Stalin and Pickles

19052019

(NOTE: I am writing this retroactively, the internet on the ship was horrendous so it wont be as fresh)

Tallinn was a sleeper hit. I really wasn't expecting that much, and it turned out to be a really cool city, before we even get to the really cool tour we did.

Our tour wasn't until the afternoon, so we all got off the ship as early as we could to walk around the city. We took the quick shuttle to the center of town and were very surprised. The old part of Tallinn is all enclosed in the old Medieval wall of the city. It reminded me very much of Český Krumlov (https://danswritingsonnonsense.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-vienna-but-still-awesome-medieval.html). We wandered around a little and found a medieval wall to climb into.

Inside the wall they had pictures from the last 100 years of Tallinn's history, it was mostly a climb-up-and-see-the-city thing for 2 euro, but you also got a little recent (as the town has been around for 800 years, the last 100 year history is recent)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallinn

The old medieval part of the city is actually a UNESCO site.

We had to head back to the ship to catch our shore excursion, but not before laura and I grabbed a few bottles of beer, and a bottle of wine. Our intention was to drink the beer before getting on the ship and bringing the wine to our cabin for later, but the beer was so tasty we managed to finish it before the bus even got to back to the ship.

We made it back, snuck on our wine, and then headed out for the tour. I was originally skeptical, as it was pitched as a "Memory of Soviet Times" excursion that felt like it could be hokey. But it was pretty neat. The tour guide was dressed in an old Soviet Uniform and demanded our passports as we got on the bus, and searched our bags for recording devices. and when we got on the old beat up bus he held up a picture of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin as we all did (disappointingly small) shots of vodka and ate a pickle.

He then broke out of the character to explain that he infact hated the Soviets, and then discussed with us what it was like under the Soviets, and how things have changed.

The bus then took us to the naval museum area, mostly to dump us off with a view of the city, so he could point things off, and tell us about the prison that was nearby and how he had friends disappeared at this prison. From here we drove to have a picnic by the marina, here we had kali (which is their version of kvass, which I only now realize is what I was drinking on that homestay in Saint Petersburg way back when, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass ) and viineripirukas (pigs in a blanket). Really the whole excursion was an opportunity to talk to a local that lived through the Soviet Satellite state Estonia and the conversion to todays Estonia.

As I have discussed before, and may have failed to discuss this time around; cruises are dominated by older people. This cruise being a little bit more premium meant that it was almost exclusively old-moneyed-white Americans. This leads to various issues that I/Laura have with going on cruises, and it will likely be a while before we go on another one. I will try to get into that in my the final cruise day post, as I need to think about it some more.

I digress, being that all of the other people on our excursion *also* lived through the Cold War, they had questions about what it was like, and how Estonia can be doing so well now. The US/West had its own propaganda about how terrible it is in the east/Soviet world, and many of them havent kicked this mindset. I think they were expected ex-Soviet states to be shitholes, and were surprised that Estonia is doing great, cranking out programmers/developers/IT people in general. So it was interesting listening to the questions these people had, and the guide was happy to answer them, but I would have appreciated a smaller conversation over a beer to see what Estonia is really like, and what it meant for him/his family to go through the post-communist transition, and the accession to the EU. But alas, I wasnt going to be that asshole that dominates the tourguides time.

After the picnic the bus took us back to the ship, a little bit late, but not so late they left without us. We climbed the gangplank, and went to the top deck for the sail away ceremony.

Apparently many of the cruise lines other ships actually have sails, so the sail away ceremony is cool as there are actual sails being set and ropes doing things, but on this ship, that burns awful bunker fuel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil its basically what is left when you make all the good petrochemical products, its like one step above raw crude), all they do is fly a little pennant and blare the music.

We had some drinks, we chatted with other cruise guests, and we watched Tallinn fade away. I very much think Laura and I will visit again.

Maybe when I early retire, my Dad and I will take a vacation through Old Medieval towns, Tallinn included.

We eventually ate a good but not great dinner, retired to my parents cabin, drank some of that wine while half-watching On Her Majesty's Secret Service and chatting about the trip.

Home Again

27052019

Last morning of the vacation. Waking up early enough to pack, and eat the last of our snacks we headed out to the airport.

We had to take a train to the airport, a 20 minute ride, but the train station was a 20 minute walk from our apartment. We all survived the walk.

We got to the airport with enough time to try and find food, but all of the food we wanted was on the other side of passport control, we ultimately didn't eat anything because we kept going to the place only to realize it was the other side of a glass wall.

We did however find the fancy licorice we were looking. We picked up some of the Sea Buckthorn, the Berry and then some of the smoked licorice for my parents. So the airport wanderings weren't a total loss.

3 hours later we were back in Iceland, eating very expensive airport food, and then hurrying to passport control to get home. Laura got red-lighted at the portal, and then we got hurried along.

My parents flight was 30 minutes before mine, so I hugged them goodbye and waited around for Laura to catch up. Fortunately she did ultimately make it to the flight, all-be-it without her hair powder. I am guessing she was randomly selected for additional screening, and then the bag of un-labeled white powder caused some additional hang up. We made it to our flight.

Laura and I watched movies together by timing the press of the "start" button on our respective in-seat entertainment systems. We watched A Star is Born, which means not 24 hours later Laura is still humming Lady Gaga songs, The Favorite, which was cool because we were just wandering around 18th century palaces, so to see them in a contemporary setting was neat, and The Crimes of Grindelwald which disappointingly ended on a blatant money-grab to get you to see the sequel.

that ate up most of our 7 hour flight, we watched the mountains pass for the last leg of the flight, landed back in Seattle, took a Lyft home (on sale because of memorial day, we saved $4!) and got our typical post-travel Vietnamese food. This time i got 2 Banh Mi, Laura got her usual Pho and Spring Rolls, and we still walked out of there for less that $25.

We then slept with our humidifier on full blast, with our own blankets, in our own bed. it was glorious.

A lesson in telling one's boss they're wrong.

26052019

We ent up sleeping in a little after our late night, and our long day of walking (I walked over 25,000 steps). After missing the restaurant last night, we decided on one of their sister restaurants for brunch.

http://osterlanggatan17.se/en/

Similar cuisine, just in a different location. I was particularly interested because they had a halloumi burger and I have loved halloumi on a stick in the past, I imagine it would just be better between some bread.

I forget how not-cheesy halloumi is, it works as a great non-meat patty for burgers, its pretty dry, but not crumbly, and the lack of grease means when it does get fried, its not a sloppy mess. The on top of the fried brick of cheese was a pickled red cabbage, a yogurt sauce, and some greens. It came with a side of fries a a 1/4 cup of aioli.

It was a great consolation after missing the restaurant the night before.

Laura got the ham and cheese omelette, I have never seen eggs to effectively scrambled before, but the ham was a bit to smokey for me.

My dad got the crispy cod with a caviar butter sauce, which is probably one of the most decadent things I can think of, the butter itself was very rich, to have it tossed with caviar was very flavorful. And then my mom got a tartar of beef that none of us got to try because she ate it so quick. Im guessing it was great.

From our late lunch we walked to the Vasa museum. This place was amazing, it was a whole museum built up around a 17th century warship. The Vasa was to be the crown jewel of the Swedish navy as they fought the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth ). On orders of Gustav II Adolf (who is kinda the guy in Swedish history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus_Adolphus_of_Sweden) it was to be built larger than anything on the sea, with enough guns and gaudy bullshit to put the British fleet to shame.

Unfortunately, (and I blame the design engineer for this, though a special counsel convened at the time found no one to blame) it was built to top heavy to actually sail anywhere. It sank less than a mile into its maiden voyage. So the king demanded a huge ship, and that it be delivered sooner to take up station in the reserve fleet ready to smash the Polish-Lithuanians. But the guys on the ground during construction even knew it wasnt a sound ship; the captain had 30 men run back and forth across the deck to illustrate this fact for the Fleet Admiral, and the admiral had the exercise halted because even *he* believed the ship would capsize. Regardless, the ship was completed on time, and never made it out of the waters of Stockholm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

The museum in itself was an engineering marvel, everything up to the bottom 1/3 of the masts were in the building, the top 2/3 were never recovered. The museum walked visitors through the recovery and restoration process. It was salvaged in the 1960s, 333 years after it sank, and undertaking in itself, it was displayed for the 25 years of restoration work at a shipyard until it was finally placed into this museum. They found thousands of bits of history in the ship given that it was quickly submerged in the silt of the waterways. There were several bodies found in fantastic states of preservation to give historians a good idea of what 17th century sailors were up to.

Some of the Sails even survived

The overly-beautiful front and back of the vessel

Models of how the recovered it.

It is apparently Sweden's most visited museum, and rightly so.

It took us several hours to get through the museum, burning much of the afternoon, we hopped an Uber back to our neighborhood to put a plan for dinner together. Laura and I went on a hunt for more licorice to bring home, but given that it was a Sunday, and late afternoon the only places that might have had the fancy licorice we were looking for were closed. We ventured back to the apartment, and grabbed my parents to cross the street for a burger.

The burgers were ok, honestly we were pretty exhausted from the whole trip so this was an easy close, easy choice for us to eat, i don't regret the choice, but it wasn't that special. The most noteworthy part of the experience was that the place touted itself as a craft beer place, when in reality between them, and their affiliated bar next door, they only had 6 beers on tap, 2 locals, and 4 other "lesser" european(I mean not Heineken or Guinness, more like Hoegaarden and Pilsner Urquel) beers, and all of them were 80 SEK for a .4L (which boys and girls is less than 14oz. Im not paying $8+ for a short pour).

Anyways, we got home, planned our route to the airport, and went to bed.

Foodhalls, Dancehalls, really we need more -halls in the US

25052019

Woke up for a food tour. Laura and I ate the yogurt we purchased at 7-11 to amoe sure we weren't too hungry for the tour. The yogurt was a little chunky, and Laura used her superior detective.akills to read the English on the yogurt packaging, learning there were ancient grains mixed into the yogurt.

Anyways we took the metro two stops up to the Östermalms foodhall.

https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/mobil/

Our guide, and the 11 other participants all met up outside. The guide was very knowledgeable and wrangles the group well. This particular foodhall started in the 19th century. At some point in the 1800s the various vendors started struggling, to the point that the Stockholm city government had to take over the hall to make sure there would be local availability of food stuff. After several years of bad business under city ownership, the city instituted new laws forbidding the sale of food stuff in the street, effectively requiring them to move into the foodhalls, of which the city now owned the largest one.

We started with cheese, as pictures above. I don't remember what all the heeses were named, they were all cow cheese, two of them reminded me of milder parmeseans, one of them was interesting with pepper and cumin mixed in. We moved on to meat; slices of Cold smoked reindeer, took 3 weeks to smoke, warm smoked elk, which was like 8 hour smoke, and then a course ground reindeer salami, and a small beer. All of the smoked meats were good, the salami was my favorite. Apparently almost all of these meats that are consumed in Sweden are wild, they don't have reindeer farms.

From here we walked to another foodhall, this one in the basement of a mall, very much like our Asia explorations. This was the fish stop.

Here we had a seafood soup, which was a little spicy, the dish has been modernised with a sriracha aioli. The white mass there is a shrimp sandwich (sandwiches here are open face, stuff piled onto a slice of {usually rye} bread). This was ok, the shrimp was very subtle, the Mayo and whatever else was in there overpowered the shrimps. The last think there was fried herring with a Dill sour cream dollop. This was pretty tasty, I guess I've never had herring that wasn't pickled, so it had a slight fishiness balanced by the sauce, rather than the slimey vinegar of previous herring experiences.

Upstairs we had a tasting of licorice candies. Licorice is really big here, it's by far they're favorite candy.

We got a plain licorice, a smoked licorice, a sweet licorice and a candy coated (seabuck thorn) licorice. Personally I liked the plain, the most, then the candy coated, then the smoked and finally the sweet. Which isn't surprising, and I love Absinthe, which is primarily anise, which tastes similar to, though is not related to, licorice. The store claimed to have over 700 different kinds of licorice, including a whole slew of different candy coatings.

More walking and talking our way through city center to get to the chocolate shop.

https://www.chokladfabriken.se/en

Being that it is summer, we started with a chocolate sorbet. I've never had a non-fruity sorbet. It was very rich dark chocolate, here was no cream to cut the flavor, just straight frozen chocolate.

Then came a raspberry chocolate square, and a salted caramel dark chocolate with licorice shavings square. The length of the description corresponds to the flavor of each. The former wasn't that exciting, definitely quality chocolate, but not novel
The latter was very good. My father leans towards very dark chocolates, and he was blown away. He was as excited about this bite of chocolate as I was for the dumplings yesterday.

Our tour then ended with a fika in our neighborhood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_culture#Sweden

We had chocolate cake, and a carrot cake (with a cream cheese frosting). These cakes were good. We weren't explicitly here for the cake and coffee, we were here to have a fika.

Which if you haven't read the wiki, is basically a light meal where you.get together to have a coffee and catch up. It's less than a date, less than a sit down meal, but more than getting a coffee. It's a neat concept, but the group we were in was too big to sit together, so we only had one novel person at our table beyond my family. The lady worked for Google in Dublin, small world that we leave Seattle and still find tech employees.

With the tour done, we went to the swedish medieval museum. It was one of the better museums I have been too.

The walkthrough ran from the 1200s to the late 1600s. Which makes sense because that is the medieval period. The first written mention of Stockholm was in the 1250s.

That is actually said reference.

The museum took visitors through the life of the people of Stockholm, from the baker to the Noble. They had neat displays and vignettes of what things looked like, for my readers in Milwaukee it was very much like the Streets of Old Milwaukee at the Public Museum, but from 400 years earlier. Everything was in Swedish and English, they had some multimedia displays, and a special section with historical re-enactors that go out a live like their in medieval Stockholm for a week at a time.

https://medeltidsmuseet.stockholm.se/in-english/

Well worth a 2 hour wander, and it was free.


Staying on Gamla Stan we found another bar that had a Warren of basements to drink in. We had a few beers and headed out on a long stroll to get to our proposed dinner spot.

http://nytorget6.se/

This place was a little over a mile away, aonit took us out the the tourist center and into a hipster neighborhood.

We came to a park to have a sit, and just like hipster neighborhoods in Chicago and Seattle, it was slammed with families enjoying the first weekends of summer. The people watching was pleasant, other than the slightly higher proportion of blondes, it was just like Cal Anderson or Wicker Park.

We elected to stop for a quick bite and a drink before going to dinner. There was a neat deli accross from the park.

https://www.urbandeli.org/

We got beers, oysters (from Normandy) and a change board. I can't tell you exactly what was on the board, because our waiter didn't know, because the deli guys just sliced up meats and cheeses higgledy-piggledy. We had a prosciutto, peppered salami, a capocola, a salami, and small sausage bites that had been rolled in spices. There was two soft cheeses, two hard cheeses, and a blue cheese, all were good, pretty mild cheeses. For spreads there was an apple jam, an artichoke/garlic tapenade, and a plate of olives, pickled pepperoncini and cucumber.

There was quite a bit of food here, which turned out to be great. Because the restaurant we planned to hit for dinner had no space till 2145 *the next night*.

Still full of meat and cheese, we walked home, and Laura and I looked for a place to check out on the evening.

We settled on a place that sounded beat, and had been recommended by our food guide, Trägården.

It was about a mile and a half from our apartment, so easily walkable, and just long enough to help sober up on the return journey.

http://www.tradgarden.com/

It started drizzling on the walk, but not enough to discourage us. The venue was up the street and easy to find on the map, it was a little harder to find in person. It is actually under a big bridge. Fortunetely other people were going there, so we made our way down some stairs and under the bridge, around the badminton stadiums and boom there we were.

There were a few food trucks outside, and unfortunately a line to get in. We were looking to get in before 2300 as that's when they start to charge a cover.

The line moved quick, and we got to security around 2250...and then we paid 3900 SEK to get it...

And it was totally worth it. Upon clearing security we surveyed the whole place. It took us about 25 minutes to hurry through all the rooms. It was basically 5 different venues. The main stage was outside but covered by the bridge, there the DJ played mainstream house-y music, most people were here. The music was loud enough to enjoy, but the open air space meant you could move a little bit further away and have conversations. The next venue was a deep industrial/house music, the kind with disorientingly repetitive music, stomach churning bass, and accompanying flashing lights. Then up some stairs and around some corners and you have a Top 40 type club, the kinda stuff you would hear at any bar/club. And through some more poorly lit doorways and past drunk kids you find another outdoor space. We didn't spend much time here because it was semi enclosed but smoking was allowed, so we avoided it, the first walk through they were playing country, and the second walk through they were playing some swedish music. And the final bar, that we only found after seeing from the outside, was playing Indie music in a more chill atmosphere.

The place was super cool. There were probably 10 different bars secreted aroind the place. They had chill out areas, a pizza oven (with pricey pizza), a burger spot (that sold you a burger *and* a beer) and an NES hooked up to a projector throwing Mario kart up on one of the bridge stanchions. I bet the place could support 2500 people.

The city/national government puts personnel into these venues, and in the bar/club neighborhoods to keep people from getting out of line. They weren't cops, they didn't have guns, or batons, or even handcuffs. But they are around, being vigilant, and calling people down or escorting them out of the venue if necessary.

It felt very comfortable. Despite the pricey door charge drinks were cheap, we were buying draft beer for <$6.

The place was generally young, but there were all kinds of people present, including people our age and older. Again, other than the larger proportion of blondes, it was very much like an event at home.

We hung out for a few hours, drank a few beers, people watched and danced. It was a great time. After about a half beer too many, we decided the walk home, and inevitable drunk food we would find would cure an upset tummy.

Bout half way home we found a kebab spot. I got a felafel wrap, and Laura lamb/beef shwarma wrap. It was exactly what we needed.

Upon getting home, we watched a little more TV (I ate some of the chips we purchased in the Netherlands), pulled the fold out couch mattress to put on the floor (the fold out was terrible). And promptly passed out.

Great menagerie of game meat

24052019

The ship booted is pretty early in the morning. And they killed our WiFi that morning so we couldn't figure out how to get to apartment.

We sniped wifi from the boose cruise terminal to order an Uber. Thank goodness they have them here. We got taken to the immediate neighborhood of our apartment. We are staying in the Gamla Stan neighborhood, which is the oldest part of Stockholm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamla_stan

The original fortress and the current palace are on the island.

Given that it is so old, it is predominantly a pedestrian area so our car could only get us so close.

That's ok because it was only 0900 and we can't even think to drop our stuff at the apartment until 1100. So we squatted in a local cafe that had WiFi. We began planning out our day drinking coffees, and then beers waiting to hear back from the apartment people's on when to drop our stuff.

We spotted our dinner locale, and how easy it was to tour the palace museum complex.

After waiting the appropriate amount of time we got into our apartment to secure our stuff, we headed out to the Royal Palace.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Palace

It's a neat museum complex, you buy one ticket and it gets into 4 subordinate museums. We started with the Royal Apartments, where previous Swedish Kings/queens lived. It is still used today for ceremonial purposes, including recognizing new ambassadors to Sweden.

The lighting isn't great sorry.

From here we went into the Royal treasury. This was obviously in the basement of the palace, because that's the most secure place to keep crowns and sceptors and such. I don't have any pictures, because it was strictly forbidden, and I was intimidated by then probably high school aged docents.

From here we hit the armoury, but that was under maintenance so all we saw was the Royal carriages.

The next museum was that of the Gustav IIIs antiques. The swedish king Gustav III reigned in the late 18th century, and was actually related to Russia's Catherine the Great (I'll write about her later, i need to catch up on the cruise days).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_III_of_Sweden

He travelled to Rome incognito to buy art, but everyone knew who he was, so they still probably upcharged him.

That piece right there is a statue of Endymion (who has a cool story of his own
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endymion_(mythology) ).

Gustav purchased it from some art dealer in Rome, and at the time everyone thought it was from maybe the late 17th century. And until recently everyone just figured it was indeed
300ish year old. When in fact it actually dates back to the 2nd century.

And the final portion was the Tre Kroner.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tre_Kronor_(castle)

This was pretty neat, the museum was built into the excavated portions of the castle. As with most palaces/castles it has been expanded upon and partially destroyed over the years. The museum traces the development of the structure while providing snippets of history of the larger Swedish kingdom.

Above you can see he earliest iteration that could reasonably be described as a castle, and below the castle at it's height in the 1700s.

Completing our museum run for the day we wanted to go to dinner, but the place wasn't open yet. So we went to an Irish bar for beers and bar snacks. The food was ok, but the building was fascinating.

We went into the basement and it was huge, it sprawled much larger than the footprint of the building above, but none of it was uniform. You had to duck under doorways, step up uneven floors, and squint through ill-lit hallways.

After wasting enough time, we went to dinner.

http://www.restaurangbrinken.com/

The food was fantastic. We opened with a knäckepizza, a thin crispy rye bread with cream cheese spread, with peaches and pumpkin seeds, and a balsamic vinaigrette reduxion drizzled over it. It was a little sweet, and a little savory, very interesting. We also got the smoked reindeer with horseradish on rye. Reindeer is a little less gamey than deer, I would describe it as if deer were domesticated like cows and fed well, they would taste like reindeer.

For the mains my mom got the pulled boar burger, burger is a bit of a misnomer, I think it's a miss-translation, it was really a pulled meat sandwich. The boar was rich, and they used a very sharp mustard that proved a solid combination. My father got the wild sausage, which was combined boar, reindeer and spices. It was very spicy. Laura got the swedish meatballs, pork, and slathered in a tasty mushroom sauce.

But really, I got the best meal. I got their pork stuffed dumplings. It was exceptional. I am worried that the frequency with which I describe something as being "one of the best things ive ever eaten" in this blog would lead out to believe that I use that term fleetingly. In reality, we have done a good job finding good restaurants, and making the right choices at said restaurants. The pork was ground and perfectly browned. The pork had spiced folded in, dominant flavor of clove or nutmeg I'm not sure, I'd have to re-smell both spiced to determine which. The dumplig dough was thick and rich enough to support to wholesome flavors of the pork, it was soft enough to not need chewing.

I would highly recommend you come to this restaurant if I Stockholm, hell if you are within 50 miles off this city come in and eat here.

We went home and staved off the it is long enough to finish this post.

Sea Day Snores

18052019

Day at sea. The WiFi is pretty poor on the ship. We have 1 login for the 4 of us and connectivity is an issue, so it is hard to get through these posts.

I try to write them into a Google doc and then cut+paste into the blog as I get better internet.

As far as the day goes, we slept in late, and spent the day reading and watching the sea.

Given that this is a smaller ship, there is less to do on these slow days. Only one outdoor and one indoor bar, with few drink specials, the dining room, the buffet and a small snack bar. I appreciate the smaller vessel.for other reasons, the tours are more intimate, onboarding/offloading is quick and easy with only 200 other passengers.l, and most importantly the vessel can sneak into ports closer to the destination.

Also the cabins are very spacious, this combined with having my parents here, leads us to be spending more time in our cabin hanging out that out n about getting happy hours and playing Scrabble. Also they print the New York times crossword, which is wayyy harder than the one Holland America was printing for us. And it's no fun being bad at crosswords.

I don't remember what dinner was, or what time we finally went to bed. But the day was generally uneventful.

Meat Sleeve > Hot Dog Bun

17052019

Today's stop in Copenhagen, Denmark. My mother scheduled a Segway tour in the afternoon, one that had originally been a shore excursions through the ship, but apparently didn't get enough participants and was cancelled. So in the morning we planned to walk around the Freetown Christiania area and maybe a museum.

Unfortunetely it was pouring, making the walking very unappetizing. We took a cab to the entrance to the microstate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania

In addition to the pouring rain, it was like 0800, meaning almost no one was awake, and none of the businesses were open. We only walkend a few hundred yards into the are before we decided to try a museum for the morning activity instead.

On the walk towards the old town we stopped in a bakery to use some wifi and decide on a museum. The place was actively making bread so it smelled delicious, placating some of our frustrations over the weather and the walking.

We decided on the Thorveldsen Museum, as it was in the heart of the museum area, and we could decide on something else while travelling there, and it appeared smaller, which would give us enough time to get back to the port area to hop on the Segway tour.

The museum building itself is spectacular.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorvaldsen_Museum

Every room has different murals on the cieling and different tile patterns on the floor. And obviously they are full of art.

Thorveldsen was a prolific sculptor and many of his final works were presented, and nor interestingly almost all of the surviving plaster test/model scultures were presented.

Marble sculptures typically weren't simply birthed from the imagination and skill of the artist. Typically they would sculpt the figure out of clay, and then make a mold, and then cast the model in plaster. From here the artist would scale it up to the intended final size and use the plaster cast as the model from which they sculpt the marble.

Pretty neat.

After meandering through this museum my mother decided to try and sneak on the noon segway tour as the weather was supposed to get worse in the afternoon. We hopped in a cab back to the cruise terminal area.

Aaand it started raining harder, and the Segway staff was on a different tour. My parents, somewhat defeated, were willing to wait until the 1300 tour (it was then 1130), but were still on the fence all together in participating in the tour as it was raining so hard. Laura and I were not ready to waste 90, minutes of our 6 hours in Copenhagen waiting for a tour that might not even be running. My parents decided to head back to the ship (only a 5 minute walk from here) while Laura and I headed back to the older area of the city.

Our first stop was a hot dog cart. Many years ago Laura came to Denmark with a school trip, and the hotdogs here left a deep impact. I have, prior to this trip, prior to even planning for this trip, heard about the hot dogs. She described them as the most efficient delivery of cased meats to your stomach beyond hot-dog smoothies. Rather than splitting the bun longitudinally placing the sausage, and slathering in condiments, they core out the middle of the bun, squirt the condiments into the bun and slide the sausage into the bun.

It is honestly a superior method, the condiments end up more evenly distributed along the bun/meat, the enclosed bun tends to be less messy, making walking and eating easier. And then the regional advantage of just having good sausages just put it over the top.

While walking and eating said sausage and bread pocket, we heard quite the hubbub nearby, and spotted flares getting launched into the sky. Approaching the fray we realized a Dannish sports team must have won a major event, and writing this several days later, I am still unsure who won what. But the streets were wild, the streets were blocked off by police and there was a sea of people wearing yellow jerseys drinking and singing nationalistic/sport songs. Without Danish currency, or the right colors we just observed.

Laura was physically satisfied by a light meal, and emotionally satisfied by the vindication of 20 year old memories. Which was great cause then I could convince her to come with me to another museum.

I wanted to go to the Danish National Museum.

https://en.natmus.dk/museums-and-palaces/the-national-museum-of-denmark/

This was a really great museum, it was a little busy, it was a rainy weekend, so there were lots of kids around. The museum was accessible to children, but not a kid's museum. The primary section Laura and I walked through traced the life of a Dane from each class of life from 1600-2000.

They had a bunch of artifacts and informational displays (including English). It was very cool following the timeline of the both the lower classes and the aristocracy through the last 400 years, this exhibit naturally moved into a but about the Danish empire. They had small colonies in India, West Africa, the Caribbean and Greenland. And most of the Danish wealth came from a form of triangular trade, slaves from West Africa being taken to the Caribbean to work the plantations, and then raw materials coming back to Europe for sale or manufacturing processes. The museum appropriatly tackled the reprehensible nature of slavery, it wasn't apologist, but it recognized the suffering of the humans being exploited. By this point in the museum we were getting worried about time, and overwhelmed by other patrons, and thusly didn't read every plaquard.

Beyond these two exhibits we also zoomed through Denmark in the Dark and Medieval ages, and about ½ of the special Viking Exhibit.

This museum deserves a second visit. And Conpenhagen deserves another multiday visit.

We’ll be back.

We wandered around town a little more looking for a grocery store to buy another bottle of wine, ultimately got a bottle of French Rose (perfect for a visit to Denmark) and taxied back to the ship.

The rest of the day was uneventul, I'm pretty sure Laura and I fell asleep watching whatever movie the ship was playing.

Strategic fake rivers

16052019

We travelled through the Kiel Canal. It was effectively a day at sea. They pitched the experience as a super special exciting thing, but in reality it was a sea day, but we could see land on both sides.

The Kiel Canal itself is about 60 miles, and it shaves about 250 miles off of travel times rather than going around the Jutland peninsula. The Germans built it in the late 19th primarily for military purposes, it links the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, so they could move their fleet around quickly.

Beyond that my dad taught Laura and I how to play sheeps head, we played a few rounds and then all broke for a nap.

And writing this a few days late, I don't recall what I ate. Which means it wasn't super great.

No pictures no fun food. Sorry.

Bonding over Beer

Day 8

15052019

First full day on the cruise, stopping in Harlingen, Netherlands.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlingen,_Netherlands

The town is pretty small, we are glad we didn't do any of the ships excursions because I feel like it would have been pricy for what it would have gotten us. We just walked around the town. I think it would be most aptly described as being quaint, most of the town was still asleep, it was a weekday after all.

The canals on the town are so small that they have a crew of guys that bike around to open and close the canals and raise/lower bridges.

We happened to be stopping to use a public toilet as the canal tour boat hired by our cruise ship was passing through, so we got to see how manual the process was.

Given that the whole time in Port was relatively short we headed back to the cruise ship. Laura and I stopped off at a grocery store to bring in some extra wine on board. We also snagged a discount bottle of beer to drink on the sock before getting on board.

While enjoying that beer in the pleasant weather security approached us: “what're you drinking there?” and struck up a conversation, we basically got a portion of the info we would have gotten had we taken the tour. He himself was port security out of Amsterdam and travelled around to support these smaller ports. He lived in Friesland.

He told us about how Friesland used to be a separate landmass, but was connected to the rest of Holland by landfilling. And that they actually have their own language. He talked about the beer we were drinking, that it was from a monastary in the dunes of Holland. The monks have been brewing this beer for centuries.

He pointed out that Harlingen has a long history of fishing, whaling and exploring the northern seas, he claims a Frieslander discovered both Iceland and Greenland before the Norwegian Vikings did. Which is exactly what Tord the Norwegian in Iceland told us would happen. All the various flavors of sailors around here claim they discovered America, they only seem to agree that Columbus was 400 years late to the party.

After getting back on the ship easily with the wine, Laura decided she needed more wine and we went back to the grocery store to grab another €8 bottle of wine and spotted a bottle of Aperol for €11, which is a great price honestly. And given that it's not actually liquor we thought we could get it on. Aperol and the tonic they have on the ship? Aperol spritzes on a cruise? Sounds great.

No dice, security caught it, didn't have a problem with the wine, but took our bottle of Aperol to give us when we get off the ship. So now we have 3 days in Sweden to drink up a bunch of Aperol.

The next exciting part of the day was dinner. Laura and I ordered the peppered tofu entree as an appetizer to split, and it was, whelming. Not great, not bad, would have been a disappointing main course, but as an app it was acceptable. I ordered a mushroom sauced roast duck, and Laura got a chorizo and shrimp dish on couscous.

My duck was pretty good, not great. And Laura's dish came sans chorizo, my father got the same thing, and his was also chorizo-less. It was so conspicuously absent we had to check the menu again to make sure. I don't even recall what we got for desserts.

After dinner we went to my parents cabin, which is slightly larger, they have a couch one can stretch out on, ours feet hang off of. There we drank some of the wine we snuck onto the ship.

Basement beers and sneaky wines

Early day by virtue of checking out of the AirBnB, we packed up our things, tidied up the apartment and dropped our bags with the proprietor, a very nice lady that lives on the premises.

http://www.rose170.com/

We knew we were boarding the vessel that afternoon so we didn't get into anything to exciting.

Laura found a quick morning activity, a walk through the Berghoff. This was a little neighborhood that was made up of unmarried Catholic women that were involved with the church but not nuns. And after the Dutch adopted Protestantism as the official religion this became a ghetto of sorts for Catholics, and when the church in the neighborhood was handed over to the Anglican congregation of the city.

the Catholics had to build a secret church in some houses. It was pretty neat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begijnhof,_Amsterdam

We walked down the street to get a sandwich from a local cafe. ¾ of us got a grandma's meatball sandwich, which was very good, though I would have described it as a meatloaf sandwich, and I had the curry chicken sandwich just to change it up (I intended to get the grandmas meatball sandwich too, but figured we should get some variety). All of the sandwiches were exactly what we needed inexpensive, tasty food that didn't require much in the way of decision making.

After the sandwich we went accross the street to a bar to waste more time. While drinking the beers we were provided entertainment by the beer deliver guys. All of the taps, and seemingly much of the storage is in the basement of the bar, which isn't all that uncommon, but was unique about this place (and I'm guessing older cities in general), is they didn't have room to waste to put in a whole staircase, so the way to the basement is through a trapdoor in the middle of a bar, and down a ladder. Watching these guys wrestle kegs of beer down the ladder was impressive. They obviously do this all the time, in fact it made me truly appreciate he strong man competitions where they through kegs over field goal posts.

Laura drank her beer quick so we could run to the grocery store and pick up some more snacks and wine for the ship. The ship had a 3 bottles per cabin limit before they would start taking then away. And given the price of alcohol on the ship, bringing on a €8.50 bottle of wine was wise.

We returned to the bar to retrieve my parents and then back the 3 blocks to grab our bags.The proprietor’s son was left in charge of waiting for us to get put bags. He was very surprised to see a family of four when he was in charge of only my/Laura's 2 backpacks, and a small rolling carry-on, my mom's rolling carry-on, my dad's medium duffle and my mom's wierd stuff sack that she has had for at least the 30 years I've been around. So we said our goodbyes and or thank yous and got on the tram to the central terminal. With a transfer to another train we were at the cruise terminal and on the ship in about 45 minutes.

Given how easy it was to get the bottle of wine on board (no one remarked on it at all) Laura and I were tempted to run back into the city to grab some more. But instead decided to nap on the couch.

Given how Iceland never got dark after our 8 hour overnight flight, and Laura and I had stayed up late both nights prior to a location change we never got over the jet lag. So we welcomed having a privet space, and enough room to spread out our stuff. So we napped, basically until the ship was leaving Amsterdam.

We observed the departure and some of the canal/river exiting the area, and returned to our cabin to nap some more.
Eventually we got room service. Knowing that many people went through some kind of journey to get on the vessel, the room service offered the same food that was in the dining room, as many guests may not have been ready to make their way to the public areas of the vessel.

Anyways, the food was ok, again if I wasn't logging what I did and ate, probably wouldn't be writing home about it. The soups were probably the best part of the meal. I had a butternut squash soup that was probably 40% cream/butter and 60% squash, so it was delicious. Laura had minestrone soup. And then for our mains I wanted the spaghetti and I was feeling a little under the weather, and a bunch of carbs sounded great. Laura got the bacon wrapped scallops.

Then we watched the 4 hour epic of the 1996 full text production of Hamlet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(1996_film)

And then went to sleep.

Flowers!

Day 6

12052019

We again got to sleep in, and ate some pastries Laura and I nabbed from the grocery store (who incidently didn't take credit cards). Our activity for the day was a tour of the koekenhof, which are the famous tulip fields.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keukenhof

The park is set up to flower at different times so when visitors come they still see something. But the fields themselves hat support the Dutch tulip industry had bloomed in previous weeks and we're thusly empty fields. Which is kinda disappointing. But Washington has their own tulip fields so we can more easily catch those next year.

On the drive out of Amsterdam the guide briefly discussedthe tulipmania of the 17th century. In the 1660-1670s everyone wanted tulips, and a speculative market developed around the harvests. People were buying futures on tulip bulbs, and the futures contracts for the right kind of bulb were trading at the value of a nice house on the main canals of Amsterdam (those houses are now selling for upwards of $1000USD/sqft).

We walked all around the canals viewing the flowers.

We left a little bit or Sicily here too, again in proximity to ducks. I think she would have enjoyed trying to walk into the flower beds to have a pee, mashing the flowers in the process.

We grabbed some fries and curry ketchup as a snack and continued the meandering.

We finally got back on the bus, and napped on the ride back into the city. The return ride took a little longer due to traffic. But I think the propensity for bicycling and mass transit means it wasn't that bad for a city of 800,000.

We headed back to the airbnb, drank some beers that we had picked up at the grocery store (if I didn't mention it before, beer is super cheap, paid like <€7 for 2 6 packs of beer. We headed to another food hall, this one in the mall. https://thefooddepartment.nl/ I know a mall food court doesn't sound very good, but it was great, and the food stalls themselves were more than just Auntie-Anns Pretzels and Sbarro's. Laura and I ate from a Szechuan stall, I got a Jian Bing sandwich, it's like a Chinese shwarma sandwich. It had roast duck, and spices and cabbage and happiness. Laura had a spicy-cumin noodle soup. I watched he guy handpull the noodles that went into her soup. My dad had a lamb burger that he said was solid, and given that he didn't share any, I dont doubt it. My mom had a poke bowl on quinoa, and a plate of zucchini fries. The fries were breaded, and tender, but not too greasy. From here we went back to the Central station to hop on a canal tour. This was free with our ticket for the tulip fields. We sat on the outside back of the canal boat so we got 0 tour-guiding and just looked and took badly lit pictures.

It was nice to see Amsterdam and not also be keeping an eye out for a zooming scooter or whizzing cyclists or silently prowling electric cars.

The homes were beautiful, both architecturally and interior-decoration wise. We spotted buildings currently lived in that were built in the 1660s, meaning older than my home country.

It was relatively late night, we headed back to the Airbnb to drop my parents off and shortly thereafter Laura and I went to wander through the Red Light District.

We walked there as it is close, and it has always been around the older part of town, as it serviced the sailors that were coming in from the main canal. It was a little after midnight when we got there. And it was admittedly a Monday night, but the place was pretty dead. There were drunk people wandering about, but the place wasn't packed. More than half of the girls in the windows were not occupied, so there weren't many people *in* getting serviced. We went into one bar that Laura had researched that was supposed to be pretty hopping, but when we got there we doubled the patronage, so we left without paying €7 for a Heineken. We went to the next bar that was allegedly 24hrs, but when we went to order the beer they said they were closing in <30 mins. So we left there too.
We did find a coffeeshop that was open later, so we sat in there till they closed at 1am. And then took a long circuitous route home

High stakes Frogger

12052019

Day 5

Finally got to sleep in. All of us slept in until at least 0900 Laura got up first to do some stretching and yoga, I finally got up amd started looking at what it takes to get in the Rijksmuseum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijksmuseum

It's the Dutch national Museum, seeing that we went to only the one museum in Iceland I was feeling the itch to sauntering around and lookin at old stuff.

We purchase some tickets online and head out for breakfast. On the way to the tram that took us to the museum we stopped at a cafe for breakfast. I had a ham and cheese sandwich, Laura had a ham, cheese and pineapple sandwich, my dad had an omelette, and my mom had a savory tomato-spinach pancake. The savory pancake was basically a pizza, but on a crepe instead of crust, it wasn't bad. Also we obviously had beers, as it was basically lunch, so that's fair.

We made our way to the tram, which involved crossing a bike path, a street, a tramway, another street, and another bike path. Crossing the street here is crazy. You gotta keep an eye out for bikes, because you won't hear them coming. But you have to time it so that you can get across the bike lanes *and* then get across the street as the cars come.

We safely made it to the tram, used our multiday pass for the tram and got to the museum square.

The pre-purchased tickets got us in quick, and we wandered around the museum.

That's a bust of St. Fredrick, that they actually kept some bits of the very same after he was canonized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_of_Utrecht

Some unicorn horns.

The library, which is an active library, you can do research here through a sign up and wait-time process.

There was much more to see, the museum traces Duth art from about 1100 to modern day. You should check it out.

From the meseum we went to a bar.

https://cafegollem.nl/

They had about a half dozen of their own beers and another half dozen guest beers, in addition to over a hundred different beers in bottles/cans.

They also had a cat.

Every beer we tried was great, and all of them were from the Netherlands.

We also got a sausage, and cheese board for snacking.

The sausage in particular was great. It was organic pork, course ground, and spiced with cubeb that really made it pop.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_cubeba

From here we went to dinner. We went to a Surinamese restaurant. Overall it was pretty good. The flavors we're unique and interesting, but there was very little difference across the dishes we selected. There were noodle dishes with beef and lamb, a fried rice and chicken dish, and a chicken and lamb dish with roti. The roti was dry and not inpressive honestly. The chicken and beef was great, the lamb was a little dry, and the fried rice was good, but not my style, it tasted almost smokey. My favorite part were the noodles, they were like chow mein but with Indonesian flavors.

I suppose it was difficult for this meal to be really impressive after our last few dinners.

Laura and I then went to the grocery store to try and get snacks, and we saw we could buy 6 packs of beer for €3.75 we came home with beer in addition to the snacks.

Took it easy the rest if the night.