If it's Tuesday, this must be Gothenburg

I arrived at Gothenburg station and headed straight for my pre-booked accommodation. It wasn't too hard to find, being the tallest thing around that area.

Yep, I was sleeping on the "Barken Viking" - a retired 100 year old cargo ship. She is a four-masted barque - of which only 345 were ever built (with only 10 of those still existing today). My little single room was tucked up in the prow of the ship. It had two port holes and the floor was tilted from the front to the back!

I ate dinner up on the deck, where I had a 360 degree view of the sunset - I could see the sun dropping in the sky while I watched the colours across the sky change (it was about 10pm that the sun went below the horizon) while the seagulls flew around the masts.

I had a great nights sleep - the boat felt very steady - and in the morning I breakfasted in the saloon.

I then headed into town and visited the "Goteborgs Stads Museet". This is housed in a building that is 250 years old and it has been a museum for 150 years. I started with the viking exhibit, which showed viking relics such as nails, runes carved into stones, combs and ornaments, engravings and the remains of a boat. It was very interesting (and fortunately, the info cards were translated into English).

Each display in the museum represented a period of history of Gothenburg - from viking up to the modern age. Not all displays had an English translation, but most of the time I could tell what I was looking at.

Up on the top floor was a temporary exhibition celebrating the combined anniversaries of the Gothenburg theaters and opera. This was a display of costumes, scale models of stage sets, photos and sketches from plays, musicals and operas - with some costumes as old as 150 years! This unfortunately was not in English, but I could pick out some bits like "William Shakespeare", "Madame Butterfly", "Hamlet" etc and others that were easy translations like "en midsommar nätter dröm" - but the rest I was in the dark. However - it didn't matter as they were amazing! No photos from inside the museum unfortunately (and the gift shop didn't even have any postcards of the displays!)

In the afternoon I went for a ride on the Gothenburg "Circle of Excellence" (aka ferris wheel). From here I was able to look out over the town, and also get the photo of the ship which was at the start of this entry.

I thought it would be a short ride, but it turned out to be such good value that I went round and round so many times that I just missed my train (I had time to get my bags out of the lock up, but not enough to get the ticket and on the train). So I went back to town and looked at a few more things until the next train to Stockholm left.