Stockholm

We visited Drottningholm, the residential palace surrounded by English and French gardens.













We took a pretty touristy photo...

















On Monday morning, we decided we were going to take the 10am English tour of the City Hall. We got off the train at 9:50 and hurried.

This is where the Nobel Prize dinner is held each year, in the Blue Hall. The architect, Ragnar Östberg (our guide said his name about one hundred times, so we'll never forget it) originally wanted to paint the bricks blue, but decided it looked better as a copy of an NC State building. Ragnar Östberg wanted a glass roof, but contemporary construction methods didn't allow it. So he decided to place windows at the top. Our guide, not quite familiar with idioms in the English language referred to Östberg's compromise as a "final solution". I suppose we should have told her that it might be a good idea to rephrase that before the next tour.

A wood carving of Nobel found on an armoire in City Hall.

















The tour ended at 10:50. And we wanted to make it to the 11:15 tour of the Nobel Museum in the Old Town. So once again, we started running. We ducked into some back alleys to try to find a short cut.

And miraculously, we popped up in the large square, right across from the museum.

We got a very interesting tour, including a history of Nobel himself, as well as the prizes. We learned that while he was most famous for inventing dynamite, he made most of his money from smokeless gunpowder. Nobel's will and death mask are shown to the left.

Each Nobel Prize winner receives an equal share of the interest generated by the Nobel foundation that year. The graph to the left shows the real value of the prize from 1901 - 2001. Nobel was hesitant to invest in Stocks and Real Estate, and so explicitly prohibited this in his will. But the foundation decided in the 1950s to overturn this decision. The prize has been worth 10m Swedish Crowns for the past few years.

And the gold medal itself, this the last prize awarded posthumously.

The prize diploma, seen at the bottom of the picture on the left, is hand drawn for each winner, and reflects the winner's specific research. Each of the five Nobel Prizes are awarded yearly, four in Stockholm, and the Peace Prize in Oslo. Contrary to popular belief, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. (Though you could win the Sveriges Riksbankens Prize for Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel)

Below is a picture of an oar that represents several of Cambridge's Nobel Prize winners. The oar is in the style of those awarded to the winners of the May Bumps races held on the River Cam each June. Below would be the Nobel 8+. Although the 11 oarsmen they try to cram in might be a bit unsportsmanlike (Watson & Crick sharing 4 seat).

This is where Amit and I stayed while we were in Stockholm.

...NOT. But the Grand Hotel is where we will stay when we recieve our Nobel Prizes some day.

We also saw the changing of the guard ceremony at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Actually, we heard the parade from inside the Nobel museum and ran outside to see what was going on.

Then came the real adventure.

We went to pick up our tickets for the cruise. We were told they only accepted cash. So we went and withdrew several thousand Crowns. Then we tried again to pick up our tickets. There was nothing in the system that corresponded to our booking number. So we called Silja line. "Oh, they were unbooked because you didn't pick them up." Little did we know, that we were only allowed to pick them up on the day that we ordered them. But alas, we were on an island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. So the representative said she would try to rebook. Meanwhile, we walked up to the Viking Line office. While waiting our turn, we called Viking Line, and got a quote for a trip to Riga at about 700SEK. Just as we hung up the phone, we got up to the counter, asked about various options, including the trip to Riga, which we were told now cost 1500SEK. We asked about the discrepancy, and she said there were no more 'last minute' trips left. Well...seems to me that we were trying to purchase even more 'last minute' tickets than whoever redeemed the last actual 'last minute' fares. So we called Viking Line back, and sure enough, they still had the 700 price. So we went ahead and booked it, and they told us to pay at the office. Fortunately, we were still standing right outside the Viking Quest office, so we walked right in, slapped our 700 down on the table...VICTORY!!!. I'm sure they didn't really care, but it felt like we had stuck it to the man.

So the adventure wasn't over there. Our big goal for the day was to get the pictures off Amit's camera so that we could put them on the blog. I guess you know the end of the story, since the pictures are here, but I hope you will all appreciate the lengths to which we went to provide them.

We couldn't find a single internet cafe in the whole city, so our next option was to find an electronics store that had computers on display. We'd simply put the memory stick in the computer, drag the files onto Amit's USB-key, and we'd be done. Well, we go to the store ONOFF, we find the display computers and ... all of them are locked. We find a salesman who unlocks it, and we get to work. We copy the pictures from the memory card onto the desktop. Pretty simple so we think we're home free. Then Amit pulls out his brand new USB-key, one of two hundred that he was personally responsible for ordering and had distributed to the participants of a conference last week. As soon as we put the drive in, the computer went haywire, popping up new Microsoft Vista windows left and right, until it ultimately shut itself down. We called up my cousin Johan, who helped us get the pictures onto a CD. But not before that same USB drive had crashed his Mac twice.

So in the end, we got our pictures, and we went out to dinner with Johan and Anna Pia, then for a walk to the highest point in Stockholm.

Amit and Ben play checkers...to a stalemate.