Weekend highlights

Last week was actually a relatively productive week work-wise, so when Saturday rolled around, I hopped out of bed ready to leap back into tourist mode. Here are some of the highlights:

I went back to the hip, happening Södermalm to do some gift shopping. I'll be cagy about what I actually shopped for because certain gift recipients might be reading this blog. But I can say that I had a fun time browsing through stores, lunching and snacking at cafes, and just taking in the streetlife. It helped that the weather was awesome this weekend. One place I made sure to go was a highly regarded record store, called Pet Sounds (but I won't hold that against it). It was super cool; in many ways it fulfilled my platonic ideal of what an independent record store should be. Oddly, there was very little Swedish-language music. Also, I made a very unfortunate discovery. New CDs here cost up to 200 Swedish kronor, or over $30 US (and rising daily as the dollar continues its steady decline). As cool as it would have been to buy the new Sigur Rós disc in Scandinavia, I think it's going to have to wait until I get home.

Sunday was given over to museum-going. I first checked out the history museum. And anyone who knows me well could probably guess where I headed first: the Viking room! In many ways, it was a typical "stuff in glass cases" museum, so I wasn't really blown away. But two things stood out. First, the staging of the exhibits was very artfully done. The lighting in the Viking exhibit in particular was quite artistic, for lack of a better word. Second, it was one of the most postmodern museums I've been to. (Which begs the question, can you use "postmodern" in a relative sense?) There was a hall in the back of the museum that was all about how history is constructed. It was set up to mimic an airplane terminal (an interesting choice), with each "gate" leading to a different room that posed a series of questions about historiography, like one room that asked "Whose are all these objects? Why do museum collections look the way they do? How are the objects sorted and how does this affect history?" Another room discussed how contemporary perspectives on what defines a family determine how historians describe familial relations in the cultures they study. I've certainly never seen an exhibit like that in a history museum. Although the museum also had the obligatory "attractions" (like "Sweden's oldest preserved garment"), it was pretty interesting to see a museum tackle these "how the sausage gets made" type of issues too.




After all that heady material, it was time to get outdoors. Fortunately, Stockholm has a great outdoor museum dedicated to the culture and history of Sweden. It's called Skansen, and I highly recommend it if you plan on traveling to the city. The museum is a large park filled with historic buildings from all over Sweden. In many of the buildings, there are people in period costume who will take the time to explain to you what the period they're representing was like. There are even artisans like potters and glassblowers making handicrafts by traditional methods.

Reading about Skansen and hearing it described, I was a bit worried it was going to be kind of corny and Disney-fied. But the reconstructions were pretty faithful (as best as I could tell), in large part because the historic buildings were actual buildings that had been moved from their original locations from around the country. There was also a section devoted to the wildlife of Sweden, where I got to see a brown bear, some moose, and some reindeer, among other things. Sadly, the wolverines were in hiding when I was there.

I had ambitions of checking out the art museum as well (mainly for its highly-regarded design exhibit), but I was pretty tired and it was already mid-afternoon. I still have a small handful of museums on my itinerary, although I have to be strategic about when I go to them because some have weekday afternoons when they're free. And when I do go, I'll be sure to write about it here.

I'll leave you with some photos from Skansen.