Wanderung 31

A searchlight beam illuminated the interior of our cabin in the middle of the night, which was a first for me! Curious, I jumped up to see who was playing with a searchlight in the middle of the sea in the middle of the night, and it turned out to be a Swedish pilot boat dumping a pilot on board the Costa Pacifica at 3:50 am, for heaven's sake! The fjord and maze of islands on the East side of Stockholm has protected it since Viking days, but it also forms a devilishly long channel for modern cruise ships to negotiate, hence the need to have pilot on board from 4 to about 8:30 am.

I went back to bed, but still arose early as watching the cruise ship traversing that maze of islands was really quite interesting. The navigable channel is rather narrow, so the cruise ships have to arrive in single file. The "Mein Schiff 4" from the Tui cruise company, a German outfit, was about a mile behind us, and a Viking ship and a Birka Cruise liner were ahead of us. At first the islands were uninhabited, but as we neared Stockholm the islands were more and more densely settled. Most of the homes at the water's edge had boat houses and a small pier of some kind, which was very picturesque.

Instead of docking at a cruise ship berth, the Costa Pacifica moored between two very large yellow buoys in Stockholm's harbor. From there, the ship operated two tender services, one for passengers with a ship's tour that went over to the cruise ship pier where the tour buses were waiting. The second tender route was directly over to the small dock on the island of Gamla Stan where the Swedish royal palace and most of Old Town Stockholm are located.

We were walking around Stockholm on our own, so we took the latter tender route. What surprised me, but in retrospect shouldn't have, was that when they issued the call for the tender tickets down in the theater, there was a mad stampede of Germans to rush onto the stage and get the earliest possible tender. We all joined into the mad rush, but Linda and Monika ended up in front of Jerry and I, who were delayed due to being polite. Fortunately it turned out that they could each get two tickets, and they did so in order for us all to be on the same lifeboat. If the supervisors had told the crowd to send up one person from each group to get tickets for the entire group, there might have been far less of a stampede, but that's speculation.

As it turned out, we were on the second tender going from the ship to Gamla Stan, and were walking up the narrow, cobblestone streets of the Old Town area by 10:30. Monika enjoyed the different signs hanging from the stores, like in Ireland.

The map we were given at the dock was nice but did not have a walking tour indicated , so we tried to find a Tourist Information center. Our first attempt was to walk to a spot with a big "T" on the map, but the "T" indicated a transit station instead! Shifting our focus to the small "i" symbol, we ultimately tracked down two Information Centers, but they were both closed, which puzzled me greatly as there were at least 3 cruise ships in Stockholm's harbor that day.

We did, however, find a currency exchange where we changed 40 Euro to 340 Swedish kroner, which allowed us to donate kroner to the nearby German church, the Tyska Kyrkan, which we visited next. That turned out to be a very pretty church inside, with a perfectly intact set of beautiful stained glass windows--Sweden stayed neutral to profit from both sides during WWII, so their churches and cities were not bombed. The altar and organ were beautiful. The stained glass panels featured Grisaille for the fine facial features, which plus the vivid coloring of the stained glass really made the scenes depicted on the church windows come to life.

We headed over to see the Royal Castle, but along the way we stopped off at the Nobel Museum, where the Nobel Prizes at handed out each year. The graceful museum building fronted on a large, busy square ringed by restaurants and boutique shops.

Continuing on to the Royal Castle, we arrived at the front gate, complete with guards and old cannons. I finally found a sign indicating where to buy tickets for the castle, which turned out to be right back where we had walked into the complex! The castle complex includes the royal apartments and two complete museums, so we reckoned that it would take at least 2-3 hours to do it all justice. Unfortunately, that would have been most of the rest of the time we had in Stockholm, so we decided to skip the Royal Castle tour until our next visit.

Instead, we walked down to the harbor, where we bought tickets for the Hop-On-Hop-Off boats to get us over to the island where the Vasa museum is located. Along the way, we passed some lovely old sections of Stockholm on the shores of the network of rivers and lakes that makes up the central part of the city. Those historic areas would be well worth walking, which would be easy to do with the HOHO boats, but we weren't sure how much time the Vasa museum would take so we stayed on the HOHO boat and listened to the English commentary until we reached the island of Djurgarden where the Vasa Museum is located.