After the end of my program, my parents came up to visit me in Stockholm, and we traveled around Scandinavia for the final week and a half of summer. I wasn’t trying as hard to photodocument this trip nicely, so you just get the lightly-explained photo reel of arbitrary things I did take pictures of.
Stockholm, Sweden
The Vasa Museum, as recommended by Lucia. It’s a little hard to really grasp the scale from this picture, but the Vasa is huge, and the museum was very cool!
This frog-shaped cake was on the tastier end of prinsesstårta I’ve tried in Stockholm, but it’s also definitely one of the cutest!
Helsinki, Finland
Liddol creachers!
More joyous beasts! Look at that zest for life!
The National Library of Finland in Helsinki—gorgeous ceiling art!
The Rock Church, with very cool rough-hewn stone walls and spiralling bronze ceiling. Allegedly has great acoustics, although sadly they weren’t playing the organ when we dropped in.
Trillby and Chadwick, a turn-of-the-century detective agency-themed speakeasy. The street door was totally unmarked, and you entered to a tiny atrium about the size of a well-appointed portable toilet. Apparently there was supposed to be some sort of puzzle/secret to find in the entrance room before they let you into the main room, but I think the bartender was just bored when we arrived for lack of customers, since he let us in straightaway. A little disappointing, since the mini escape room part was what I was most excited about here, but oh, well.
Oslo, Norway
Apparently the Norwegians are very fond of shrimp…RIP to the one lil guy on the floor 😦
This seemed like it would appeal to some of you on principle, so here:
This is Gol Stave Church, an impressively well-preserved stave church at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History.
The museum also had a very nice couple of exhibits on Norwegian historical craftsmanship and cultural dress that I enjoyed, although I had to hustle through them since it was nearly closing time.
Bergen, Norway
On the way from Oslo to Bergen, our train stopped to see this waterfall—plus a (to me) unexpected dance performance up on the hill by the waterfall. I think the dancer was supposed to be a huldra, a slightly siren-adjacent forest spirit in Norwegian folklore.
Now in Bergen proper, we had a little sailing trip in the harbor on a vaguely viking-inspiret boat for the sake of my dad’s boat enjoyment.
…And a pipe organ concert for my mom’s pipe organ enjoyment. Apparently there’s an annual European pipe organ convention in Bergen, who knew?
Kibby!!
The funicular tracks up one of Bergen’s seven (rather small) encircling mountains.
Seattle, WA, USA
After Bergen, I headed home for just a couple days to slightly get over my jet lag before moving back into Claremont. The creatures:
Me getting once again personally victimised by low-quality overpriced American marzipan and Seattle’s rather marzipan-inappropriate climate in the pursuit of homemade prinsesstårta.
Claremont, CA, USA
…and that’s a wrap! If any of you have actually read this to its end, thanks for coming along on my summer with me. At time of writing (a week into the fall semester), I’m finally done crocheting hexagons and moving on to blocking them with the help of Sontag’s unreasonably large bulletin boards. There might be one more update here once I finally get to put them all together into a blanket in order to tie up the final loose end of this summer’s narrative—we’ll see how busy I am by then, though.
As a reward for your diligent readership, come find me anytime to tell me you’ve gotten this far and I’ll make you Swedish pancakes or something. They’re pretty good, and I’ve been playing with ways to make the recipe various-allergen-friendly, so the odds of them poisoning you are relatively low unless it’s on purpose! What more can you ask for?? See you then! 😀
Lyra Cromwell 