We slept in till 9am for a change then set off for the station around the waterfront. Yesterday while on the other side of the harbour we took two pictures to show the expensive apartment blocks there.
Not a bad spot to live when you have a country house to spend weekends and holidays.
We had to walk really fast to catch the 10.11 train to Uppsala and made it with 2 minutes to spare. It is only 66 km and the train was almost empty. Swedish trains are excellent.
At Uppsala Station we saw three large parking stations for bikes. All of them nearly full on a Sunday! This is a University town like Heidelberg and maybe students leave them there when they go home. Cyclists are treated with respect here. This is one of the three parks:
We followed the instructions in our Europe By Eurail handbook to find the Information Centre. We got a map and over morning tea decided to follow the 7 stage tour recommended. Unfortunately the map and the tour points did not match up very well but we got by. These things are always written by local experts who do not try them out on mugs like us to see whether they are foolproof. We started by walking along the river and came to this little diversion which might have been a fish ladder.
We climbed the hill to the Cathedral,
but found the Sunday Service was still in progress so went across the road to the Gustav museum. This was the official University museum and not well funded but featured a fullsize replica of the first Anatomy Theatre from the 16thC.
Standing room only for 100 people to watch convicted criminals be dissected (after paying a fee). There was a display for the history of this uni., Sweden's oldest. Another display traced the history of computers. Spot the Apple II and the Commodore 64.
The church and the museum are positioned opposite each other to represent the relation between faith and reason. Into the cathedral and we found another big organ and a series of tableaux including this scene of Jesus with the children:
Then we climbed the hill to the castle which overlooked the town. One section was called the Peace House and entry was free. They had a display on Landmines which consisted of posters of beautiful women competing for the title of Miss Landmine. All of them had lost at least one leg after stepping on one. Another section dealt with the achievements of Dag Hammarskjold (please insert the missing accent). He was General Secretary of the United Nations after WW2 . He described his job as the hardest in the world. They showed a video of President Kennedy announcing his death in an airplane crash in 1961. He was even more popular than the Beatles at that time and greatly mourned in Sweden. He studied at Uppsala Uni. for his degree and we decided to look for his grave which the staff here told us was in the cemetery. The toilets were also free here and they won our prize for the best ever. Cotton towels to dry your hands!
Dag was rated as the second best known Swedish person in history. The number one was Carl Linnaeus, the greatest botanist of all time. His last work was a treatise discussing every single plant that was mentioned in the Bible. On the other side of the castle was a garden devoted to him.
We bought a bookmark consisting of a slice of wood from the elm tree which grew in his yard to give to someone. After some searching we found the H. family grave.
Just a minute while I correct the spelling above. The gravestone is the one with the flowers.
It was time to relax after soaking up the town's culture. So we sat next to the Swandam and enjoyed the weather along with the ducks and the infants.
At the end of the rainbow you will find . . . a black duck. They are in every country we have been in. We had an appointment with Evelyn's friend Susie (now Susanne) at the station at 4pm and we met her stepson Martin (15) and son Felix (12). They both spoke excellent English and were keen to converse with us. We told Susie that we had walked around the town and loved it, so she took us out to a lake in a forest.
We explained to them what an Australian bush walk was like as we walked across fields. Lyn found a tiny frog in the grass.
Evelyn wanted a photo of Susie:
We climbed up a tower which may have been for bird watching or maybe fire spotting but it gave us a view of the lake:
We took a picture of the boys with Susie:
and then walked to the lake.
Meantime Susie had walked back to the car and brought it round to the lake. We picked up Susie and Johan's daughter Amanda (5) and went back to their house where Felix proudly took us on a tour of the rooms and Johan prepared a wonderful barbecue meal. After a very interesting discussion with them about their lives we caught the train back to Stockholm and walked to our flat, coming in at 11pm.
Must not forget to show Amanda:
Once again we found ourselves treated like visiting royalty.
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