Skansen (Stockholm)

I’m going to try to keep this short because I only visited one place this afternoon in Stockholm, Skansen, It was a big place, which is also part of the reason I visited only one place. Another part of the reason is I didn’t want to push my left foot too much because, as regular readers know, it’s been bothering me.

I’m also gonna try to keep this short because I’m really, really, really tired. I want to try to get to sleep at a not-too-unreasonable time tonight. So let’s get this over with.

Skansen is one of those things they can’t seem to get enough of in Scandinavian countries, an open-air museum. I was in one in Norway on my trip there last year, and I’ve lost count of whether this is my third or fourth open-air museum here in Sweden.

Of them, Skansen is the mother of them all. It’s the oldest of the open-air museums, and I’m pretty sure it’s the largest of the ones I’ve been to.

Most of Skansen is atop a hill. Just past the ticket booth, there’s a funicular that goes up to the top. When I bought my ticket into Skansen, the ticket seller asked me if I wanted to take the funicular. (There’s a small extra fee.)

I thought about walking up the hill, but my left foot said to me, “I’m finally starting to heal. If you do insist we walk up, I’m going to jump off the next high cliff we come to. And, not to put too fine a point on this, if I go, you go.”

I hate independent, rebellious feet.

I told the ticket seller that, yes, I’d like to ride the funicular.

Skipping ahead, when I left Skansen, I discovered that if I’d just looked a little piece over from where I was, there were free, long, up and down escalators that go to almost the top of the hill. I discovered this when I went to the upper funicular station as I was about to leave. I found that it closes earlier than the park. I don’t know when it closes because there wasn’t a sign there, but the entrance was chained shut, and there wasn’t an operator around.

I then went in the direction that a sign for the exit pointed to, walked down a small piece of the hill and got to the escalators.

But enough skipping ahead. I don’t think my foot is up to too much skipping.

Like the other open-air museums I’ve been to, Skansen assembles old buildings of between, I think, 100 to 300 years old and plunks them down on Skansen’s grounds. Skansen has several whole homesteads scattered around.

Skansen also has a tower, the Bredablick Tower, that stands where it was originally built. It’s 30 metres tall and was erected in the 1870s by a doctor who wanted to start a spa.

And there’s a copy of an old bellfry elsewhere in Sweden. The sign said the bells ring at 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. I don’t think I was at the belfry at 4:00, but I don’t think I was very far from it. I didn’t hear them.

There are also two charming old windmills. And there’s a lovely pond.

In front of an old allotment house, there was a musical trio composed of an accordion player (she also sang), a cellist who plucked his strings, and a drummer who stuck strictly to his whisks on his drum. I listened to a couple of cheery tunes they played.

Probably my favourite building was an old church, Seglora Church from Västergötland, Sweden. It was erected in 1730 and moved to Skansen in 1916.. It has a rust-coloured wood exterior. Inside, it has a barrel ceiling with paintings on it. Also, in the centre of the ceiling are some Hebrew letters that are the same as the ones on the pulpit in the Stockholm Cathedral. In a reply to my post about that, after a friend did some research on the interwebs thingy to find a higher resolution picture than the one I posted, she told me it’s the Hebrew word, “יהיה. Yud hay yud hay: i.e., Jehovah.”

Also in the church, on the walls just below the ceiling, there is a series of religious scenes painted directly on the walls.

Unlike the other open-air museums I’ve been to, unless I’ve totally forgotten about it in those other places, Skansen has a small zoo with Nordic animals. Most of the enclosures were large. In many of them, the animals were well hidden, but I did get to see some European bison, rams, pigs, and wild boars, including an adult and a bunch of baby boars.

I also saw some wolverines. When I got there, three or four of them were up on some rocks at one side of their enclosure, far from the viewing platform. Wolverines are carnivores. On the other side of their enclosure, there were two formerly living rabbits hanging from hooks on a couple of tree stumps. After a while, one of the wolverines came over to one of the rabbits and started biting at it. Eventually, the wolverine got the rabbit off the hook and started biting at it on the ground. There was blood.

Like they say, it’s a wolverine-eats-rabbit world out there.

Skansen has an aquarium, but it closes early, and I didn’t get to it. If I remember from when I was there more than a decade ago, it’s not so much of an aquarium as an exotic animal zoo. I don’t think there were many fish or sea creatures. I don’t remember being impressed with it. Then again, my memory sucks.

Left Foot Update after Skansen

Following the trend that started this morning of my painful left foot getting progressively better over the day, by the time I left Skansen, I was experiencing only a very little discomfort in it, and I was barely limping. But it would have been a long walk back to my hotel, I think about 40 minutes, so I decided to give my foot a rest. I took an Uber.

By the time I got out of Uber, the pain in my left foot was back with full force. I hobbled pitifully slowly into the hotel. I think the moral of the story is, never stop walking.

Oh, by the way. Something weird I’ve noticed with my foot. When it’s hurting, it hurts if I walk on flat ground, a slope up or down, and downstairs. But it doesn’t hurt in the least if I walk upstairs. The second moral of the story is, always aim higher, but only on stairs.