museums and laundry

i woke up this morning and took my first run around the big lake just down the hill from my apartment - don't think that i will be doing that again... wayyy to slippery, so need to find a second hand store where i can get skates or skis because it is so pretty down there!

this afternoon ankur and i decided to go to two museums that are right next to each other.

first we hit the vasa museum which houses a large viking ship that sank after sailing for about 20 minutes on its first voyage, not so great.  anyhow it sank in 1628 and was under water until the 1950's.  because the water in the baltic sea doesn't have as much salt in it the worms that generally eat through shipwrecks in the open sea can't survive there, so the ship is still fully in tact.

the ship is huge and pretty impressive, and there was a free movie about the restoration and a tour both in english!  the ship was huge and the restoration was amazing... however apparently it was a bit too narrow to be sea-worthy.

right next door to the big vasa museum is the nordic museum... according to the guy who gave us a lecture last week nordic countries include: norway, denmark, sweden and finland whereas scandinavian countries include only norway, sweden and denmark... so this is sweden's kind of national museum and it was pretty interesting... they had a free audio tour which was actually fairly interesting and the museum focused primarily on what old nordic houses and outfits looked like... i really wish that i had socks like these to keep warm

or mittens and hats like these from the people who live far north in the laplands... the one with the huge pom pom is my personal favorite.

then we got to the best part of the museum the entire exhibit devoted to laundry.  one of my parents friends warned me before i came here that swedes are obsessed with laundry and laundry rooms.  i didn't quite know what this meant... but it turns out it is true.  i did laundry for the first time yesterday, this involved navigating a complex electronic booking process entirely in swedish and then there were a wide array of laundry machines inside the laundry room that magnetically unlocked for me during my scheduled period. mimmi the housing director at SSE warned us during our orientation that laundry rooms cause 95% of the fights in swedish apartment buildings... ankur and i got to witness some of the bi-products of these fights at the nordic museum today.

these are all letters that have been left in or outside swedish laundry rooms... definitely click and zoom into read them, they are pretty hysterical... hopefully nothing like this gets posted in my laundry room!