Whale! Wow!

When I first met the swede I was obsessed with Sweden and what there was to see there...I remember reading in a travel book about a museum in Göteborg that had a stuffed baby blue whale. Well since Ive been in love with whales as long as Ive been in love with The Ricker..If you know who the Ricker is then I give you points for useless 80's trivia? Which my head is full of!

So anyway...Last month we went to Göteborg for the weekend. Paulus was busy with his gaming convention so I thought I would site seeing a bit and took a bus tour in the snow and visited the great museums they have there. I saved the Natural History Museum for that Sunday! Plus it was super cold and the snow it was a blowing!!!

Link to website.... www.gnm.se

When I got there I was so excited to see the stuffed whale....There were signs everywhere about him so I walked around and saw the other stuffed animals ,had some lunch and talked with a older women about spiders you find in the USA.

So finally I make it to the Hall of Mammals.....There next to its skeleton was this large stuffed baby blue whale....He was stuffed in the late 1880's and he just looked so sad.....I really felt bad for him. He was not caught and killed for the museum but washed up on a beach outside Göteborg and he was then cut into 4 pieces and stuffed...I remember just standing there reading at account of his story and how in the 1900's they thought it would be a good idea to open his mouth, add some walls, wallpaper,carpet and some seating and have fika in the whales mouth...(Fika is Sweden's version of high tea) I cried!

But you have to remember its was a different time and people didn't know what they know now....But at the same time its was fantasizing. I could not leave and I just thought this is the closest that I will ever get to a blue whale and I don't regret going. I even plan on going back one day and see it again!

Maggie