You're getting an extra post today, since my earlier one was pretty lame. Today I went to the Vasamuseet (Vasa Museum), a museum built around a Swedish warship that sunk in Stockholm harbor in the 1600s. http://www.vasamuseet.se (You can choose the English language website at the top.)

It was underwater for 333 years before they successfully re-located it and brought it to the surface. The ship is amazing - the pictures can't possibly do it justice. They keep it under somewhat dim lighting, and the temperature and humidity of the museum are carefully controlled. It looks like a ghost ship -- the photos don't really show it, but the whole hull looks almost black when you see it in person. They also have the skeletons and artifacts found in the wreckage on display, as well as facial reconstructions of some of them. Check out the website, it is really neat.

People in Sweden have more style than Amerians. Not to say that there aren't plenty of Swedes running around in jeans and t-shirts and sweatpants, but if they aren't wearing something like that they tend to have more, more interesting, jaunty flair to their ensembles. And the clothing store displays along the main streets are amazing. The mannequins are fully articulated, so they can be placed in almost any position, and they group and dress them in ways far more interesting than anything I've seen at home.

My traveling buddy, who I've been bumming around with since Oslo, is leaving tonight. His friend has a cabin somewhere up in northern Sweden, near the Finnish border, so he's off that way and I'm headed down to Hamburg in a day or two. It's been nice having company, and considering we just met we traveled together really well, but I am still glad that I'm doing this trip alone. It's tiring to coordinate things between two people, and I'm starting to miss having absolute control over what I do and when I get around to doing it. I don't think there's anyone in the world I could travel with for two solid months and not hate them by the end of it...

Slight annoyances so far on this trip:

1) My knee started making some scary grinding sounds after 3 days of walking around London. I coughed up a small fortune on a knee brace that ended up making me so sweaty that I couldn't wear it after day two. Fortunately this problem seems to have corrected itself for now.

2) My wrist (the one I wore the brace on for so long) is telling me ever so subtley that it doesn't like hefting my backpack all the time. I'm trying to use the other arm, but I *always* put a backpack on with my right arm. Oh well. Just as long as it doesn't get any worse.

3) I've been wearing a money belt, which has the amusing effect of making me look like I've just packed on 5 pounds of belly fat. If I ever see anyone that I've met here when I'm back at home, they'll think I lost weight, though, so I suppose that's OK.

4) My pants are hemmed about a half-inch shorter than I would like, so I'm walking around Europe flashing dorky white socks everywhere I go. I either need to get some more interesting socks to wear, or take out the hem of my pants. How did I not notice this problem when I bought them?

5) I tried to make a (mandatory) reservation for an overnight train to Hamburg, only to find that the international reservations desk at Stockholm Central Station is closed on the weekends. I'm going to try to figure out a way around this, but I may be here through Monday. That wouldn't be the end of the world, but I'm ready to go back to the Euro. It's bad enough trying to figure out how much I'm paying for a pound of apples when I'm looking at Euros per kilo, but when I'm trying to convert kilos to pounds and then Swedish Kroner to dollars, it gets damn confusing.