Our first stop on our honeymoon was Stockholm, in order to visit Eric (or Erik, as he’s known here), who is currently participating in a general relativity research program at the Mittag-Leffler Institute, after which he’ll spend the rest of a year at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Here’s a short video overview:

We arrived in the afternoon after a short layover in Iceland, checked in to our Airbnb in the Norrmalm district of Stockholm, and made our way over to the Vasa Museum, featuring the eponymous ship that sank in the harbor just ~ 1km into its maiden voyage in 1628. A museum about a ship sounds a little bit boring, except maybe if that ship were the Titanic. Well, maybe even if it were the Titanic – but this was very well done. It’s pretty impressive to see a huge, 17th century, prestige warship in most of its glory in a big museum, with bits and pieces of the story told through exhibits and short videos.

I don’t think there are any other > ~400 year old warships preserved to such a degree. So, why did it (spoiler alert) sink almost immediately after such fanfare? This essentially was the result of a confluence of several unlikely events:

  • someone with enough power to commission such a large ship to begin with: King Gustav II Adolph
  • a spectacularly faulty design, ensuring an almost immediate catastrophe in just-driven-off-the-lot condition: in this case, the king wanted to one-up his Danish rivals by hurriedly adding a second gun-deck
  • poor succession planning in the shipbuilding phase, with perhaps no one to question the King’s wishes – or at least lead to a re-design: the primary designer, Henrik Hybertsson, fell ill and died a year before the ship’s completion
  • the right underwater conditions for preservation: the brackish water of the Baltic sea meant that shipworm wasn’t a worry and the massive dumping of sulfur into the water polluted it to such a degree which ironically preserved the ship due to lack of oxygen, inhibiting wood-degrading bacteria

A drone shot of the colorful buildings in Kungsholmen, not far from our Airbnb in Norrmalm

In front of the Vasa

Kelly and Eric in Gamla Stan

Looking out from Gamla Stan at night

Skål in the Icebar

Archipelago cruise. The lunch was surprisingly good.

A nice speakeasy, apropos

Walking into the gardens of Drottningholm Palace

In the gardens of Drottningholm Palace

At the ABBA musem

Dinner at Lilla Ego: Clockwise, from upper-left: Butter fried chanterelles. Gooseberry pickled in elderflower, smetana, and lightly baked arctic char; dessert; bread with butter and sunflower seeds; Apple smoked and fermented pickled herring. Poached egg yolk, brown bread and brown butter; Cod. Broccoli purée (accent), yuzu pickled lotus root, algae crisp, coriander and ponzu butter