26 July - Stockholm day 4

First expedition today, Saturday, was to the Millesgården, a museum on the estate of the late Carl Milles, a Swedish sculptor of some renown. He did mostly large public monuments. He created this one as a peace monument and to celebrate the founding of the United Nations. It was intended be placed in the garden at UN headquarters with the water cascading into the East River, but the project was cancelled, so it now stands on the Stockholm waterfront, where we saw it on a boat ride the following day:

God on a rainbow, putting stars into the sky

Today we rode the T-Bana and a bus and walked a few blocks to get to Milles' old home in the suburb of Lidingö. You enter to a terrace of statuary overlooking the water, with the cruise ship docks beyond.

Inside the main house is a room devoted to models and plans for other works.

Outside we took quite a few pics of various works. Here is a rather Buddha-like Jonah escaping a Whale,

and Milles' best-known work, or at least the one you find the most pictures of on the internet, the Hand of God.

For a lot more of these interesting works, look at our Smugmug Gallery starting around the 4th page of thumbnails.

After a pleasant lunch in the museum's open-air cafe we went back to the hotel to avoid the afternoon heat. About 5 we emerged to take a look at Gamla Stan (Old Town), the island where Stockholm began. We meant to see the cathedral, but we had misread the opening hours—it closed at 1400 hours on Saturday. So we wandered around taking pics of the crowded plaza,

Note people eating at tables on a raised platform. Remember that.

And the famously narrow alleys,

Backlit red hair, ok.

And an unexpected, cool and tranquil square.

For more shots of Gamla Stan including a cute sentry in back of the Royal Palace, see our Smugmug Gallery, starting around the 5th page of thumbnails..

So we found a table at a crowded cafe on the main square, which was now full of people listening to a band concert. We were seated at a table next to the edge of a raised platform. This picture was taken from that table.

We had shared our table with another tourist couple and were enjoying drinks, an appetizer and conversation, when Marian said, "My purse is gone!"

She had set it on the floor by her chair, next to the railing of the platform. Sometime in the preceding minutes, someone had walked past, picked up the purse, and kept walking.

This is upsetting, as you can imagine. We looked around and under the platform, we enlisted the waiters (whose only advice was, cancel the credit card right away), and finally we abandoned supper (the restaurant said "forget it" when we offered to pay for the appetizer and drinks) and headed "home" to the hotel.

The damage was not as bad as it might have been. Marian had no money in her purse, but she had lost her California driver's license, one of our two credit cards (she wasn't carrying the other, nor the ATM card), and most seriously, her passport.

The staff at the Radisson Blu were most helpful. They said we must make a police report, the embassy will want that. And dialed the police and introduced Marian on the phone to a detective who took her report.

Meanwhile David called the credit card company and cancelled the card. No unauthorized charges had been placed in the hour since it had been stolen.

In the room, Marian looked up the US Embassy web page about lost or stolen passports and found that,

• Not only did they want a police report made, they wanted a physical copy of it.
• They also want proof of ID, which can be a xerox of the lost passport. Here David earned major credit because exactly such passport xeroxes were in the back of the purple binder!
• They want passport photos, made to their very specific dimensional requirements.
• They are open 8-4 M-F only. (This was all happening on Saturday evening.)
• You must have an appointment which you can obtain online.
• But the appointment booking page offered no openings next week at all! and we are booked to fly home on Tuesday.
• However there was mention of emergency assistance when travel was imminent.

So now we set out to fulfill as many requirements as possible before 8am Monday. Took a cab to the police station to obtain a printed copy of the report. No problem, Stockholm police are calm and polite and helpful.

Back at the hotel, Marian discovered a two-year-old blog post by someone who said there was a passport photo machine somewhere in the Stockholm Central Station complex. That's next door! So we set out to find it in the complex hallways and escalators. And did! Tucked away in a corner behind a spiral staircase is a take-your-own-photo machine. All we needed was a credit card... oops. Our only card with a chip is now dead. Or, 100 Kroner in coins. OK, we have about 40, so we go to two 7-11 stores and talk the tired clerks (it is now about 11pm) out of enough change. And make the pictures!

So by midnight, 5 hours after the theft, we have the documents we need for the Embassy on Monday. Will they come through with a temporary passport in time for us to fly Tuesday? We don't know. Also, we've been using the "chip" credit card several times a day. Now our only money is cash from the ATM machine, and we can't buy anything such as a bus ticket from a vending machine. So we went to bed with a lot of uncertainty and angst. But there is still Sunday to get through before anything can be resolved.