Stroll from Gamla Uppsala to Upplandsmuseet, and More

I don’t normally provide a “previously on Joel’s Journeys and Jaunts” introduction as they might on each episode of a television series, but I’ll make an exception here.

Previously on Joel’s Journeys and Jaunts, I was in Gamla Uppsala and had lunch, but I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to take the pleasant-looking path back to Uppsala that I spied on my trek around the Gamla Uppsala burial mounds or take an Uber back, as I did on the way over.

In that episode, I also whined about the three guidebooks I’m using on this Sweden trip and my frustration with them.

There. You’re caught up.

Based on the title, you probably figured out that I decided to walk back and, at the end of my stroll, I visited Upplandsmuseet (whatever the heck that is, you’re probably thinking). However, picking up the story where I left off, after lunch, I hadn’t yet decided where I was going to end up after the walk back.

My guidebooks didn’t offer any other suggestions that were open, sounded interesting, and that I hadn’t already seen. Then again, I don’t discount the fact that they might have offered something else, but I couldn’t find it because of the way the books are (dis)organized.

What I decided to do was to ask Apple Maps to plot a walking route to my hotel. I figured that once it got me back into civilization, I’d use the TripAdvisor app’s “attractions near me” feature to find something. Doing so got me to Upplandsmuseet.

But first, the stroll is worth some notes.

Oh, before I go on, I should mention that I leave Uppsala tomorrow morning for my next destination. So you’ll find an Uppsala summary at the end of this post.

Stroll from Gamla Uppsala to Upplandsmuseet

The first part of the hike took me along one of the same trails I had been on this morning until the path that veers off to the centre of the city. That new (new for me) trail initially took me by some fields and then into a lush forest. So far, so enjoyable.

I hadn’t walked particularly far before coming to a directional sign that pointed me to “Frälsarkransen.” An accompanying information poster told me that they were the “Pearls of Life” and a place for meditation.

It also told me, “Walk up to the place for meditation and walk around among the stone pearls while you focus on your own thoughts: What is hard and what is easy? What sorrow and what happiness do you find in your life? Where is your personal centre?”

It further said to please take a folder and learn more about the pearls. There was a plexiglass-fronted box with two slots. I assume one was for Swedish and one for English. I say “assume” because both of the slots were empty, so I didn’t learn more about the pearls.

But I could see the place, and it wasn’t far off the path, so I went.

There is a circle the size of maybe four decent-sized living rooms. The surface of the circle was low, living ground cover of a few varieties. At regular intervals around the circumference, there were rocks with one or more smaller spherical stones sitting atop them. The spheres were each painted a bright colour, with different colours for the stones atop each rock.

I walked around, paused in front of most of the rocks, and meditated on the stones. By the time I was done, I had come up with most of the answers.

• Breathing is easy. Walking isn’t as easy as it used to be, but it’s still easy. Everything else has varying degrees of difficulty.
• I find happiness in travel, and family and friends. Everything else, less so; some bordering on happiness; some bordering on sorrow; and the rest varying degrees of sorrow.
• The personal centre question is the one that stumped me. I didn’t have a measuring tape with me, and I doubt I could get good measurements without someone’s help because of the need to bend somewhat to take the measurements. So I couldn’t accurately find my personal centre. But maybe that’s not what they meant. I’m not very good at that sort of thing.

I then returned to the trail and walked on.

I soon passed a tilled field on one side of the path. The parallel rows of upturned clumps of light-brown earth looked artistic to me and almost mesmerizing, but that quality probably doesn’t show up in the picture I posted here. Then again, I might be the only person who would view it that way, even in real life.

A little farther on, I passed a large group of probably more than a hundred people walking the other way, i.e., toward Gamla Uppsala. I think I inadvertently made a good choice to visit in the morning rather than the afternoon.

A little farther still, the trail turned into a divided path: Two parallel paths divided by a median of low vegetation. Streetlights on tall poles sprouted out of the median. There hadn’t been any lights on the path to that point.

There were no signs indicating what each of the parallel paths was to be used for. Bicycles on one and pedestrians on the other? Bicycles and pedestrians on both sides, but each side reserved for one direction of travel? Something else? I have no idea.

But, despite being divided, they were still paths. They were too narrow for cars. The surface was made of fine-grained gravel, about halfway between sand and what you’d normally think of as gravel. The divided trail lasted for a while before it merged again into a single trail, but still with streetlights and the same material on the surface.

As the trail got close to civilization, its surface was paved and there was a line painted down the centre. Icons indicated that one side was for pedestrians and the other for cyclists.

Then the trail ended at a sidewalk in a nice neighbourhood with densely tree-lined streets perpendicular to the street I was on, and what looked like single-family homes on those perpendicular streets.

It was there that I opened up the TripAdvisor app and chose Upplandsmuseet as my next destination.

Upplandsmuseet

Upplandsmuseet is the Uppsala County Museum. It’s run by the same organization that also runs the Gamla Uppsala Museum, which I visited this morning. The two share the same website. (The website also says that they have an open-air museum in Gamla Uppsala, but I didn’t see it when I was in Gamla Uppsala and didn’t notice it on the website until I looked at it when writing this post. So, I won’t be seeing the open-air museum.)

It is a small museum with exhibits on three floors above the entry level. The ticket-seller told me there’s Swedish and English on all three floors, but the signage is all in Swedish on the first floor. However, there are loose-leaf books available with English translations. The ticket-seller said that on the other two floors, all of the signs had both Swedish and English.

Upplandsmuseet might be the Uppsala County museum, but it isn’t dedicated solely to Uppsala County. The exhibit on the first floor is titled “Time and Space.” It very briefly covered prehistory and history around the world. It, for example, talked about the Romans and Greeks. On one wall, there was what I assume was the name Abraham in Swedish, I’m guessing Arabic, and Hebrew.

(By the way, I never spoke Hebrew, but at one time I knew the sounds each of the Hebrew letters made, enough that I could read my Bar Mitzvah portion even though I didn’t have a clue what it meant. That skill is long gone, but even to this day, if I hear a Hebrew word spoken and see the word in front of me, it triggers a memory of the sounds each letter makes. I know what you’re thinking. “Sure, if you can hear the word, it wouldn’t take much to match the sounds to the letters.” But despite not hearing the name “Abraham” at the exhibit, I knew with reasonable certainty that’s what the Hebrew said.)

The text for that part of the exhibit in the loose-leaf book talked about the Israelites in Canaan. So, it definitely was not all Uppsala County.

In addition to historical artifacts, some of the display cases contained plates of fake food indicating what sorts of food people ate for their meals in whatever place it was that was represented and at whatever time.

I should mention that there were no letters or numbers, or any other index, beside each of the displays on this level. So matching the displays up with the information in the loose-leaf binder was difficult. I wasn’t terribly successful at it. Hence, the vagueness in the preceding paragraph.

Jumping around geographically on this level, the first exhibit (so it was easy to find in the loose-leaf binder) was titled “Stone balls – a symbol of life.” It was a bun-shaped rock (the info sheet called it a stone sphere, but, no, it was bun-shaped), with some straight lines painted on in.

The text said that, “More than 1,500 years ago, certain female graves were decorated with large stone spheres. These are fertility symbols, possibly representing eggs or bread. Today, we believe that the stone balls were mainly symbols of female fertility and the survival of the family.”

Make up your mind. Bread or eggs? They usually look quite different. And I get how an egg is a fertility symbol, but bread? Then again, buns are bread, and it looked bun-shaped to me. Maybe the expression “a bun in the oven” has been around longer than I imagined.

The second level of Upplandsmuseet covers mostly more recent history, but there is some mention of prehistory. As the ticket seller said, all of the signage there was in both Swedish and English. The floor covered a broad range of topics—ways of life, commerce, transportation, social welfare, warfare, and more that I’ve forgotten. There were also a number of artifacts representing what was discussed.

Because there’s not a lot of floor space in Upplandsmuseet, it covers each topic at only a very surface level. Here again, the exhibits weren’t dedicated exclusively to Uppsala County, but it mostly stuck to Sweden, if not specifically Uppsala County.

One text panel seemed to be a complete non sequitur in the context of Upplandsmuseet. I mention it here primarily for the benefit of two readers.

The panel talks about superstitions and illustrates the brief discussion with four examples of superstitions, none of which are exclusive to Uppsala or even just Sweden, but are present much more widely in the world. For example, it says, if you can believe it, “If you happen to say that something is going well for you, then you should immediately tap on the table and say ‘touch wood or knock on wood’ – otherwise something bad might happen.”

Can you imagine?

The top floor of Upplandsmuseet is used for temporary exhibits. Today, it contained woven baskets. I’d tell you more about it, but what the ticket seller told me notwithstanding, the text was solely in Swedish. It probably told me a lot about basket weaving and the examples on display, but I didn’t bother trying to apply Google Translate to the text.

Uppsala University Library

After I left Upplandsmuseet, I walked over to the Uppsala University Library. It has a small museum with old architectural drawings of the university and old, rare books. Its prized possession is the Codex argenteus, or Silver book.

The book itself isn’t silver, but the book cover is. According to the sign by the museum entrance, it “is one of the oldest and most extensive examples of the Gothic language today. The manuscript was probably copied in Ravenna in the period under the Ostrogoths for their King Theoderic the Great, at the beginning of the 6th century.

“The manuscript contains the four gospels written in the Gothic language. The translation from Greek to Gothic was done in the fourth century by the Gothic Bishop Wulfila, who also constructed the Gothic alphabet. The text is written on thin purple coloured vellum in gold and silver ink. The silver script is dominant and has given rise to the term the ‘silver book.'”

Inside the museum, in the room with the Silver book, there’s more signage providing additional information.

The book lies flat inside a glass display case, with a thick, transparent sheet over the opened leaf. I don’t know if the words were faded and fuzzy or if it was looking through glass and plastic that made them that way.

The silver cover was off the book and standing open and vertical, with the beautifully etched surface easily visible inside the case.

Apart from the museum, the library is rather mundane. Some shelves look only a step up from IKEA furniture, and they’re filled with books. There is a sign pointing to a rare manuscripts room, but it was closed when I was there. So I don’t know what’s inside.

Cube of Art

I made one more stop before calling it a day. That was at the Cube of Art. That’s the name of it. There was no Swedish name. Maybe it’s an international thing and this is just the local iteration of it, but I don’t think so. When I did a web search for “Cube of Art,” all of the results on the first page were for the Cube of Art in Uppsala. But maybe the search was location sensitive, and it knew my location. I don’t know.

To be honest, I didn’t have high hopes for the Cube of Art. The description said it is an interactive art exhibit inside a large cube, and, using AI, the art is influenced by the people there. It really didn’t sound like my sort of thing, but it’s close to my hotel, it wasn’t close to dinner time, and nothing else I found particularly interested me.

When I bought my ticket, the ticket-seller explained how it worked. I had to take off my jacket and shoes before going into the cube because the floor is interactive, too. There are six programs that I could influence by touching the wall with my hand, finger, or the brush that she gave me. Before each program, instructions are projected in Swedish on one wall and English on another.

Each program lasts five minutes, so a total of 30 minutes for all six, but you can stay for up to an hour.

Because there was already a program in progress, she explained to me how that one worked.

The cube is about the size of a large living room, but with a higher ceiling. When there is no program running, the walls are black.

When I went in, there was no one else there, so I had the cube to myself. The program painted flowers growing on vines on the wall. I could make the vines sway a bit and direct the growth of the flowers somewhat. As I stood in one spot on the floor to interact with the wall, flowered vines grew on the floor around my feet.

I also had the cube to myself for the second program. For it, the system knew of, I think, seven animals. I was to draw on the wall by moving my finger or brush on it. The AI would guess what I was trying to draw. It then projected a large illustrated image of that animal, which moved around the room on the walls. I got a few giraffes, a couple of elephants, a horse and a pig. The lines that were drawn as I brushed the wall were thick and very fuzzy, so getting a particular animal was more luck than anything.

At some point, a family of three came in and joined me. The room was large enough that we all had space to interact with the art.

I’ve forgotten the order of the other programs.

In one, like the animal program, we were to try to draw a car, a motorcycle, a plane, or a helicopter. The program would guess which we were trying to draw, but rather than a good illustration like with the animals, it just smoothed out some of the rough edges to bring it somewhat closer to the vehicle we were trying to draw.

In another program, the system projected white circle outlines on the wall and floor. We had to fill them in. The system chose what colour to fill them in with, and they floated around the walls. The floor circles could be filled in by stepping on them

In another program, some butterflies would change colour and fly away as we touched them, pulling a trail of small bright coloured lights behind them.

The sixth program has totally slipped my mind now. I left after running through the full program that I had entered in progress.

As I left, three more people were coming into the cube, and another couple were coming to the ticket booth, so I lucked into a good time.

It sounds hokey, but I very much enjoyed myself.

Uppsala Summary

As of tomorrow morning, that’s the first city on this trip down.

I quite like Uppsala. It’s not a spectacular city. There’s nothing that absolutely stands out as, wow, you can’t miss that, but there were several interesting sights, making it very much worth the visit. Plus, the city has a good vibe to it.

For a city this size, there are a lot of pleasant parks to enjoy, and some sections of the river are lovely. And how many cities provide a place to warm your bum like on Jona?

As to the amount of time I spent here, three nights—two full days and the half day at the start—that seems about right. I couldn’t find any more attractions that looked interesting, but as I said, I’m not confident my guidebook sources steered me everywhere that’s worth seeing. If I’d spent less time, I probably would have felt that I was leaving too soon.

If you’re in Sweden and have time, Uppsala is worth a visit.