North Sea Serenade – Day Two

I somehow didn't get this one before the other, so it's a bit out of order now. Enjoy.

Tom and I went to bed last night around 10 PM and woke up about 2 AM and chatted for a few hours and then about 4 AM went back to sleep and woke up around 9:30 AM in a panic because we thought we were going to miss breakfast.  The breakfast buffet was almost as good as the smorgasbord last night.  After breakfast we laid around the room and whined about being tired and not wanting to do anything but we had already paid for the hop on hop off bus and so we dragged ourselves out to the ship stop.  Then we went to the Vasa Museum.

For those of you who don’t know the Vasa is a ship that was commissioned by the King of Sweden in 1628 and after traveling 30 meters into the bay the ship capsized and sank.  The museum was not only an attempt to demonstrate the actual ship but to explain why it capsized and apparently it was a combination of fatal errors, i.e., design, construction and instruction by the senior staff.  There were 50 people who lost their lives when the ship capsized and they tried to explain but there wasn’t just one reason and the ship’s builder had already died so nobody got blamed.  We took so many pictures our camera died.

After that we took the hop on hop off bus around Stockholm to the ice bar which is a bar constructed out of ice which is maintained in a -5 degrees Celsius temperature so you have to put on a cape and mittens just to get inside the bar.  I thought it was pretty cool.

We continued traveling around and got back to the hotel and went up to our room.  I took a nap for about an hour.  Then we went down to the bar and had some olives which were amazingly good.  Garlicky and olive oily and rosemary-y.  Then we came back up to the room and got ready and then we went to Matsalen for dinner and although I recognized Mathias Dahlgren I was too late to get a picture with him but the food was spectacular and we loved every bite.  I have pictures of every dish.  It was, as Jennie says, very spendy but I was happy to pay it for such a memorable dinner. 

We are still suffering from jetlag, but hope to be adjusted to local time for the cruise which starts tomorrow.