"Hej-hej!! Jag är här i Sverige nu!"

This is a long one, get comfy,

Hej-hej!
(I found out "hey-hey!" wasn't just my typical greeting. Everyone says it here in Sweden, they just spell it differently. On that note, please pardon any typo's. I am trying to learn to use a Swedish keyboard. The Swedish language has 3 extra vowels, ö, ä, and å. I know they look like they are just accented letters, but they're not. Then there are all these other wierd symbols I've never seen befoer like ¤. I don't even know if your computers will display that. Looks like tilted cross-hairs in a rifle scope...sort of. ...No idea...)

Anway, enough of that. I just got wired up today with e-mail and a computer. Hence the teething period of öåäoa etc. and the resurgence of correspondence.

I am not sure where to begin, I really can't articulate (certainly not in Swedish...yet) how stunningly amazing this place is and wonderful the people are. Where to begin.....the city? the Sankt Erik? the architecture here? the shipping? "The Bastards" (I'll explain)? the dogs? the Vasa...ja-hå!!
THE VASA, of course.......but it will make more sense if I introduce Fred Hocker first.
For the last year or so I have been corresponding regularly with the Head of Vasa Research (Vasas huvudförskare) in the Vasa Unit (Vasaenhaten), the department I am officially attached to. Betweeen him, Williams-Mystic, people at the Wawona Conference, etc I found out he is quite an accomplished guy in the field--I dare say he is very close to the top, globally. He is a Williams-Mystic S'82 alum, SEA alum, Texas A&M Institute of Marine Archeology alum and former professor, naval architect, former Danish National Maritime Museum research somthing-or-other, etc., etc.) and as luck would have it (or rather, as Leif Malmberg, Fred, and I decided to have it), he is my advisor. That means he gets me keys and contacts to various people....and gives me a sizable corner in his office. (I have keys everywhere!! It is a little intimidating).

Fred and I hit it off immediately when I arrived. He's a sailor, I'm a sailor; he's a tea-drinker, I am a tea-drinker; he's a woodworker, I would like to be a better woodworker, he's a blackpowder muzzleloader man, I'm a bird hunter. It goes on and on and our personalities match better than i could have anticipated. I think we must have some genetic material in common. I came into the office this morning and found him poking about online looking at photos of model airplanes. I blurted out somethign about a Grumman F9F Tigercat and he asked me "Model airplane nerd?" --ja-hå.

So, anyway, we have a good thing going here which brings us to the mighty royal warship, Vasa. For those of you that have't remembered every knothole in every timber in her hull like Fred has, Vasa was built by order of the Swedish King in 1628 here in Stockholm Harbor. She was the largest warship on the Baltic and would give the Danes a real run for their kronor. She was over 400 tons and embodied the new and daring innovation of having three gundecks. Most of her cannon were the hefty, short range batteries, the infamous 24-pounders--the cannonball, not the cannon. Each cannon is almost 3 tons, bronze barrel and carriage combined. Anyway, she was built to be the biggest, most powerful gunplatform in the Baltic or on the Danish Straits and indeed she was. Above her guns she is monumental in every dimension from her 70cm-thick deckbeams to her enormous 3-masted rig, to the bewlideringly ostentatious gallery, aftercastle, and raised poop on the stern, all decorated with 700+ sculptures.
Well, on a fine August day in 1628, this grand ship sailed over to the king's armory to take on all the cannon, and then sailed toward the harbormouth with a moderately sized crew to provision at a fort closer to the Baltic. However, she never made it. She sailed less than half a mile when she caught a gust of wind and given her toweringdesign , and topheavy three decks of cannon, she heeled over to port, burying her open lowergundeck gunports. Within a minute or two, she was gone.

Some 300 years later she was rediscovered and raised in 1961. The preservation on the harbor bottom had been so superb that she floated on her own once she was pumped out. Now she's a museum ship here in Stockholm not far from where she was built. Somehow, this total engineering disaster that managed to travel just under 1 measley mile in her 330 years has become an icon of Swedish pride. Go figure.


In fact, the Vasa museum is responsible for attracting a full half of all of Stockholm's tourist volume. This week it is all Russians. It is Christmas time according to the Gregorian Calendar so the tourguides are struggling to get through the week with what little Russian they know. Likewise, I am struggling to get through the week with what little svenska I know. It wouldn't be a challenge if I were not trying to learn it; everyone here speaks english including cabbies and carpenters. Thankfully my learning curve is skyrocketing, partly because of the immersion, partly because of kind, considerate people like "The Bastards." But I digress...

Back to the Vasa. Fred took me on the grand tour my first day at the museum. We went through the entire facility; exhibits spaces, collections storage, exhibit production shops...eveywhere...including ONBOARD the Vasa! Remember, that means walking the decks of a 375 year-old shipwreck, one that came up with practically everything--wood, leather, cloth, and even the bodies of some of the crew. She is a resurrected coffin with an indescribably powerful presence just in her form. As Tom Jackson said to me at the Wawona Confernce a month ago, "I've been aboard a lot of historic ships, but this is the first one that made me shudder." She is amazing, utterly amazing. The afterdeck and raised poop are so inordinately tall it boggles your mind...and blatantly points out why she capsized after sailing less than a half mile. She is so utterly ostentatious, so mammoth......and so black with polyethalineglycol PEG (conservation measure), she's a ghost ship if I ever saw one. For you "Pirates of the Caribbean" fans, imagine the Black Pearl and you have her to a letter...in fact, the Black Pearl in the upcoming movie was built using the Vasa's lines. The boards have shrunk and worn a bit, the corking slipped out, and everywhere she is blackened giving her a deadened, skeletal look. Yet, when you stand back and look at her broadsides you cannot visualize a sturdier ship. Aside form the insanely elaborate gallery (decorative portion around the stern) with its 400+ sculptures, she looks indestructable...and in fact, maybe that's part of why we have her today after 330 years on the bottom of the harbor. I can't possibly describe how utterly stunning it is to be aboard, walking over that still-strong oak frame, ...you all must come...and I may be able to take 'special visitors' aboard depending on how the current sulpher treatments go.

All right, I'll leave it at that, I'll have to send photos to even get close to telling you what it is like to go below decks on the Vasa.So, Sankt Erik--my other ship. I have settled into my quarters aboard the icebreaker Sankt Erik tied up at the museum's pier, not more than 100 yards from the Vasa inside the museum. Sankt Erik is a sizable ship; five decks high, over 180 feet long with a broad 60 foot beam. I am fairly sure I have the largest apartment in Stockholm...and I don't even have to pay rent!
Since I came aboard Thursday I've spent a good chunk of time settling into my 3m x 2.5m cabin and exploring Sankt Eriks decks and inner recesses. The cabin is really quite nice; a bunk, a writing desk, a small bureau, a sink, and a really choice radiator--the warmest on the ship. The cabin is well insulated save for my lone porthole which affords me a good vierw of the Viking Line cruiseships coming into the harbor. My door is labeled "2e Styrman" or, 2nd helmsman/steersman. I guess that's me now.

The head is opposite my cabin on the port side (babord sida). It has a working toilet and shower connected sto shoreside plumbing, but it lacks any insulation against the hull. It is just bare steel studded with rivets and being only an inch or so thick, it gets mighty cold against the icy harbor waters.Directly above is a very lovely ward room all dec'd out in ornate lace, lanterns, and leather couches. That's my study now. Going aft, the galley is semi-operational right now, but if I had the fuel and 4 hours it takes to fire up the gigantic stove, I could feed an army....or a fleet, I suppose.

Exploring further aft and deeper in the ship, there is a wonderfully complex engine room full of twisting pipes, massive cylinder heads(think, dinner table size), more pipes, fuse boxes, oil cans, and valves galore. Twisting around and going forward again there is the boiler room. I've never seen such an array of boilers! This ship must have more power than Mt. Pinatubo (present tense because she is operational and will probably show off around the bay come summer...really useful time for an icebreaker). She is a powerhouse, though. She has 2800shp on the main engine, 1200 on the forward engine (I tell you, no apartment can compare) and these engines were built with the ship in 1915!Sankt Erik was one of the first purpose-built icebreakers with the overhanging bow and secondary powerplant and prop up forward for flushing broken ice back along the hull. She did some WWI icebreaking convoy escort work, then settled in to keeping Sweden's harbors and Baltic sealanes open. Now she's a museum ship undergoing restoration and providing me with a place to live.

She must have made an awful racket in her working days. Her thin steel hull transmits sound superbly. That's how I know when it is 0600 without checking my clock. Right on the hour, a little commuter ferry gets going and chuggs by, the raspy, cracking of its propeller clearly audible in my big, floating, steel drum. Anyway, between that and the amount of grinding from the little bit of ice in this part of the harbor I can tell it must have been noisy work crashing through the thick ice. But as it is...frankly... I like it.

All right, I suppose you all want to hear about culture shock. Well, shock might not be the word for it in Sweden. This is the land of six-meals-a-day, land of the sauna, the heaven with 6 weeks of mandatory paid vacation, and the surreal reality where all your biggest expenses are paid for life. You can imagine how much lower the stress level is here. Coffee and tea breaks sometimes last up to an hour (none of this drinking caffine at your desk), dogs are encouraged to come to work meaning there is always someone wanting a belly-rub or a scratch behind the ear as you go down the hall. And that isn't the end of it.
The Vasa museum (like many companies/instiutions/facilities in Sweden) provides its employees with a critical space required for the maintenance of an age-old Nordic custom, the sauna. I experienced this phenomena just yesterday and it was fabulous. The heat is absolutely searing--for goodness sake, don't touch your hair or you'll burn your hand--but oddly soothing even though you sweat a river. The custom does have a few guidelines which must be observed.

First, it must be kept in mind that a sauna is a group activity intended to further the fields of philosophy and ethics. Lenghty, in-depth, and thoughful discussion is mandatory.
Second; there is a dress code...it is a small towel and may only be worn as far as the door to the actual sauna chamber. Beyond that, pray that you are near-sighted.
Third; no one shall be allowed in the sauna without a beer---and if you want any of it, you had better drink fast because the bottle neck quickly heats up enough to burn your lips.

I was provided this exceptional opportunity by a small group including my advisor, Fred Hocker, that refer to themselves as "The Bastards." The moniker's origins are not so lewd as they may seem. The Swedish word for a sauna is en bastu--literally, a "baster." Rather like a Thanksgiving Turkey. The verb and past tense forms are quite similar such that "Vi bastera i bastar och nu vi är bastard." --literally, 'we baste in the baster and no we are basted.' Being basted makes us "Bastards" hence the odd little five man entourage that has now taken on a mission to train one of its members in the language of Swedish.

As I have already written a great deal and I need to return to my office shortly, I'll stop here and update you later should anything particularly amusing occurr.I have not yet begun the masters program at Stockholms Universitet so I cannot report on that. It begins next week. Other than that, I've got a place aboard the museum's 17th century replica mail boat for the annual open-boat mail race to the offshore islands come June. It ought to be cold and one heck of a rip-roaring ride from the tales I hear.

Hejdå,-Nat

P.S. Williams-Mystic folk, remember there is a possible impromptu European Gam coming up this summer.

P.P.S. Ya know, I never had a cell phone before and they are hard to learn when everything is in Swedish......