Sweden's not so bad

National Gallery of Volvo Victims

Sweden has not been involved in a war since Napoleon's Era in early 1800. Before that though, the Danes and the Swedes have been pounding it out on the battlefield for a few centuries. The existing animosity simmers but never really surfaces. There is an empty spot on the wall in a Hillerød Museum where a small bronze plaque marks the spot of a missing painting "Stolen by the Swedes". Danish King Christian II in 1518 signed an amnesty after a long war with rebellious Swedish nobles and then proceeded to behead all his enemies in the "Stockholm Bloodbath". They haven't forgotten that one.

I risked my life to get this photo

So with all this delicate history in mind, we headed off to Stockholm with a written assurance from the Danish Queen that she would muster the forces to come and get us at the first sign of trouble. Surprisingly, the streets were fairly quiet when we arrived. Most people in Stockholm (and Sweden in general), pack up and head to the country to live in their summer houses during July. There are plenty of tourists to keep things humming but compared to Copenhagen, it seemed eerily quiet…. was it a trap? 

Stockholm is like a huge Victoria, BC except with 6' tall blondes in miniskirts instead of a bunch of pensioners in support stockings complaining about the noise made by the growing grass.

Stockholm is an amazingly pretty and clean city built on a bunch of islands within an archipelago of about 20,000 islands. Incredible fact: Stockholm is further north than Fort McMurray, but other than the occasional moose, the similarity ends.

Even the U-Boats got lost getting to Stockholm so the Swedes were able to remain neutral.

Obviously, water plays a big part in the psyche of the Stockholmer with lots of bridges, water buses and tourist ferries. We took an hour long ferry out to a town called Vaxholm to get a sense of the surroundings by sea. If I was really rich, I would take my yacht into Stockholm for a few days of cruising before accepting my Nobel Prize in bovine waste chemistry.

A retired Börje Salming lives somewhere in these islands hiding his hideous scar face.

Highlight of the trip for the family was probably the Vasa Museum where they have retrieved and preserved an almost perfect warship that sunk in 1628. It sailed out of the shipbuilding yard in Stockholm to the cheers of thousands, fired the cannons, caught some wind and tipped over. The crowd went home.

Umm, yeah, King Gustavus? You know that ship you've been waiting for…..?

Personal highlight was my 54th birthday supper at "Lasse i Parken" which is an outdoor cafe with some live music. I had to celebrate one day after my birthday because I was on a train enjoying a $12 Swedish beer the day prior. The only alcoholics in Sweden live close to a Danish Ferry.

Nice little cafe in the park for my B'Day supper.

We slipped out of town after 4 days of living among the cursed Swedes and luckily nobody recognized Mette's accent. They are not the terrifically horrible race of people that I had been led to believe. If they keep exporting good hockey players, cheap furniture and tall blondes, they might make it another 200 years before they need to battle the Danes again.

I had Tom act as a decoy while I stole this cherub to take back as plunder.