Gamla Stan is a beautiful, quaint area. It is filled with lovely buildings and has lots of restaurants that all looked inviting - nice lighting and candles on the tables with wonderful smelling food. I would definitely
recommend it as a place to spend some time to anyone who visited Stockholm.
We used the internet on the way back to the hostel and then picked up some take-away food to eat there. Time goes by pretty fast each day, and it was almost 10PM before we were eating our dinner.
7/24: Another good breakfast and then we gathered our stuff, walked to the strain station and put our big packs in a locker. We used the internet, called Geneva to organize our room there for when we meet Eva, Mary Ann and the 2 guys, and then walked down to the dock area for our boat trrip out to Birka.
What a lovely day. It was beautiful weather and the boat left at 1PM and it was a 1.75 hour ride to the island of Birka. Birka is famous for the Viking town that existed there from 790 - 970 AD. About 1,000 people lived in the town and it was a major trading area because the island was located in the middle of many trade shipping routes.
The island is of great interest to archeologists and a number of significant digs have taken place in the late 1800s and then started again in 1995, and now they dig every year between May and October.
There was a commentary during the boat ride to Birka describing the various islands between Stockholm and Birka and then we had 2 tours on Birka. One was a short tour of the Viking Museum there and the other was an hour's walking tour given by one of the archeologists during which she described the history of the island and the people who lived there during the Viking period.
The return boat left at 3:30 and got back to Stockholm at 5:15. We got our luggage out of storage and found out there was an earlier train out to Norrkoping (pronounced Norsherping). Luckily we got the ealrier train because the ride was about an hour longer than we expected. We were supposed to be at the hostel at 8PM and we got off the train at 5 minutes of 8. We had about a half mile walk from the train to the hostel and there is nothing around this place - no restaurants and no stores. Good thing we both had a pasta dinner to cook or we would have gone to bed hungry.
There are no rooms available tomorrow, so we need to move to the only other hostel in the area - 6 kilometers out of town. We will check in the morning to see of there are any lockers at the train or bus station and if so, we'll leave our big packs there. Then we can just carry our day packs with some overnight stuff and tour the town and then go out to the other hostel in the evening. We need to be back to the train station about 10AM on Saturday for our train to Copenhagen.
I'm laying here at 10:45PM wondering why were came out here, but I know we read that there were some interesting walking tours. Oh well, we will find out tomorrow if the trip was worth it or not.
7/25: Only 5 months 'til Christmas! I walked down to the train station about 8:30 to check out the lockers and they had them. Meanwhile, Shari had found another hostel on the map near the center of town, and when she went to ask this hostel owner about it, she found out there had a been a cancellation and we could stay here tonight. It was so nice to know we didn't have to pack our stuff up and move on.
We walked to the center of town (about 1.5 miles from our hostel) to the Information Center to find out about a walking tour we wanted to take. Unfortunately, it wasn't being run today so we got information on some museums and then went to the library to use the internet for about 20 minutes. Then we went to visit 2 museums and best of all they were free.
The Museum of Work (Arbetets Museum) is housed in an old mill, which closed in 1962. The museum collects recorded memories of working life rather than objects.They has some brochures of the exhibits in English, but all the signs were in Swedish. One of the most interesting exhibits was called The Life of Volvo 120 - a story based on a 1966 Volvo Amazon. The writer, Staffan Ekegren, found the car in the woods and began to wonder about its history. He traced all 19 owners of the car and asked them to tell him stories of their lives when they owned the car. He wrote a book on the car to show what a car creature man has become, and how we express status, love, private territories and the differences between the sexes through cars.
There was also an exhibit showing works of photographer Christer Stromholms (1918-2002), one of Sweden's leading photographers. Some of it was pretty weird stuff on death and trans-sexuals and sime were pictures of his travels through Spain, USA, India, Japan and Kenya. Another exhibit was on the Brirgitine Sisters, a group of 11 cloistered nuns who devote most their time to prayer.
Another exhibit featured in the stairway between floors was called The Story of Alva. Alva worked in the mill as a bobbin changer/threader for 35 years and it told the story of her life. She was married and had one son and worked throughout her married life. She loved her job and was very upset when the mill closed and wished she could have continued working until the day she died at 85 years old.
The next museum, the Stadsmuseet (City Museum) was also interesting, depicting life and the crafts and industries of 19th century Norrkoping. Both the museums were housed in beautifully maintained industrial buildings. The Arbetets Museum actually sits in the middle of the Motala Strom (River) and the Stadsmuseet sits on the bank of the river.
Next, we took a lovely walk along the river, up one side and down the other and it was a beautiful sunny afternoon. We saw very few people out and around in Norrkoping, whether we were wandering the streets of town or walking near the river. It is a lovely town with wonderfully architected brick buildings. It is clean, not crowded and easy to get around.
We bought some groceries, brought then back to the hostel and then went back to the train station to go on a narrated train ride. We rode a 1902 tram named Gamla Ettan - "The Old Number One" - for a half hour tour of the city (narrated in Swedish, but it was still fun to see and interesting). There are only 2 cities in Sweden that still use the tram system - Gothenburg and Norrkoping. They describe the tram system as quaint, clean and efficient.
It started raining just at the end of the tram ride but it didn't rain very hard for our walk back to the hostel. Luckily, we got back when we did though, because it absolutely poured for about a half hour just after we got inside. We have been really lucky with the weather on our trips so far.
I am so glad we came out here. It is pretty and peaceful, and we had an interesting day. We also did a lot of walking which makes up for our many hours of sitting on boats and trains.
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