I'm on a boat

Heading out into the night and places unknown.  Well, towards Tallin in Estonia, but I've never been there before so it's unknown to me.  As I sit here drinking my glass of bubbles and waiting for my fried perch to arrive, the lights of Stockholm have faded and there is now only blackness, the occasional navigation light and, if I lean close to the window, the white froth from the bow wave lit from the boat's (it's really a ship) lights. 

Stockholm is a very elegant city.  Its Christmas decorations elegant and refined, its buildings stately and straight (with the odd exception in Gamla Stan), and its streets and footpaths clean and litter-free.  But I preferred Amsterdam with its wonky houses, chocolate penises and streets bleeding red with the remains of fireworks.  I enjoyed Stockholm, I possibly would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been sick, but it's museums are for looking whereas Amsterdam's are for playing.

Today, I went to the exception, the ABBA museum.  You get to sing and dance along with ABBA (holograms) on stage, shake your booty in a music video and other interactive exhibits.  It was fun - but a bit small for the price tag which was twice that of most other museums.  You also get a look through the Swedish hall of music fame - apparently there are some very good music producers in Sweden, and of course, musical geniuses like Europe (it's the final countdown!!!!)

I also visited the Modern Art museum.  They had a Duchamp exhibition and as I wandered through, I was struck by how dated it is.  Coat hangers arranged is no longer innovative and a urinal in an art museum is no longer shocking.  At times I've pondered the function of art - usually for a work essay - and one of them, I think is to shock us.  To jar us from our view of what is acceptable and to take what is hidden and secret and bare it for all to see.  To take what is ordinary and boring and present it as beautiful and worthy of acclaim.  But what then?  What about when it stops being shocking?

Another of the exhibitions was intended to do so.  It even came with a warning on the packet.  Cindy Sherman's photography is indeed intended to shock and possibly offend.  Naked wooden dolls (they look like mini crash test dummies - and the kama sutra dolls from the Nemo museum in Amsterdam) in somewhat degrading sexual positions, a picture of a model of a vagina with tampon cord and the like.  I raised an eyebrow at these but it was the clothed pictures that I am still thinking about.  The series is of 'centrefolds' except it is of women looking scared and vulnerable - and with their bodies largely covered.  She received a lot of criticism for these pictures, they were seen as anti-feminist.  I haven't read the blurb, so I'm not sure what she intended.  But as they replay in my head, I find so many possible meanings - all very feminist.  And this is one of the other things that I think art should do:  keep replaying in our heads, thinking of it's meanings and possibilities.

So I've finished my very leisurely dinner; sat in the cigar bar drinking bubbles, listening to the piano bar and inhaling second hand cigar smoke (I know it's bad for me, but it smells so nice); looked through the shops including supermarket (it sells alcohol, cigarettes, and chocolate); and now I'm watching the show in the Starlight Palace.  This might be the only cruise I do until I'm 90, so I figure I should see what it's all about: men in skintight leather suit pants singing and shaking what their mama gave them, apparently.  Followed by a UB40 covers band.

I'e skipped a day so I should tell you what I did on Monday.  I headed out of town.  I'd wanted to see the island of Birka, but it's closed for the winter to I got on a train to Sigtuna instead.  It's a nice little lakeside village with an impressive collection of rune stones.  These are memory stones erected about a 1000 years ago to memorialise people who had died and also the person who had erected the stone.  Sigtuna itself was the home of the king at one point, and he divided his lawn up into equal sized sections (it was a big lawn) and asked all of the noble families to build there house on these sections - right where he could keep an eye on them.  Today, the roads still follow this structure.  There are information boards and a nice walk through the town, some old fallen down churches and a bit of a wooded area which looks over the town and the lake.  This is the spot where my camera fell off the park bench and died.  Bugger.

Having had a couple of average and overpriced meals the previous nights, I decided I would eat at the hotel again where I knew I would get very nice food for about the same price.  I tried the seafood bouillabaisse as the waiter said that it was exquisite.  It was.