My first day in Visby in Gotland, a part of Sweden

Today was an amazing day. I woke up ridiculously early- 5:30 so I could be out of the apartment by 6am and be at T-Centralen by 6:30. I was late because the train was late, but it ended up being all right. We caught a cab, got to the airport, checked in, and by eight we were in the air, and by nine we had landed. A short busride, and we were in Visby.

Visby, I think, has become my favorite city I have ever been to by far. Ridiculously old, it was built by a peaceful version of Vikings. (I might insert more here as I read my guidebook)

But history aside, the town is all wonderful cobbled streets and old houses so that you feel like you’ve stepped back into time. There’s a sea breeze that blows through the streets, so that even when you’re hiking around and are overdressed because you thought you’d be cold, you stay a nice temperature. There’s roses springing out of the most unlikely places, like the cracks between sidewalks and the bases of buildings. Apple trees hang over walls that surround gardens and small little parks are nestled between buildings or in “squares” (because most of them aren’t really square). The roads are meandering and haphazard, apparently similar to the setups of Viking towns in other parts of Europe.

Right now there are hardly any people on the streets, and there’s a peace that is only broken by the passing of cars down streets that should be too small for them to maneuver. It’s a close fit in places, but the natives seem to know what they are doing when driving. Sometimes the cars take you by surprise, expecially when exiting one of the older buildings, because you feel like modern things have no place in the town. But somehow Visby has succeeded (for the most part) with meshing old and new.

We had a tour by a man named Guther (although pronounced in the Swedish fashion so the name sounded much more musical.) It’s interesting… He is a really old man, and remembers when Visby’s main language was German and you took English in the schools. Now, (as he puts it) the Germans lost the war, and we speak Swedish. Visby has a particular multicultural history, in that at the height of its prosperity (that is, it’s Medieval Prosperity) eighteen different nationalities were represented – and they traded with people as far as Mesopotamia.

Guther is our guide for the weekend, and today treated us to a tour inside of the city walls. I have lots of footage (today I discovered my camera had a video feature… guess what I’ve been doing?) and pictures of the churches and houses he took us to- many of which aren’t open to the public during the main season, and you have to know someone to get you into them during the off season. We got to see a lot of places that my Visby Guidebook says are off limits… kind of cool, huh?

Don’t worry, I’ll upload the footage when I figure out how.

The highlights of the trip included our visit to a house that had paintings instead of tapestries on all the walls depicting beautiful scenes of various hunting and biblical passages. We got to go into the inside of one of the towers and went into several ruins of churches… they were both beautiful and haunting, and somehow they were more powerful to me than going into the church that has been maintained that was built around the same time. I felt like the ruins were like skeletons, the flesh melted away but the bare, pale bones and ribs pointed to the heavens like a giant that simply died.

One of the great other things about having Guther as a tour guide was not only his knowledge (ghost stories) and island connections, but also the fierce pride he had for the architecture on the island, and the enduring ability of these structures. He pointed out that the houses and things we build today will hardly be there 500, 1000 years from now. Sometimes things like these make me wonder how much we’ve progressed, and if historians that look back at us will say, yes, they had great technical advances, but this was a time when art and architecture went stagnant. Simply because there’s no buildings that lasted.

Sure, now we might look and be like, yes, this was a time of sickness and war and they lived with relatively little technical advancements, but look at what they were able to achieve with the little they had. I mean, the rune stones we saw today told stories of a boy who decided to go home over the dangerous rapids while his brothers went overland. He died… his pride to prove that he was able to do better than his older brothers the lasting impression we have of him. (ok, so I added the last bit about his pride and having to prove stuff, but really, how much have things changed?)

Another highlight was at lunch we went to a medieval restaurant, ate on bread trenchers, only had a knife, and ate like we would have if we were at a formal meal in medieval times. The food was quite good, and it was a lot of fun, if a bit messy.

I’m thinking of waking up early tomorrow and seeing if I can walk around the edge of the town and follow the wall around Historic Visby, since I don’t think I’ll be able to do it otherwise. I’ll have to resist taking pictures, because I’ve almost used up a while GB in one day. Some of that was filming, but not that much. I have SOOO many pictures. I don’t know which ones I’ll be able to choose to put up here.

So after lunch we finished the tour (a few more churches and some ghost stories) and we had freetime until dinner. I took the opportunity to go to a Nordia bank and cash my check. Then I went to the one still functioning church from the mideval times, and after that I went through some charming tourist stores, culminating in me going to a handicraft store and caving. I got myself a hat trimmed in lamb’s wool, and also a pair of slippers. I badly wanted a pair of gloves also, but I had to resist. There might be other things I want to buy the rest of my stay here.

I did also get an obscene amount of postcards to add to my incipient collection, and also some tour books that have info that I think is interesting. I thought one of them might also make a good gift.

Dinner was in a monk’s tavern, and now I’m going to work on my English Essay (due Monday, along with a bunch of reading) that I’ve been procrastinating doing by writing this entry. Hey, this journal and my cultural experiences is just as important!

*wink*