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.