2013-06-12

Domestic Vacation, museums & old ships

Visited the very well known Vasa Museum. In 1961 some guys salvaged this old ship...


... after it had lay(ed?)/lied(?) on the bottom of the sea for circa 400 years. It sank 1628 merely hours after its christening. A total fiasco. Which might explain why there was only one Swedish flag in the whole giant ship-museum: Painted on a little obscured piece of wall on the sixth floor.
       The museum-people are a bunch of no-good leftist, "humanist" globalists as well, which might explain why our guide was mainly talking about how badly women were treated and how we already in those days were "an immigration country - already a multicultural place". I didn't complain on her further bashings of Sweden and silently left the group to study the ship - no longer a wreckage - on my own. I was there to look and learn about the ship, not to get lectures on how bad white, middle-aged men supposedly were and are. Idiots...

This has nothing to do with the regular stuff posted here, but I suppose there might be some interest in this old ship... A link to how it might have looked before spending 400 years on the sea bottom.

New mount-hold but old cannon - very few cannons were left on the bottom of sea, most of them were salvaged the years following the fiasco. The cannons were needed for the 30 years war (I think).
      Below some personal things that didn't belong to Johan the skeleton. 

 A pipe and some fire utensils.

They quite morbidly had eight or more skeletons in open caskets. It was interesting to see how many of them had traces of healed wounds - was it really that tough living back in the day? Most of the recovered bodies had - except for the expected karies-teeth, lost and pulled teeth etc - a bunch of weird stuff happened to them: Amputated toes, broken ribs here and there (that had healed before the sinking, meaning they had survived the wound), some serious skull-cracking seemed to have happened to a few of the ol' mateys.
     While this is not uncommon at all - I have seen this in many other examples and museums - I must admit it was just a little too much: I wonder if my manliness would have been enough in those days. What if I could meet one of these 155 cm guys and see what he had to say about today? I can only assume Johan would kick my ass...

Johan the skeleton.

... and a total kick-ass scale model. It looked like 1:72 but I am not entirely sure. That's it for today and likely for another few days, the schedules full with pointless things to do, so see you in a while crocodile...

3 kommentarer:

  1. I've been there. A very impressive ship. The carvings on the stern were cool. maybe nice for us that it sunk, since it's now preserved, but a surprising disaster for the people at the time it was made.

    SvaraRadera
  2. Oh, you have? Were you visiting from another country or was it a domestic vacation, as they say?

    I must admit thinking the same "nice for us that it sunk" :)

    The lightning inside the museum was terrible though, but that was because something about the preserving of the wood, the guide said... I could have guessed it - when visiting Italy we were instructed not to photo the suits of armours in a museum! Camera-flashes seems to be the nemesis of museums...

    SvaraRadera
  3. I was visiting from another country, I live in the US (though more often than not wish I didn't). At the time of that trip I got to live briefly, for a summer, in Denmark, and took a vacation trip from there to Norway, Sweden, Finland and stole 3 days in St.Petersburgh.

    I took a few movies in the Vasa museum, but they didn't come out as much, the pictures needed a lot of adjustment in Photoshop, but ended up alright after that.

    SvaraRadera