Stockholm

In Stockholm we stayed in the coolest hostel I’ve ever stayed in. It’s made from a jumbo jet, parked near the runway at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport! It’s really awesome! I lived in a giant recycling project! If they made it into a house, I’d buy it.

No, those are not Swedish meatballs. They're actually falafel. 

Stockholm has a bunch of islands, which means there are a lot of boats:

On our first day in Stockholm, we decided to go to the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a ship built for the king of Sweden in 1628. The king, Gustavus Adolphus, was at war with Poland, and he wanted to build a ship that would show the rest of the world that he was the Lion of the North, and was to be feared in battle. So he ordered a giant warship, covered in carvings and filled with cannons. Unfortunately for him, the ship was too tall and too top-heavy. It sailed for twenty minutes, listed (tipped), took on water through the cannon holes, and sank. The Vasa had a sister ship, which was similar but had twice as much ballast (heavy things in the bottom to balance the top), was one metre wider, and carried lighter cannons. It sailed for thirty years. This means that if they had just modified the Vasa, it might have been the pride of the navy. Instead, it was at the bottom of Stockholm harbor for more than 300 years. In 1961 it was pulled out of the ocean and put in a museum, in a special climate-controlled building. I am amazed by this. They pulled a three hundred year old ship out of the bottom of the harbor and I got to look at it in a museum! Awesome! 

That evening we saw La Boheme in the Stockholm Opera House. The opera house was beautiful, and the opera was well-done, but I really missed the English subtitles. The opera is in Italian, and with Swedish subtitles, I think I missed out on some of the finer plot points. I’d read a summary, so I followed the general idea. I feel like I finally understand an idea of Paris that has seeped into the general consciousness, but I’d never understood before. Paris: the home of starving artists. It’s not a Paris that I saw when I was there, but I think it’s an important part of Paris. I remember touring Paris with my Museums and Monuments and learning that Montmartre used to be the home of the starving artists, until it became famous as a home of starving artists, and then the area got expensive, and all the artists moved to Montparnasse, and then that got expensive, and now they’ve moved on. There aren’t any artists in the 16^th, where I lived. You have to be quite wealthy to live there. (or have your study-abroad program arrange housing for you in a garret)