We breakfasted in the basement of Hotel Gama Stan whose walls and vaults formed part of the ancient City walls.

Further under ground on the way to City Hall, we rode an escalator 100 feet down to the Kungstradgarten Subway station

and were astounded by what we found down there:

We got the requisite portrait at City Hall.

While Jan stayed at the cafe, I roamed the grounds that I recognized from the Hendrik Willem Van Loon alphabet book I’d treasured as a five year old.

As an inscription in it shows, my parents rescued the battered volume and gifted it to our daughter Claire when she was 9.

I rented one of the ubiquitous Lime electric scooters, planning to ride to a beach along the shore a couple of miles away for a swim. But I soon lost heart because of the traffic and confusing road alignments and walked over to check out one of the Culturfest events:

Jan and I reconnected in the mid afternoon and agreed to visit the National Museum. We wound our way through the ever more crowded streets filled with young Swedes whose beauty appealed to my art conoisseur’s eye.

We arrived with just enough time to catch some highlights before it closed for the day.

Over the entrance we both found the PreRaphaelite mural by Carl Larsson visually appealing  but  bizarre in subject. “Midwinter Sacrifice” portrays a legendary naked king being willingly beheaded for his subjects by a red-cloaked priest in the effort to end a famine. Inspiring ongoing controversy, it was removed and then returned over a period of several decades.

Only briefly distracted, we hunted down the less controversial, but no less affecting Rembrandt portraits of youth and age.

With only a half hour or so left, we came upon the featured exhibit entitled “Hannah Hirsch Pauli, The Art of Being Free.” We both loved the work and the life story of this relatively unknown Swedish painter (1864-1940) who came from an assimilated Jewish family, spent several years in Paris with the Impressionists, married an artist and bore children, lived a sane and productive life and died before being exiled or murdered by the Nazis. Like Rembrandt’s, I particularly liked her portraits of Youth and Age.

This image of fulfilled exhaustion befitted our mood as we left the museum and hiked back to Kungsradgarden for dinner in a cafe neatly tucked in a tight grove of linden trees.

Somewhat refreshed, we braved exuberant crowds gathered before the Opera House to hear a concert by a big star we didnt know, but whose lyrical enthusiasm I greatly enjoyed.

Jan and I again parted ways in front of the Royal Palace, she on her way back to the hotel and I in search of one last taste of mainstream Culture that I wished the one I was returning to in the morning was more like:

As I stood with the crowd, my phone dinged notice of a text from Jan.  It was a picture and the caption, “Best dessert I’ve ever eaten.”

It felt liberating to be on our own for the last two days in this City we had come to love.  To reach the coffee shop arranged to meet Ruth, Jan’s undergrad roommate, we took a pleasant busride through neighborhoods inhabited by locals, all of which gave evidence of an extensive and prosperous middle class.

Ruth was late so I left Jan waiting and walked up the hill in a nearby public park which offered wide views

and the preserved structure of the Stockholm astronomical observatory, built in the mid 1700’s at the behest of the Swedish Academy of Sciences which included major researchers whose names are still familiar like Celsius and Linnaeus.

Back at the coffee shop, Jan and Ruth were deep in reminiscence and catch-up.

After graduating Stanford in 1967, she had opted to move to Sweden, gone to medical school there, became a specialist in oncology, married a fellow physician and pharmaceutical executive, and recently retired.

Her husband, who had come along to the coffeeshop, invited me to visit their nearby apartment, in the middle of major renovation but still notably comfortable.

Jan and I returned downtown to retrieve our suitcases and walk through the steadily increasing crowds assembling for “Culturfest,” a weeklong festival of free concerts at multiple outdoor venues. We arrived at Hotel Gamla Stan, relieved to check in to the modest room overlooking an ancient alley.

Refreshed by a siesta, we crossed the street, found a restaurant and sat at a table again overlooking the water. Before we had a chance to order, a shabby-looking fellow and two sidekicks entered the terrace and set up instruments. Then he started to sing

At that point we stopped thinking about food, captivated by his voice and personality. The large respectable looking party sitting nearby sang along with him.

And people along the quay outside the restaurant gathered to listen and shoot video.

During a brief set break we ordered from the waitress and I asked who is this guy.  “Tommy Nilsson,” she said, “Look him up.”

That I did, and on the iphone popped this:

and this

Next morning, after loading up on the Scandinavian staple of pickled herring and lox, our small group assembled to meet the local guide, Gaby, a former high school history teacher, who spoke with knowledge and enthusiasm.

After passing a synagogue built in 1870 and apparantly not destroyed by the Nazis, she stopped at at a memorial honoring slain Jews and the gentile Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who risked his life to provide safe passage to people fleeing the murderers throughout Europe. After the Allied victory in Europe, he was imprisoned by the Soviets and never heard from again.

The prostrated figures reminded me of the memorial in Vienna I saw last year.

Next, with no waiting necessary, we boarded a comfortable electric bus headed toward the Vasa Museum.  It houses a huge sailing ship that sank in Stockholm harbor in 1628 and was salvaged almost fully intact 333 years later.

It was commissioned by King Gustavus Adolfus, who at the time was fighting wars with Denmark, Russia, and Poland-Lithuania,  a nation  ruled by his cousin and Sweden’s former king who’d been exiled during wars of religion because he was Catholic. “Richly decorated as a symbol of the king’s ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world. However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and sank only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.”*

Just as memorable as that story was the one of the sunken ship’s discovery in Stockholm harbor and its recovery and restoration between 1961 and 1990 presented in the museum’s film theatre.

A tiring walk through the crowded streets of Gamla Stan, the well preserved old section of the City

ended with a short ferry ride back to the harbor

and dinner in a cafe served by cheerful young waitstaff,

and return to our opulent hotel room.

Arriving in sunny Stockholm, I was energized by the luxury of the room we were assigned at the Hotel Kungstradgarden, complete with a large chandelier reflecting moving lights on the walls and 12 foot ceiling.  Originally an adjunct to a royal palace, it was renovated recently to retain its 18th century decor.

Its location on a little sloped plaza allowed us to reach the King’s park in minutes and stroll  down  a treed alley to the harbor.

We scanned the waterfront in search of an optimally situated restaurant to take in the spectacular views. Across a graceful stone bridge and surrounded by palatial buildings we saw a treed terrace with tables and umbrellas jutting into the water. Wary of long flights of steps, we found a cylindrical outdoor elevator accommodating those with knee issues.

At a table by swiftly flowing tidal currents we realized that this City, like Venice, was an archipelago equally composed of land and water.

A panorama of majestic buildings adjoining the King’s Park spread across the opposite bank, the  most imposing being the Royal Opera House, perhaps, I surmised, in competition with those of Copenhagen and Oslo.

Behind us and beyond the bridge stood the austere but elegant royal palace.

And across the road from the elevator rose the less fortress-like parliament building.

On the way back to the King’s Park, we noticed a young man fishing.  As in Oslo, we were told, all the waters here were clean enough for angling and swimming.

Fabled Scandinavian design was evident everywhere, from a brightly colored local church

to the sculpture of lamposts and lions

From Jan: 

Sick in bed, poor Steven completely missed seeing Bergen.

So, I set off bravely on my own. First I went to the Bryggens Museum.  I was blown away by the unique tapestry series “Åsmund Frægdagjeva” by Ragna Breivik.

These ten magnificent tapestries created by Norwegian textile artist Ragna Breivik were woven over a period of more than 25 years. She dyed the wool with natural dyes, spun it and wove the tapestries on a loom of her own design, on display at the museum.

The tapestries are based on the medieval ballad of Åsmund Frægdagjeva, who rescues Princess Ermelin from trolls in Trollebotn where the sun never shines.

These visually stunning woven images reawakened my long ago love of  Viking and Icelandic sagas–as retold in medieval poetry and storytelling traditions–when I studied them in my Comparative Medieval Literature MA program at Columbia.

The story begins as many fairytales do: the fair princess has been captured and imprisoned in a faraway castle, and the King commissions a hero, in this case Åsmund, to rescue her.

He and his brothers take the King’s flagship vessel to the castle of the ogre, where the princess is imprisoned.

He finds the princess walking through the castle, and immediately falls in love with her. But she, under a spell of the ogre to believe that he is her mother, will not leave with Åsmund.

He then takes her by force. On his way out, the ogre appears. They fight a long battle both physically and with curses and spells, but Åsmund eventually kills him.

The princess being free from the spell, they plunder the castle and return home with all the ogre’s treasure.

Next I headed to the Hanseatic Museum.  I was excited to see the well preserved historic Bergen headquarters of the Hanseatic League. A whole block of wooden buildings dating back to the Hanseatic era, comprising no less than 62 buildings, has been preserved.

This was a thrill for me because as a student I had studied and explored several of the ports dominated and operated by these 13^th Century merchants from Northern Germany. They sailed into Bergen to exchange grain for stockfish from Northern Norway. Their trading activities made Bryggen and Bergen one of Northern Europe’s most important trading hubs for the next 400 years.

The Hanseatic League, using the power of the purse, supplanted the kingdoms and governments of Germany and Norway. The Bergen seal symbolizes this shared governance, half German heraldic eagle and half “King Codfish.”

The Hanseatic trade routes went as far West as Greenland and as far East as the Holy Land.

The tour’s itinerary included a railway trip to Flam, an outpost at the head of a fjord on the super-rugged west side of Norway.

The route followed a steady ascent from sea level through farmland up to 2800 feet at Myrdal, a mountaineering, hiking and cross country skiing area where glaciers are visible nearby in midaugust.

There one changes trains to the Flamsbana, a railroad enthusiast’s classic operation that descends along a hair-raising right of way down to the fjord

At one point the train stops briefly at a tiny curved bridge crossing  over a wild cascade

Through the windows one sees the rushing river and numerous waterfalls

interspersed with isolated farms and homesteads, many inhabited for centuries

At the terminus, after walking through a riot of tourist shops, we arrived at a rustic-styled hotel fronting on a cruise ship wharf thankfully unoccupied during our overnight stay

I felt a cold coming on and stayed in through through dinner, but next morning took a walk on one of many trails surrounding the village.

I had to cut it short to board another ferry that  carried us for the rest of the day through inland waterways

and for a short while in the open ocean to the historic port of Bergen. Again under the weather — now gray skies and intermittent rain–I went back to bed and slept until the next afternoon’s flight to Stockholm, while Jan explored the City’s preserved heritage of the Hanseatic League, established there by Germans in 1350.

A morning boatride around the harbor along with the tourist hordes we joined

preceded departure on the overnight ferry, including sleeping cabin, for Oslo.

Another literary association brought the significance of this passage in view. It was the location of The Surgeon’s Mate, the seventh in the Aubrey-Maturin series of 21 novels by Patrick O’Brian I’ve become addicted to.  Set during the Age of Sail and the  Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800’s, these blockbuster books have been called “the greatest historical novels of all time.”

The often narrow passage between Denmark, Sweden and Norway, control of which has been contested since the Viking age, provides the only sea access from the Atlantic and beyond to Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia.

At at a table in the congenial bar on the rear deck I noticed a man writing notes on a pad next to a thick book stuffed with multicolored stickies.  Aha,  I thought, an academic! Despite fifteen years since retirement from the profession, I felt no reluctance in striking up a conversation.  It turned out he was a professor of African-American studies, working on his third book.  His wife was heading a Social Work program, and they were riding up to Oslo and returning to Copenhagen the day after arrival.

Jan joined us for a heated happy conversation, and next morning we exchanged hugs and contacts. But I’ve lost the information.  It was another of those travellers’ meetings, sufficient in itself, reminding me of the phrase I had learned from our tea ceremony host in Japan in 2010: “One life, one encounter.”

Upon arrival in Oslo, we were greeted by the local guide, a moonlighting building contractor who hailed from a village north of the Arctic Circle, hired to lead a City tour. Regaling us with sordid gossip about the Royal Family, he drove us in a van to the out of town hilltop location of an Olympic ski-jump training facility–not a place of pressing interest for me–and then to  a reputedly world reknowned sculpture park exclusively featuring the work of Gustav Vigeland. It was impressive to be sure, but left both of us cold. The last stop was the Fram Museum, containing the preserved ship built and led for the first successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911 by Roald Admundsen. Wandering upon and below decks vaguely recalled the account of that trip and the brilliant heroics of its leader that enthralled me in the 1952 Landmark book and affirmed that positive aspects of the Viking spirit have remained.

After checking in at the portside Radisson Hotel reserved by the tour, we searched for a place to eat in another jam packed and very expensive tourist district. We ate  falafel pita at a dirty sidewalk table and ended up crashing early.

Again the selected luxury hotel offered a lavish breakfast leaving behind mountains of food waste. However, it did offer advice on how to behave sustainably.

Before departure to the train station, I explored some of the new monumental buildings at the waterfront, including another Opera House, financed by Norway’s vast North Sea oil production.

After a lavish breakfast included in the tour’s hotel accommodation, our group of nine assembled in the lobby under the leadership of a local guide.  Its membership fluctuated throughout the ten days allotted, probably as a result of low enrollment. This was reflected in the decision to use public transportation rather a van to take us to appointed attractions. At first I liked that option, but it turned out that the initial destination–the statue of The Little Mermaid in a remote section of the harbor– demanded a long, fast paced and uninteresting trudge from the subway that was onerous for the heavy-set limping Australian housepainter and us two octogenarians. That little landmark, widely forewarned on the web as a disappointing trap, was packed with tour buses and crowds of people elbowing their way to a railing to snap selfies with the icon.  The rest of the three hour directed excursion offered little improvement, and we were relieved to be released to our own recognisance to return to the hotel, rest and explore further.

Sharing our early interests in Viking age culture–reinforced for me by the recent audiobook, Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough I’d heard on the flight from San Luis Obispo–we returned to the National Museum to an exhibit emphasizing the neglected female perspectives of the fearsome Nordic conquerors.

One entered through an “immersive” multimedia show dramatizing occult roles and rituals of Scandinavian wise women.

That led to galleries displaying real artifacts and captions detailing new discoveries and research. One was a gold pin similar to a replica that Jan often wore

It depicted a favorite Scandinavian favorite theme of furious sea monsters like the ones I remembered in Ezra Pound’s translation from the Anglo Saxon of “The Seafarer.”

This item is supposed to represent either a Valkyrie or the Goddess Freya.

A sidewalk cafe nearby provided a welcome glass of wine and early dinner

Afterwards Jan went back to the hotel and I walked to the Arts Academy where we’d been the day before and roamed through its courtyard featuring posters promoting avant-garde political/cultural themes that recalled our own visions during the 1960’s

at the age of its present day students.

This was probably the same age as the Israeli pianist who again thrilled the small audience

Back at the Royal SAS, I grudgingly enjoyed the 12th floor panoramic view looking down into Tivoli Gardens and the Central Railroad station.

It was raining the third morning of our stay, and we agreed to go off the beaten path negotiating our way by two buses  to the six million brick cathedral.  Located in a district of affordable housing and from the outside less pleasing looking  than the photo of the interior in BLOX, we found it was locked up, nobody around.

Knocking on the door produced no response, so I crept around to a back cellar door and kept banging.  The person who opened it explained that the Church was reserved for a later morning baptism ceremony but yielded to my badgering and led me through a side aisle  to the front door where she let Jan in.

As we entered the nave together,  our senses were engulfed by sound and sight:

After the sound ceased, the front doors opened pouring in a crowd of dressed-up families many with small children.  Jan lit a candle and then we departed.

Looking for the bus stop in the rain,  a sign in Danish and English stated  that the line in that direction had been cancelled to accommodate street construction. A young man passing by led us a couple of blocks to a stop on a different route that could take us back to Hotel Savoy to retrieve our baggage and relocate to the  hotel booked by the tour.

This was the SAS Royal Hotel, featured in the BLOX museum, built in 1960 and famously designed by architect Arne Jacobsen. As have many others, I found the exterior blocky and ungraceful, especially compared to the variety of Copenhagen buildings I’d already seen or the Lever House on New York’s Park Ave. I’d admired growing up during the 1950’s.

It was the sole subject of a large book found in the building’s museum to itself in the lobby

and the of the memorial room containing all its original furnishings, including Jacobsen’s ubiquitous swan and cloud chairs.

After the requisite nap, we took a tram to the Art Academy housed in another palace to attend a late afternoon concert we’d preordered tickets for presented by two young Ukranian virtuousi.  It featured pieces by Beethoven, Ravel and two Ukranian composers.  That made it one of many political/cultural events staged throughout Europe

Another gratifying architectural experience was offered by the escalator to the subway back to the hotel

Tired and hungry in search of dinner, Jan led us to the  appealing Bodega cafe around the corner

across the street from the Tivoli Gardens, the 19th century progenitor of Disneyland, which we never entered.

At the end of a long day, we preferred to enjoy the local food, music, and company of this great discovery.

I was eager to ride a bike around this City, even more bicycle oriented than Amsterdam, where two wheelers take precedence over cars and pedestrians.  I rented a clunker from the hotel, its weight and size making me regret I hadnt looked for a smoother ride, and took off along a dedicated path by the lagoon/canal toward a large section of greenspace, museums and historical monuments to the north. Parking at the stone gate of an immense formal garden surrounding the Rosenborg Castle I wandered in and felt enfolded by the beauty of the building and landscape architecture, completed 1633.

Spurred on by a cappucino in the outdoor cafe, I pedalled east toward the harbor, and across the water saw Copenhill,  the incinerator/power plant and snowless skislope, the highest point in Denmark which I’d been told about by my contact at the San Luis Obispo Waste Management Authority.

Nearby stood the  Copenhagen Opera House, financed by the founder of Maersk shipping corporation, whose conflicts over design with the architect, Henning Larsen, were chronicled in his book.  Both from this vantage and a couple of days later from a boatride, the building looked good to me.

A couple of minutes away I came upon the Christianborg Palace, home of the Danish Government, an equally symmetrical and pleasing design in contrasting neo-Baroque style last rebuilt in 1928.

Further along the quai, perched BLOX, a museum devoted to the Danish architecture which I’d become a fan of.

I paid the entry fee and found numerous engaging displays, glad I selected this among the embarrassment of riches where to spend some time.  One was a picture of a cathedral in a remoter part of the City built between 1920 and 1940 called Grundvig’s Church or “six million bricks.” I’d never seen anything like its combination of medieval vault and modernist austerity.

An extensive display featured the work of Arne Jacobsen, in particular the hotel in which our tour had reserved rooms for the last two nights of our Copenhagen stay

A large area was devoted to what we used to call Green Building, in particular a fancy kitchen built entirely out of construction waste

which would have fit nicely into the high-end second homes our son builds in Ketchum Idaho.

On the way back to meet Jan at the Hotel Savoy I took pleasure in the variety of less grandiose urban beauty: