Stockholm

More islands. Stockholm is built on fourteen of them, where a freshwater lake meets the Baltic sea. It's all bridges and water and -- today, at least -- blue sky.

She can't sleep, the moon is red

And the moon was red, an eerie blood-red and black globe hovering just above the horizon when I woke briefly around midnight. But I think the fact that I'm getting so little sleep has less to do with scary moons and more to do with the fact that the sun rises at three-fricking-thirty in the morning. No wonder all the vampires moved to Louisiana.

I've tried closing the drapes and wearing a sleep mask, but somehow I know in my sleep that it's light outside and I keep waking up to check the time and see what's going on. Which, this morning, was the three to five hour transit of the Stockholm archipelago, thousands and thousands of islands in the hazy blue light.

I wasn't alert enough to actually get up and grab the camera until we were almost at Stockholm, when the islands were full of boats and summer homes, but I'll see them again this evening when we sail out.

Sailing to Stockholm

This is the coast of Gotland, near Visby, off the southeast coast of Sweden. When we sailed north from Copenhagen last night, we got a sneak peak of Sweden to the east, and honestly it made me think of Oz: little farms, fields of yellow flowers, everything a Munchkin could want. Not a place you could actually visit outside a fairy tale.

Gotland looks a lot more ordinary so far. Well, except for that water.

Why don't I live in Scandinavia?

Danish power plant

Danish parking lot

Danish business lunch

Danish sunset












Of course the taxes are high -- progressive rates, averaging 50%. But for their taxes, the Danes get health care, free higher education, and something Americans haven't seen in a while, infrastructure. The roads are well-maintained, there are beautiful bridges, and in Copenhagen one of the main squares is undergoing renovation so the old water mains underneath can be replaced. Imagine: they are replacing old water mains before they burst and flood the streets. Those crazy Scandinavians!

Americans of course want services but don't want to pay for them. Or we think that there should be no services at all, and the government should be limited to issuing currency and running the military. We value our freedoms too much, including the freedom to bankrupt ourselves over medical bills and pay for our bachelor's degrees until we're ready to retire.

Elsinore

When I was planning this trip, I almost signed up for a tour from Copenhagen called "Castles of North Zealand," focusing on Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, aka Elsinore. How could an English major resist seeing Elsinore?

But I decided my limited time in Denmark was much better spent walking around Copenhagen and going on a boat ride through the canals, instead of sitting in a tour bus for an hour each way. (And thanks to Paul for the advice -- glad I listened.)

Since the ship is too large to head straight down into the Baltic from Copenhagen, we have to backtrack and go back the way we came late last night, sailing north through Øresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden. So I got to see Kronborg after all.

Funny how most productions of Hamlet leave out the sailboats.

The more traditional Copenhagen

The black tile roofs are a nice change from terra cotta. Though I imagine that in winter you'd want all the color you could get, black probably holds more heat.

Copenhagen harbor views

This is the harbor side of Noma, a restaurant in Christianshavn that is rated one of the best in the world.

I liked what I saw of the modern architecture in Copenhagen, though I didn't get to see much and none of it from the inside, but I also liked how they were repurposing the old brick buildings by the harbor. They do that in every city these days, but the contrast between the very neat, almost too pretty traditional buildings and the old brick keeps it from being precious.

Below is a section of the Black Diamond, a new building for the Royal Library, built in 1999. You can see through the glass atrium so the reflections make the building look as though it's floating on the water.

Copenhagen canal cruise

Step down into the canals and suddenly Copenhagen looks more like the old port that it is, not nearly so quaint, although still on a medieval scale.  These bridges were built for smaller boats with much smaller people, and sailing under them was a little unnerving -- the canal boat captain kept warning us to sit down and tuck in our arms and sometimes we seemed to clear the stones by millimeters. And we scraped more than a little paint off the sides of the boat trying to turn into the canal pictured below.

Copenhagen reflections

A window reflecting across the canal at Nyhavn.

Always a bad hair day

I have to admit, I considered this one of the truly amazing sights of Copenhagen, and I spent far more energy trying to get a photo of her than I spent paying attention to, you know, Copenhagen.

Not that she was a local; I'm pretty sure she was from my ship. But that pink hair is definitely something worth seeing no matter where she was from.

The Little Mermaid

When I was looking at possible tours for Copenhagen, they all had huge capital letter disclaimers at the bottom, warning us that starting in June, the Little Mermaid was going to be replaced by a multimedia artwork by a Chinese artist. I had no desperate desire to see the Little Mermaid, but somehow this didn't sound terribly promising to me. And I was right.

The statue is on loan to Shanghai, where they are apparently just crazy about the Little Mermaid, kind of like those Japanese tourists who go to Prince Edward Island to visit all of the Anne of Green Gables sites. And the "multimedia artwork" consists of a giant screen in the harbor where the statue normally sits, showing live video of the statue in Shanghai.

There were schoolchildren on a field trip to see this very exciting multimedia exhibit, but for some reason none of them seemed that impressed. Or interested.



















Fortunately for the disappointed tourists, there's another not-quite-so-little mermaid nearby, outside the souvenir shops. I am guessing that even in Denmark, they don't bring schoolchildren on outings to see her.

North Sea, first day

When I woke up this morning, the fog was pressed against the windows and so thick I couldn't see the sea at all. It reminded me of The Seafarer: Nothing gehyrde I there but the ice cold waves.

Of course the seafarer didn't have scrambled eggs and coffee waiting to help melt those frozen Anglo-Saxon fetters. I, fortunately, am seafaring with amenities.

Later the fog cleared, though it remained cloudy, and the sea was an amazingly vivid teal, a color you might expect on a postcard from the Caribbean but not in the very chilly North Sea.








Then this evening, a twilight that went on forever (I took this picture shortly after 10 pm).