Not surprising for a Wisconsin girl, my Mom's family on both sides hails from Sweden. All of her grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. with last names like Olson and Johnson. As a result, traveling to Sweden has been a life-long dream of Mom's. Now that she's 73, and knowing she'd never go on her own, I decided it was time to fulfill that dream and arrange a trip.
I knew that I didn't want the stress of driving and navigating in Sweden and that I wanted there to be people other than me for Mom to talk with, so I looked into cruises. None of the standard big-ship cruises focused on Sweden; most just had a day stop in Stockholm while touring all of the Scandinavian countries. That wasn't good enough. My internet searching turned up the website for Göta Canal Cruises which had a six-day cruise across Sweden from Gothenburg to Stockholm. Their three boats were purpose-built for the canal between 1874 and 1931. Each only housed about 50 guests. Perfect! I booked us passage on the M/S Diana, the youngest of the fleet, for July 11-16.
Of course, we couldn't travel all the way to Sweden for just six days. How ridiculous would that be? To ensure we had time to appreciate the country, I found us hotels in Gothenburg for four nights before the cruise and for four nights in Stockholm after. Sarah, the wonderful and patient travel agent at Scan East West Travel who booked our flights after I gave up on arranging them myself, got us tickets on Iceland Air. Woo hoo! We were flying through Iceland anyway, so of course we had to have a layover. Four nights in Reykjavik on our way home rounded out a three-week itinerary.
There's no way I can squeeze all we did into one blog post, nor do I want to do one for every day (how tedious!), so I'll do my best to break the trip up into logical sections that hopefully won't be too long. First up: Gothenburg.
In a way, it makes sense that Mom and I started our trip in Gothenburg. This city was likely the last sight our ancestors had of the Old Country - most emigrants left Sweden out of Gothenburg during the mass emigration to the U.S. that took place in the late 1800s.
Of course, to them the city was, as it is to Swedes today, Göteborg. My two years of college German tried to inform me of how to pronounce this name, but it was wrong, very wrong. I'll sprinkle in my attempts to learn to speak a little Swedish as I go, but this is a good place to start as it still confounds me. In German, Göteborg would be pronounce kind of like Gootaborg. Not in Swedish. As best as I can portray it, it's pronounced "Yertaboray." Huh? The city sits at the mouth of the Göta (Yerta, as it sounds) River. Apparently, ö and ä are pronounced as if they have an "r" after them when they are followed by a soft sound. I think. I have no idea why the G sounds like a Y in this situation. But I digress from my tale.
Gothenburg (I'll stick with the English spelling as it doesn't require me to insert special characters) was and is a primary commercial port town for Sweden. Until about 15 years ago, according to Kiki, a local we met on a boat trip I'll tell you about shortly, there were several shipyards in Gothenburg. As has happened in many places in the U.S., ship building and repair work has been outsourced to Asia, and the Swedish shipyards closed down. Many of the buildings you can see along the waterfront of old Gothenburg were part of shipping-related business originally. Now they're high-end residences, offices, and shops. We stayed in Hotel Opera, one of these marvelous buildings not far from the water. The room was tiny and the beds small, but it was very clean and comfortable, and the breakfast buffet was to die for.
Mom and I took a couple of boat trips our first full day in Gothenburg. They were included in the cost of the 3-day City Pass we purchased, as were Hop-On Hop-Off boats and buses and many museum entrance fees - a really great deal. The first boat ride went to Nya Älvsborgs Fästning (New Älvsborgs Fortress), a 17th-century fortress just outside the Gothenburg harbor. It was built to help protect Gothenburg from marauding Danes and Norwegians. Two actors did a very lively 30-minute overview of the history, but it was all in Swedish so I didn't catch most of it. Apparently is was quite funny. (I didn't appreciate that the guy called me up to participate and then muttered, "Oh, sorry. I thought you were a man." Apparently I need to let my hair grow.) Once the danger from Sweden's neighbors was past, the fort was used as a prison before being abandoned. Now, it's a great place to see 17th-century construction. As fantastic as the buildings were overall, it's the details that always catch my eye, especially the doors that seem to go nowhere. What was there before that led them to build tiny doors up high?
After a short nap to recover from the first boat trip we took another, this time out to Vinga, an island about 1.5 hours from Gothenburg with a lighthouse. Along the way, I fell in love with the many adorable houses on the rocky islands. It looked like many of them were just summer houses - I could have happily holed up in one for a couple of weeks. We also went by a number of residential neighborhoods that all looked quite pricey. The marinas full of sailboats in front of every one contributed to that impression. I decided that my new goal in life is to spend my summers living on a sailboat in Sweden and then sail to the Mediterranean for the winters.
The lighthouses of Vinga have had an interesting history. There's an odd pyramidal building that I thought was the museum focusing on a local singer, Evert Taubes, who grew up on the island. Instead, it was a shipping marker built in the 1700s (the museum is actually in his old house). In the late 1700s two lighthouses were built on the island. Two because mariners kept confusing the original single lighthouse with one in Denmark. One has to wonder about the navigational skills of the early 19th century mariners if they could get that confused. Anyway, in 1890 the two lighthouses were replaced with the single one still in use. Better navigation equipment by the end of the century? The island has also been used to house ship pilots waiting to help guide ships into Gothenburg, and now has a house that can be rented out for summer vacations. It'd be an awfully windy vacation, but might be interesting.
Much of the area of Gothenburg we were in was given over to high-end shopping, decidedly not my thing. There were some amazing buildings to see and museums to visit. I also appreciated the myriad examples of public art, from very old statues of important people I don't know because all the signs were in Swedish to interesting murals.
We spent a ridiculous amount of time wandering the streets trying to find things we never did find - I think Mom was convinced I was just taking her on random death marches over cobblestone streets. As a result, however, we got to explore the Haga district, the oldest part of Gothenburg built up in the mid-1600s, and we learned on the Hop On - Hop Off tour that many of the buildings have the corners chopped off to allow horses and carts to turn corners more easily. I highly recommend a stroll through Haga - great cafes and small shops for browsing. It was a nice change of pace from Cartier, Hugo Boss, and the like.
Art is clearly important in the city. There were several art museums, although we didn't find any of them, and one day there was some sort of art appreciation day going on, primarily focused on young people. We saw a band (high school or college age) performing classic rock by one of the canals, and in another area four young artists were painting the scene across the park in black paint on plastic wrap strung between two trees. When they were finished, they pulled out sidewalk chalk and got all the local kids involved in the fun.
Speaking of canals, did I mention that Gothenburg is a city of canals? When the city was growing, a Dutch city architect was brought in to develop a canal plan to allow for drainage of the land as well as being sewers and drinking water sources. Apparently they suffered through nine cholera epidemics before they figured out that you shouldn't drink the water you shit in. Having the canals sure made it easier for this navigationally-impaired tourist to find her way around, and I'm happy to report that the water we drank was very clean and tasty.
I could go on and on about the City Museum, the Universeum and Liseberg Amusement Park where we got semi-lost, and more, but I risk becoming too boring. I did have a random observation I wanted to share, however. I was taken aback by being in a foreign country where everyone looked like me. I guess I've spent too much time traveling in Latin America. I am eternally grateful, however, that the rest of the world places more importance on learning other languages than America does. It makes it so easy to travel when everyone, and I do mean everyone, speaks English. I was floored by the fluency of even the lowliest ice cream scoopers, and there were a lot of them. Apparently, Swedes eat even more ice cream than Alaskans. They're also really smart in that the restaurants provide blankets for outdoor seating, a necessity in such a windy area where they want to maximize time spent outside during the short summer months.
I guess that was several random observations. I'm sure there'll be more next time.
