We then walked to Gamla Stan and used our Stockholm card to tour the Royal Apartments. (We had a lot of discussion about the most prudent use of our 24 hours of free access. Penny wisely suggested that we not worry about it. She is a wise woman.

This palace is used by the royal family only for state occasions and for office space. They have another palace someplace outside of Stockholm. The palace was, well, palatial. They told us that it was one of the largest palaces in Europe. The royal family lives well.

Sweden for centuries has been a highly egalitarian society, at least as far as the Royal family goes. The oldest child of the King (male or female) becomes head of state. So the current successor is Crown Princess Victoria. She is about 30 and there are pictures of her all over the Palace. One room is like a family photo album.

We went to the Cathedral where the current King and Queen were married. It is a classic looking catholic church although it was Lutheran. I say this because it no longer serves as a church. It is just a museum for state occasions.

While we were there we downstairs to see the crown jewels. The jewels were not as heavily guarded as the British crown jewels. This made me wonder if they may have been replicas.

After leaving the palace area, the navigator (yours truly) got turned around and we went to the wrong side of the island. Man did we look like tourists. We had maps in hand and were stopping and staring at every street corner where the names of the streets are on the sides of the buildings. When you can’t easily recall a name because it is in an unfamiliar language, you spend a lot of time looking back and forth between the map and the street signs. We wondered through narrow streets and stone houses crammed together with their shoulders touching. We stumbled upon the main square in the old city and this is where we saw the cat burglars.

We did make it back to the hotel. Checked in and caught our breath and then walked to the bus station which shares a building with the train station. We had not seen the train information and we wondered around and found the ticket office. It is very high tech and there is a “take a number system.” This would not have been a problem except we could not figure out how to get a number. We had wanted to confirm our reservation and to make sure we knew where we were going for the next day. We gave up on the take-a-number thing and went to the general information lady (who was very nice). She not only was able to print out our tickets for the sleeping compartment but also was able to validate our Eurail pass. (I forgot to tell you that the cruise people did not ask for our Eurail pass and thus we have an extra day to use our pass.) We did all of this the day before so as to make sure all was in order and to get the lay of the land at the train station. This plan-ahead idea will come back to haunt us in our next installment of this episode: stay tuned.

We found the lockers for our luggage storage the next day and walked out the front of the station and found our way back to the hotel leaving a trail of bread crumbs. We ate Fillet Mignon at a small restaurant near the train station. Someone look up “Fillet Mignon” for me. In Stockholm, this evidently means small pork medallions. We both enjoyed the meal.

Amy called on Skype and we talked for a while. It was good to see and chat with her. Now it is really late and I am off to bed.

Ray