Fotografiska

Still not feeling fantastic today. We left the house very late again and went to the harbor to see about taking a boat tour. However, it was too late in the day, we decided to try to get up early another morning and come back for the boats. So we walked around the old town for some souvenir shopping and I couldn't find a plate I liked. Frustrating - but this is the LAST plate I need! Thank goodness.

Then we went to the Fotografiska which is a photography museum that just opened in Stockholm like 2 weeks ago, so it's very new!! I think this was one of my favorite museums I've been to on this whole trip - it was so cool. There were 4 different exhibits and I really enjoyed all of them. I feel like usually I only like one or two exhibits, but seriously everything here was so great and interesting to me. The exhibits were "A child is Born", "The Birthday Party" (Vee Speers), "Life of a Photographer" (Annie Liebovitz), and "Bodies". I don't remember who did the "A Child is Born" pictures but they are really really famous photographs. They were published in Time magazine for the first time 20 or 30 years ago. The exhibit had amazingly magnified, colorful, poignant pictures of what goes on in a female's body to have a child. I was blown away by the exact moments that were captured; for example, there was a picture of the millisecond the fertilized egg attaches itslef to the placenta. It was incredible - you should go google those pictures if you're unfamiliar with them, they're truly stunning. "The Birthday Party" was all portraits of children holding or using a single prop. It was about the imagination of children and what they want to be when they grow up or what they pretend to be or what they're scared of being. It's of course open to interpretation but the pictures were really intriguing. There was one picture of a rather plain looking girl but when you look at her hands by her side you see scissors in one hand and a braid of (her) hair in the other. The exhibit also had pictures of kids dressed up in gas masks, or holding a gun, and of a boy dressed as a ballerina, and a girl dressed like a wealthy middle aged woman. Really strange but cool. Then there was the Annie Liebovitz exhibit which was just awesome. I really like her stuff, and she was kind of the main feature of this museum. There were close to 200 of her photos there as well as a video talking about how she chose pictures for her book. What was most interesting was that her book (and this exhibit which is based on the book) combines her professional pictures with her personal pictures. So you see a famous picture you've seen many times next to a series of photos she took of her father with her niece at the beach. It was really great. The last exhibit was cool but was my least favorite. It focused on the abnormalities of the human body, and it was just kind of bizarre.

After the museum, we didn't really have anything else we really "wanted" to do so we just went grocery shopping and home. I made a really fun dinner for myself that happened because I picked out ingredients that I felt like eating and put them all together, though I'd never had this combination before. I made rice with sauteed peppers, garlic, and chunks of avocado. It was warm and delicious and hopefully will help me get better very soon.

Then Laura and Hakan and I watched the movie "Into the Wild" which was SUCH a great movie!!! If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. I don't want to ruin anything but....AH, sooo good. That's your homework: go watch that movie (after you look up pictures from "A Child is Born").