Tiny Boats

Wednesday afternoon found Jennifer with some unexpected free time, so we decided to make a trek to Göteborg's Sjöfartsmuseum. This is a very different affair from Maritiman: the Maritime Museum looks and feels like it was built by money from the industries of the harbor, back when there was money to be made there. It's full of exhibits about fishing, shipping, and the harbor itself, none of which appears to have been updated since the early 80s (at best). In other words, it's a fascinatingly quaint museum, with room after room of lovingly crafted little dioramas, most without a shred of English explanation.

The elevator (which also dates from a number of decades ago) took us direct to the third floor, despite our rather explicit instructions to the contrary (unless that button labeled "2" holds some other meaning on the west coast…), so we started our tour in the fishing exhibit. Here the history of Swedish fishing was recounted in a series of display cases demonstrating in miniature commercial fishing techniques over the centuries; each case had a few model boats up near the top, while the bulk of the diorama showed the configuration of the fishing nets under the water. These were strangely compelling, but they in no way prepared us for the Wes Craven-worthy horror which lurked at the far end of the hall: an automatic cod filleting machine (image may not be suitable for younger readers).

The shipyard displays were complete with functional models of large ship engines constructed here in the past, and layouts showing the way the shipyards looked before they all got turned into housing developments (I suspect a number of decades of urban decay fell between the former and the latter, but no need to dwell on that I suppose). The harbor room had not just models of all the individual quays, but also maps of the harbor dating back to the mid-1800s—showing, incidentally, that the "Red Stone " I mentioned in the gallery for the Älvsborg fortress post has been called that for at least the past 170 years.

The museum also has a somewhat notable collection of ships' figureheads, but these are displayed without comment along the walls of the temporary exhibition space. The current exhibition was interesting, though. It was a collection of reminiscences by the gay men employed by the Swedish-American cruise line as stewards and waiters during the middle part of the century. Apparently it was something of an open secret at the time, the line going out of its way to hire attractive young men who were clean, interesting to talk to, and unlikely to get any of the wealthy young female passengers into a family way.

The museum also touts its aquarium—the literature includes the line, "For many people it is the most memorable part of the exhibit!"—but there the passing years have not been so kind, I fear. No doubt I was influenced by having spent that very morning at Universeum, the city's new science museum with its own impressive aquarium. The older aquarium looks quite distinctly as though it's been looted of all its more interesting inhabitants to stock the new one, leaving it just a sad, oddly overlarge couple of rooms (the first room was thoroughly blessed with air conditioning though, which may have caused us to linger a bit). My favorite exhibit: a large tank displaying the "bounty of marine life in the Baltic," currently occupied by a single rather bored looking trout.

frutti di mare

We didn't actually know much about the area we would be staying in before our arrival in Göteborg, beyond the fact that Liseberg was located just across the street. Fortunately, sometime on Tuesday Jennifer noticed that our location at Korsvägen put us just a few short blocks away from one of the city's more famous spots: Götaplatsen, a square surrounded by the art museum, symphony hall and city theater, with the broad Kungsportsavenyn running down hill from it towards the old town.

What Götaplatsen is most famous for, however, is the large statue of Poseidon at it's center. It's a Carl Milles statue (the same fellow responsible for the fountain on Rackham Mall at U of M) in which Poseidon crushes a large fish while the rest of the ocean's denizens cavort about him. When the statue, which is a nude, was revealed in 1931, the good citizens of Göteborg were a little put off by his, erm, somewhat oversized attributes. So much so, in fact, that they eventually had his… attribute replaced with a rather more modest one.

Coincidentally, Götaplatsen was featured in Sunday's Göteborg-Posten, as number five on the list of Göteborg's best buildings, in which a local architect wrote, "Götaplatsen är det Göteborg Göteborg drömmer om att vara." After we had sat there for half an hour or so, we were led to the conclusion that, if that's so, Göteborg has fairly modest dreams. The art museum is certainly on a grand scale, but not what you might call appealing, and the city theater seems oddly out of balance. The concert hall, tucked away in one corner, is a little better, with some great lion statues high up on the facade facing the square.

By this time, what I was dreaming of was food, so we wandered off down Kungsportsavenyn in search of a good meal. The street is lined with restaurants on both sides for blocks, so it seemed like a good bet, but we had, naturally, picked the most expensive street in the city. We eventually wandered a couple blocks to the south, where the streets were also full of eateries, but where the prices were significantly lower. We finally settled on a promising looking Indian place which was not terribly busy, and tucked into a nice meal of curried fish and crab (having ordered the crab, the house specialty, why was I not expecting to be presented with a whole crab?), along with a pepper chutney that was easily the hottest food we've encountered since arriving in Sweden. By the time we were done it was quite late, and the temperature had finally begun to drop, which was a relief after the combination of hot sun and hot food. We wandered back over to the avenue and sat for a while, people watching mostly, before catching the tram back to the hotel.

City Museum

My plan for the afternoon was to go to the Aeroseum, a relatively new aircraft museum located in what had been a secret, underground hangar on the (now ex-)military base outside Göteborg. It was also on the north side of the river, if somewhat further outside of town, so it seemed like a good idea to combine the trips. I had a carefully orchestrated route between the two museums, involving two city buses and a regional bus in between, which should have gotten me there in just under an hour. Unfortunately, I cut one of the connections a little too closely, and missed the last bus by a minute. Since the next bus wouldn't be along for an hour, I decided to pack it in and catch the next tram back into the city.

So I wound up spending the afternoon at the Göteborg city museum, instead. There was no photography allowed, hence the lack of gallery. It was a decent museum, though, housed in the former headquarters of the Swedish East India Company, about which… OK, I know nothing, because the wing with the 17th and 18th century exhibits is closed for renovation until next spring. So I browsed the prehistoric room, looked at the remnants of the only Viking ship ever recovered in Sweden, and read about the founding of Göteborg. The problem with that last bit is that the city is staggeringly young: it was founded only in 1621 as a fortified trading city, replacing a couple of earlier settlements further up river which had become a little too isolated. The museum did have a nice model of the city from the time before the defensive embankments were demolished, which helped to give a better feel for the way things are laid out. Oh, there was also a somewhat bizarre exhibit of the 700 chairs the museum has collected over the years.

They're boxy, but good

My Tuesday morning destination was the Volvo Museum in Arendal, at the extreme western edge of Göteborg's working harbor, which lines the northern bank of the Göta. According to our guidebook, "you really need a car to get there," which was not strictly true—a tram to the middle of a residential neighborhood north of the river, followed (after a brief but lovely sit in an air conditioned waiting room) by a half-hour bus ride into the harbor itself, left me just 100m from the entrance.

The museum sits on the wharf, with a view of the harbor and, that morning at least, a cool breeze off the water. As for the museum itself, well, this is not the Ford Museum. The Volvo Museum is a decent size, but easy to cover in some detail in a few hours. It does have the one thing the Ford Museum lacks, though: amidst Ford's sprawling jumble of Americana, there is no coherent history of the company itself. The Volvo museum starts from the beginning, moving from the desk of the founders to the very first model produced, and then going on to a nice collection of cars organised by decade, mostly displayed in little scenes reminiscent of the times (a street scene from the 30s, a gas station from the 50s, a soulless display room from the 80s… you get the picture). There was also a nice collection of concept cars, and some coverage of Volvo's tractor and truck divisions.

I was, by the way, the only non-staff person in the museum who was not speaking German. Sweden is a popular tourist destination for Germans, and Göteborg (being just a 30 minute ferry ride from the continent) has Germans aplenty in the summer, but even so this seemed like a high concentration. A few of them seemed to be Volvo groupies, all decked out in Volvo t-shirts and hoodies. It takes all sorts, I suppose.

Boats in the Sun

We're back in Uppsala now after a busy week in Göteborg. Obviously I didn't manage to keep the blog up to date for the bulk of the week, so I'll just have to play a little catch up now. Incidentally, I've decided to cheat, and backdate the next few posts to the days they happened on, not when they are being written—it just seems like they'll make more sense that way. Anyway, when we left off, it was Monday afternoon…

By the time I had taken the boat back from Nya Älvsborg, it was 2 in the afternoon. Seeing as I was already in the harbor area, I decided to indulge my inordinate fondness for maritime museums by making a quick stop at Maritiman, Göteborg's floating ship museum. It also claims to be the world's largest floating ship museum, with as many as 20 ships available for viewing at a time, but I suppose we'll just have to take their word for that. The twin highlights of the collection are two Swedish naval vessels: the destroyer Småland, and the submarine Nordkaparen.

There happened to be an English language tour starting just as I got there, so I spent my first 45 minutes following the unfortunate Swedish tour guide, who was not only visibly wilting in the heat but also fighting off a cold. It was a good tour, nonetheless. My favorite moment came as he was explaining that the patrol boat they had on display was one of three which used to be responsible for both patrol and civilian rescue for the entire west coast of Sweden. They weren't enough to handle the job, but unfortunately all the rescue money goes to Stockholm, leaving the Göteborgare on their own. "So," he explained, "any boat captain in the west of Sweden who plans to have an accident soon learns to call the Danish coast guard, because the Swedes are not helpful." Oh, the ignominy.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the destroyer, which is almost entirely open to visitors. You can go all the way up the control tower, and then all the way back down to the lowest deck and crawl through the space between the boilers. The below-deck areas were wonderfully cool compared to the rest of the ship, or even to the rest of Göteborg, which perhaps made me more inclined than usual to sit in one of the seven mess areas and watch a black-and-white film from the 50s which explained the care and feeding of your new Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft turret. As I wandered from one ill-lit, cramped room with no easy escape route to the next, I found myself thinking about each one in turn, "Well, that would just be a horrible place to die."

The submarine is a post-WWII affair, so it had all the charm (and head room) of a sardine can. More interesting was the lightship Fladen, basically a floating lighthouse for those places where you need a signal but can't build one. The guide's description of life aboard the Fladen was less than appealing: awake all night to keep the lamp lit, anchored firmly in one place, so that when the seas were rough the natural rocking of the ship was continually broken by the anchor chains snapping taught at seemingly random intervals, sending everything on board rocketing about. Soup, anyone?

So, by the time I'd poked around all of that, it was nearly 6, and I was hot, exhausted, and well sunned–definitely time to call it a day. As always, more pictures are available in the gallery .

New Elf Mountain

On an island at the mouth of the river Göta lies Nya Älvsborg Fastning, where I spent a pleasant few hours wandering about this morning. It's the "new" fortress only in relative terms, as it was built in the 17th century to replace the old Älvsborg fortress, which the Swedes had recently decided they needed to tear down. The old fortress, unfortunately, was good for nothing except as a revenue source for the government of Denmark: when the Danish king was running low on funds, he'd simply send his navy over to capture Älvsborg fortress, and then ransom it back to the Swedes for a lot of money (indulging in an age old Viking tradition, there). So in the end the Swedes decided the cheapest thing to do was just tear the place down and build a new one. To this end, they hired the leading fortification expert of the day and set out to fortify the island of Kyrkogårdsborg. Alas, construction took so long that by the time the fort was in service, it was also completely obsolete. Despite this fact, the new fortress worked out much better than the old one, fending off not one but two Danish invasion fleets.

Nowadays, of course, it's a tourist attraction, complete with comedic actors in historical garb. The comic troupe has also done the informative audio guide for the island, which is a nice change of pace. Instead of lot's of rambling on about what was built when, the audio guide is a series of historical conversations that could have happened in various locations about the fort. In one, King Vasa demands enough warm, sweaty cheese so that he can bathe in it, and when he is told there is no cheese on the island he vows instead to invade Denmark, give away Finland, and kill every Swedish male under the age of 26. In another, the erstwhile commandant of the fort mistakes a passing seagull for an aerial Danish invasion fleet.

I don't know how much I learned, but it did make for an entertaining morning. If you care to see more pictures of overgrown fortifications, check out the gallery.