Tag Archives: Museum

Jun23

The Nobel Prize Museum

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Friday, 31-May-2024


On my last day in Stockholm, I went to the first museum that I saw when I originally opened Google Maps to look at Stockholm.

I’d actually picked my apartment because of how close it was to the Nobel Prize Museum – Maps showed the museum front and center, and it just seemed like such a cool place to center my adventures on that I didn’t think twice.

For one reason or another, though, it fell off the priority list once I was in Stockholm. It’s not like I went, and it didn’t look interesting… I mean, I think I walked past it once or twice? For some reason that I couldn’t say, it just didn’t excite me as much as the art museum, the Vasa, or the Djurgården did.

Maybe it’s that the Nobel Prize has been… tainted a bit in recent years, thanks to some high-profile Peace Price recipients taking the prize and immediately starting in on their own murdering spree… but whatever the reason, I found myself on my last morning in town having never stepped foot into the museum.

I also found myself, on my last morning in town, with almost three hours extra.

Hmm.



I took those three hours, and checked out the museum.


It was smaller than I expected, firstly – but absolutely PACKED with memorabilia and informational placards (<sigh> my favorite…). There were test sets, beakers, pens and pipes. Clothing, animatronic figures, and suitcases from refugees. Each recipient is asked to donate some interesting object, ideally connected to their prize, to the museum… and the width and breadth of donations was simply jawdropping.

I wandered, took a tour, and even heard a discussion about why the committee has declined to take away prizes after they’ve been awarded. It makes sense; it was something I’d heard before, of course, but hearing it in the museum was a nice addition to the tour – it’s a challenging situation, and hearing them address it front-and-center was appreciated.

Alongside, the history of the prize was a neat thing to learn about – I knew it was founded privately by Alfred Nobel, of course, and that the fortune that powered it was based on the invention of dynamite, but learning the details was really neat. Specifically that explosives weren’t rare at all prior to Dynamite – what Nobel invented was, instead, a way to store and detonate them safely and consistently.

Prior to Nobel, people would just kinda… set up nitroglycerine, and then it’d explode at some point. Probably vaguely when they wanted it to, even! Nobel’s detonator allowed them to trigger the explosion specifically when they wanted to – reducing the number of accidental deaths significantly. Then, Dynamite itself, allowed the Nitroglycerine to be transported safely with significantly less fear of randomly exploding in the train or carriage because you hit a bump. Which, for me at least, would be a really big advantage.

So… good museum. I’m very glad I made time for it, in the end!




As an aside, specifically to the voracious readers among my readers, I got a new book to read out of this! Klara and the Sun, written by a Nobel Literature Prize recipient, seems really interesting… and I’m definitely excited to dive into it! Mainly because it sounds neat and pertinent to the contemporary explosion of AI, but also because the Animatronic sculpture in the museum was really neat.

Jun21

The Nordiska Museet of Stockholm

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Tuesday, 28-May-2024


I’d first seen the Nordiska Museet after wandering around near the Vasa Museum – It’s a staggeringly beautiful building on the Djurgården island, though unfortunately it did close a bit early in the day… which meant I couldn’t do a double-header of both the Vasa and the Nordiska.

But hey – that meant I had a mission to go back to, now didn’t it? I do love quests and missions, so… I won’t complain.


Heading in on Tuesday after the National Gallery worked perfectly – I was trying to rest my poor walking muscles a bit, and so decided to take one of the electric scooters, which left me more than energetic enough to dive into the museum itself. I did grab a quick cup of coffee first, along with some glorious chocolates, to fortify myself… but that’s just good tactics, right?

The museum itself was… not quite what I was expecting. Not in a bad way, though!

You see, I was expecting something like a natural history museum, or a history museum. Something describing the geology of Sweden, or perhaps the history of human settlement? But instead, I got something similar, but at the same time more direct and grounded – The Nordiska Museet of Stockholm discussed the culture of Sweden, and how it evolved over time.

There’s overlaps with a history museum, to be sure, but it was a really interesting shift that I can’t say I’ve ever really seen before. It’s subtle, but the exhibits were focused on discussing the people of Sweden, instead of the events, which lent it a far more human feeling than the almost sterile “this happened, then that happened” nature of many other exhibits.

Neither is bad, by any stretch of the imagination! Knowing the raw details is key, but hearing the stories of individuals, and how one person may have lived their life during each of the archetypical ages of Swedish Culture… it struck. It hit hard, in some cases, and I’ll freely admit that I teared up at some of the descriptions of people. Two specific stories come to mind; one of a couple from a woodmill town, who met after moving to the new urban world (from the smaller farming and fishing villages), and raised a family in spite of the challenges – and the story of a woman fleeing from World War 2 named Selma, who fled Estonia leaving her mother behind trying to build a safer life for her son in Sweden.

It’s an interesting bend to the traditional museum, and not at all what I expected from the soaring gothic-style building the exhibits were housed in.

While it was unexpected, it was not unappreciated. It hit close to home, and I’ll absolutely be thankful for this interested and unexpected glimpse into life across the ages.

Jun19

The one and only Vasa – The Vasa Museum

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The one and only Vasa – The Vasa Museum

Monday, 27-May-2024


Somehow, my younger self never learned about the Vasa. When I was learning whistfully about the discovery and exploration of the Titanic, and the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald, my education somehow skipped right over the sinking, refloating, and near-complete restoration of one of the largest age-of-sail warships ever constructed.

(Editor’s Note: Double-checking that statistic, it seems that Ben was under a misunderstanding… While the Vasa is, in fact, quite huge for its time and weighed in at ~1,200 tons displacement, it wasn’t comparable to the largest warships of the age of sail, which weighed in at ~6,900 tons displacement… though granted, those ships were launched nearly 250 years later)

In retrospect, though, that doesn’t surprise me too much. One of the interesting things that I’ve been realizing on this trip is just how England-focused my education has been. Sweden’s empire, for example, wasn’t ever covered in my New England schooling… instead, Great Britain’s empire was discussed, with a small footnote that some other countries may have also had empires around the same time…

Interesting, and a good thing to recognize the origin and limits of my knowledge.



After wandering around, finding closed museum after closed museum, seeing the Vasa Museum open was a pleasant and appreciated surprise. Granted, I arrived fairly close to closing time… Still, I had nearly an hour before the doors locked, and chatting with the docent gave me the intel that I could be confident that I’d be able to see most everything on offer in that time.

Off I went!



As can probably be guessed from the pictures above, the Vasa is huge. Like… seriously huge. Massive, towering above you as you first walk in, with preserved timbers looking just vaguely damaged and degraded enough to know that, while this is undoubtedly a ghost ship, it’s at least more “living” than “undead” at this point.

As has been the theme to this adventure, I wandered.

Through exhibits about the building, launch, and immediate sinking, to the discovery and re-floating. (Seriously. The Vasa was launched, sailed 1,300m, and immediately sank. A small gust of wind capsized it. Turns out, science has come a long way.) The glorious placards detailed the restoration process, what life about would have been like if it has made it out of the harbor, and even discussed the tribunal that convened afterward to assess what happened and who was to blame. (They found that the King was to blame… and so obviously no one was to blame, and the whole thing was quickly swept under the rug.)

In the end, I made it out with about 5min to spare. I even had a quick hot minute to look through the gift shop before meandering off on my way to the next adventure…