We arrived at Skansen with hundreds of kids. Most of them were on our bus. OK, it just sounded like they were all on our bus. To take a field trip here, preschoolers to high schools, the whole class, get on the bus with only one teacher and one helper. So, yes, the bus was loud. The preschoolers ARE better behaved though.
Skansen, opened in 1891, is an open-air museum created to show the way of life in different parts of Sweden.
The entrance is at the bottom on this map. This is just to give you a perspective of how large this park is.
The first couple hours were frustrating because things were not open yet or not open till July or August. Glassworks - closed. Bakery - closed. Houses - closed.
The places that were open were great. There were costumed guides that told you about the life in that house or business. Most were very good. Some never said a word, unless you asked something.
This was a "Summer Home". During the 1920's Swede's were allocated land to build a 150 square foot "home" and to grow food. They would live here full time during the summer, growing and keeping an eye on their crops.
At noon when it started to rain, we stopped for lunch. We are at Tre Byttor, an a la carte restaurant, and we each had a cheese burger and a Coke Lite. Then we split an apple pie. Mostly it was tasteless.
After lunch (12:50) we toured in the rain.It rained all the rest of the day. After the children left the place was pretty much empty.
On our second trip through the interactive old town area more of the shops and houses with characters in them were open. Oddly, this glass worker had two sets of school kids come through and he never said a thing or explained what he was doing.
These two, on the other hand, were carrying on a normal conversation with these two 10 year-olds about what they were doing and why in their pottery hut.
And so it went throughout the rest of the day. We would walk into an old building and ask, "What year is THIS house?". We visited houses from 1700's through the 1900's and had nice conversations about what life was like "back then". We learned a lot about the people, their work lives, their home lives, why they did what they did, and the economics of the time.
In 1920 when people moved from the country to the city, housing was in short supply and expensive. This was an upstairs apartment, really a large room about a shop, that housed 10 people - a family of 8 with grandparents and two boarders.
There were 4 or 5 farms like this from various years. This one is a prosperous farm from 1850.
I guess the most interesting take-away from everything we learned was that times were so bad in the late 1800's that 1/3 of all Swedes immigrated to the United States. Chicago became the city with the second largest Swedish population. Only Stockholm had more. The main reason was low cost, high quality farm land in the upper Midwest combined with the growing shortage of farms in Sweden.
Pat couldn't get a round trip ticket at the ticket machine this morning and the bus drivers do not sell tickets. So he let's us ride until the closest ticket station and we get out and buy tickets and get on the next bus.
On the way home we stop for dinner at Flippin' Burgers. The burger was excellent. They know how to do burgers right here, thick, juicy and onions. Back to the apt at 5 pm.
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