Pinky up cause I'm fancy!
Yesterday and today we went to two Stockholm museums, The Viking museum and The Vasa Museum.
The Viking Museum is a fun touristy museum with a dark ride at the end! You can imagine why we went.
The museum is filled with artifact reproductions, which means you can touch a lot of things! We entered and ended up in an English guided tour right away. The guide was dressed like a Viking, talked like a Viking, and gave us a history lesson on Vikings.
He told us how Vikings spread out from Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) to Iceland, Greenland, many areas in mainland Europe, Scotland, and even North America. He told us that many were farmers but also there were pillaging pirate types. He also threw Viking shade at the Netflix Viking series which I wasn't aware of.
The Big Takeaway was that you didn't necessarily have to die in battle to get into Valhalla. He said we could get into Valhalla, with the free flowing mead from a goat, by just spreading the truth about Vikings. The big truth he wanted me to share is that only a few Vikings wore helmets, and none of them had horns! So I guess if you tell someone this we can meet in Valhalla and drink unlimited mead forever. Sounds kind of fun.
Turns out this isn't a real Viking.
After the guided tour we checked out the museum. There were cool video screens with actors dressed like different classes of Viking telling you about their daily lives. I felt it was really well done.
The loom they used to weave was vertical.
I took another opportunity to dress up. Donna got a great photo.
I enjoyed the section devoted to Vikings in pop culture.
The dark ride was at the end of the museum. Donna and I speculated on how we could ride the ride more than once. We love a good dark ride so this was exiting!
This is my, "heading to the dark ride" face.
The ride is called, 'Ragnfrids Saga'.
This may or may not be Ragnfrid.
This is the ride operator.
Infogram on how to and how not to ride.
The ride is a series of static dioramas and screens. Your trackless Multi Mover Vehicle moves you through the story of Ragnfrid, a Viking needing to provide for his family so he doesn't have to sell his daughter off to a slob of a man. He does this by taking slaves to the big city to sell off to slobs. He gets robbed and loses everything and then his friend gets killed and then he fights in a war as a hired fighter and takes barrels of silver back to his family that almost died while he was gone and they lived happily ever after.
Near the end of the ride we decided we didn't need to ride it again.
We were hoping for an old dark ride. This ride was built in 2017.
The ride lets you off in the restaurant and then you exit through the gift shop.
It was a good museum but not great.
The following day we went to The Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a Swedish battle ship that was launched in 1628. It immediately sank because it was top heavy. For about 24 minutes it was the most powerful battleship in the world. It quickly ended up at the bottom of the polluted brackish Stockholm Harbor where it sat preserved for 333 years. The brackish water and the heavy pollution prevented decay and in 1961 the ship was salvaged and preserved. It's very impressive.
Its really hard to think of it as real after working at Disneyland.
There were also preserved artifacts like this hat in a hat box.
Preservation continues today. They are replacing wooden shims with rubber feet that can move with the ship. They hope to keep the ship intact for another couple hundred years.
They had many interactive elements.
Its so huge, it's hard to capture.
The Vasa Museum is amazing and you should go. The Viking Museum is pretty cool and you should go if you have time.
