I arrived at Arlanda bright and rather early on Thursday morning. Andy wasn't scheduled to get there until lunchtime, so I took myself to the National Museum for a couple of hours. It was lovely-- I'd been pretty museum-ed out after the travel break, but the place was small and interesting enough to be great. There was a funky Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, and a whole floor on Scandinavian design to make me happy.
Andy arrived with surprising punctuality, and we split some excellent vegetarian salads and pastries at the museum's café. We spent the rest of the day roaming around the city-- through the downtown area, into Gamla Stan (the old town), and down to Sondermälm, a more southern island (the whole city is crisscrossed by canals), where we found our dinner and our hotel. It was on a boat! Fortunately, the boat was docked and on calm waters, so it was mostly just fun in concept. Dinner was Swedish meatballs (for Andy) and a sandwich (for me), followed up by a quartet of fresh chocolate chip cookies from a store that was apparently about to close for the last time ever.
Friday morning began with more touring of Gamla Stan. We then moved north a bit and found Stockholm's Great Synagogue. It was beautiful from the outside, but it transpired that you can't go inside except on tours, which are only offered in the summer. Instead, the woman at the desk suggested, we could come back for Friday night services at 5:30. Hm...
We headed to Skansen next and promptly spent several hours in the Vasa Museum, which contains a massive, ornate wooden ship from 1628 or so that sunk on its maiden voyage in the Stockholm harbor due to its top-heaviness. It was recovered in 1961 and put in a museum setting. You can't actually go on the ship, but you can walk pretty much all the way around it on six stories while getting a full feel for the history surrounding it. Other than the building's smelling a bit like the mud it was pulled from, the place was amazing. We did some more walking around Skansen after the Vasa and then caught a boat around the more open water to get back to the area where the synagogue is.
Services were really nice! The interior of the building was amazing-- all wood and colorful geometric accents. My parents had said it looked like a Viking ship, and I definitely got that. The service itself was reform, and mainly in Hebrew, which made everything but the announcements fairly easy to follow. I thought of the old Camp Tevya song "Wherever You Go, There's Always Someone Jewish" and felt wonderfully comfortable in such a familiar setting, despite being six time zones and several degrees of latitude away from home. We sat with another American student who had come for roughly the same purpose, and a few English-speaking congregants came to welcome us. Two of them were chatting with Andy and me afterwards, and one walked us several blocks to recommend a few places for dinner.
This guy claimed to be psychic, but he seemed very sincere and genuine about it. He had come up to Andy during the service to say that Andy had a great job coming--we thought this meant they needed someone to hold a Torah--and then came back to elaborate that this would be in politics, and not necessarily his first offer. On the walk to dinner, I was told I'd go into business (?), and that I was much calmer than my mother. Whether or not the guy (whose name we never learned) was for real was almost beside the point-- it was so interesting to talk to him! Apparently the 'seeing' thing runs in his family, and the congregation of the temple has generally accepted his gift, as has he. Also, his dinner recommendations ended up proving excellent, as we enjoyed a whole vegetarian buffet overlooking an indoor marketplace.
We took a long walk before hopping the metro home; this led us to a small island with a small castle (apparently used for military men to reside and dine in) and past the modern art museum with its funky sculpture garden. We wrapped the night up early after that, as our flight to Copenhagen the next morning merited a 6am alarm.
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