By Wladyslaw Sojka - Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60568001
My family and I went to Stockholm for a fall vacation. We stayed there from Friday to Saturday night. We got a travel package from Silja Line, which we all used for the first time. There wasn't much choice in the cabins, though it would have been wiser to choose better than a Class C cabin for the outbound trip. Never again. I don't remember ever traveling in Class C before, and it was awful. The noise of the engines wasn't bothersome at all. But there was noise from the car deck above us: alarms from cars, and in addition, on the open sea, an unbelievably loud banging at irregular intervals - as if there was something heavy hanging loose, crashing against a bulkhead. We went on the Symphony and returned on the Serenade. Overall, they felt like floating Stockmann department stores (an upmarket chain based in Finland), with accommodation and more restaurants than usual, and you could only exit according to the schedule. Most of the passengers looked like Stockmann customers. The five-story high promenade on the seventh deck took away a lot of floor space, causing congestion in public spaces - but allowing for windows in hundreds of cabins.
Vasa
By JavierKohen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8037128
Despite having had little sleep, on Friday we visited Junibacken (Astrid Lindgren Museum), which had a ski-lift-like cable car, where seated comfortably, one could watch a very nice presentation of Lindgren's fairy-tale worlds. Our then-eight-year-old daughter loved it. We also visited the nearby Vasa Ship Museum. The ship, which sank in 1628 near the center of Stockholm just a few hundred meters from Djurgården Island, where the current museum is, and was raised in 1961, might be the world's largest museum exhibit. The Vasa is housed in a colossal concrete building, moved there a few decades ago. It's an almost 230-foot-long ship-zombie, whose very nuanced life didn't end with its maiden voyage sinking. The international scientific community is constantly solving problems in an effort to keep the ship's frame intact. The hull shrinks by a millimeter a year and is weakened by various chemical processes. We didn't visit the Nordiska Museet, but were amazed by the grand building built for it.
We stayed in Stockholm at the Grand Hotel Central, which was a good hotel near the main train station. Breakfast was a bit crowded. On Saturday, we visited the royal palace and old town. Stockholm felt laid-back in terms of traffic and otherwise. Compared to Helsinki, there were many immigrants and elderly people working at metro stations and trams helping tourists. For instance, on the tram, a ticket to Djurgården was handwritten for us by a ticket collector who looked about 70 years old. In Finland, such inefficiencies are eliminated and replaced with technical solutions. Such a practice is unthinkable here. Sweden's economy must be good for it to afford this kind of things, and the idea is perhaps to engage more marginalized labor. The Stockholm Urban Area has about 1.4 million inhabitants and the Helsinki Urban Area has about 1.2 million, but due to its more populous metropolitan area (larger by half a million or so), history, and architecture, Stockholm feels a notch above Helsinki.
For the return trip, we hadn't been able to get cheaper than Deluxe-class cabins. Apparently, even those were overbooked, as the check-in machine in the Värtahamnen terminal printed out Commodore-class tickets. Well, we were not complaining at all. The spacious Commodore-class cabins are on decks 10 and 11 at the bow of the ship in a section of their own with the section having access control. The section has separate men's and women's saunas, which you can book for private use at the end of the evening. The lounge offers free service, excluding alcoholic beverages. The cabin fridge had a complimentary bottle of champagne, beers, and other drinks. There were magnificent views of the Stockholm archipelago from the large cabin window. We had dinner at a restaurant on Saturday evening. We noted that the ship's public areas were too plebian for our liking (heh), so we decided to retreat to the tranquility and luxury of the Commodore section.
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