Mar 7, Fri (Baltic Sea - Stockholm - Uppsala - Stockholm)

The next morning, we all felt very, very subdued - breakfast was relatively restrained. Debarking in Stockholm we grabbed a taxi who drove us directly to our youth hostel on Langholmen (which is pretty close to the centre of Stockholm). This youth hostel was in actual fact a refurbished prison. However, our rooms were (although predictably small) exceedingly luxurious by any normal youth hostel standards. I had to leave the others as they went off to explore Stockholm, I caught a train north to Uppsala instead. I was booked to give a seminar for a friend (Susanne Kerje) I had made at the last ESPCR conference in Bari. Her group was very experienced in pigment genetics and I was interested in consolidating the contact because that field looms large in my own studies. Susanne and one of her students (Elisabeth) picked me up at the station, took me to lunch and then gave me a short walking tour of downtown Uppsala before going to their institute for my seminar. Despite some lingering seediness I was able to conduct myself with reasonable coherence and I was then invited to discuss with the group head (Prof. Leif Andersson) his new findings in horse melanoma studies. Afterwards Susanne took me downtown for a cup of tea and we talked together until it was time for me to go back to Stockholm. Back at the Langholmen hostel I found everybody in the restaurant with Patrik and Cecilia and about twenty other guests for the next day's wedding. It was great seeing them again and they looked pretty relaxed about the coming ceremony. Around midnight Leila and I went to our room and collapsed.

Mar 8, Sat (Stockholm)

After breakfast in the hostel the four of us went into town and visited the Vasa museum. The Vasa was a very big boat that was unfortunately designed, it sank in Stockholm's harbour on its first test voyage. However, despite hundreds of years under the water it was raised and restored. While it is distinctly unimpressive as a feat of engineering it is certainly very impressively proportioned and we spent a few hours walking around it and reading up on its history. After that we returned to the prison to get ready for Patrik and Cecilia's wedding. The wedding was to be held in a nearby building where there were scores of well-dressed swedes and danes hobnobbing with glasses of champagne and eating little sticky things on bread. The ceremony was beautiful and emotional and quite different from anything else I have seen. For example, there is a great deal of singing and not just the drunken rowdy stuff you associate with scandanavian students at their schnapps parties, so it was really very lovely. There were also many toasts, mostly in Swedish, Leila led the Swiss contingent's toast to the bride and groom. The food was plentiful, the drinks were endless, and then they had a fantastic live band carry the entertainment until very late.

Mar 9, Sun (Stockholm - Zürich)

Breakfast was had with the bride and groom in the hostel's restaurant. Everybody looked in good shape despite the previous evening's indulgences. We packed our bags and checked out. The fantastic four headed off again into Stockholm to do some museum stalking. First we stashed our belongings at the train-station before assessing our options. Unfortunately the armoury and some other parts of the royal museum were closed for the season! This was quite disappointing. Instead, Martijn suggested we go to the Natural History museum which was a short twenty minute stroll away. This place was excellent, however it was too big for us to see it all in one day, so we restricted ourselves mostly to its magnificent viking section and the very impressive gold room. It is always very good to finally see in front of you objects that you only previously saw in books. Suffering from severe museum-lag we caught the subway back into town and, after a couple of hiccups, found Patrik and Cecilia's apartment. There were about twenty or so people there from last night helping them eat the left over food. We gave it our best shot to be useful in that department too. Unfortunately, we could not stay longer than an hour, as our flight back to Zürich was coming due. We said our goodbyes to the happy couple and the other guests and made our way, eventually, back home to Zürich. Phew!