Visby on a sunny Thursday

I have been travelling a lot in the last couple weeks with little time to sit down and write, so this post will be from events that occurred last Thursday.

After feeding the lambs in the morning I headed out with Annika, Stina and Lina to Visby. We went to the Gotland Museum and spent the morning and some of the afternoon there. This museum displays all of Gotland’s history for as far back as they can find anything!

There is a lot of Viking history on this island. It was really interesting to see how they lived and where they traveled! I even found out there were a few girl Vikings on Gotland!

On a farm on Gotland they also found treasures from two silver raids. In total, 80 Kilograms of silver (what it weighed at the time of burial) were recovered!! 

One of the most interesting things I found was a 9000 year old skeleton! That is not a typo! My brain almost fell out of my head. I couldn’t believe it! In Canada something that is a couple hundred years old is considered ancient. I can’t even begin to fathom what life could have been like 9000 years ago! And it was even in pretty good condition considering it is so old! 

There was also a lot of information on how Gotland came to be a Christian island. Before Christianity they were Pagan. Then a few people who had travelled to Christian countries or traded with Christians thought that they should start to implement the religion on the island. The first church that was built was burned down by the community. So the guy just built another one! The community was about to burn it down again but then the man sat on top of it and said “If you burn the church you will have to burn me too” Luckily before anything rash happened the man’s father-in-law, who was a well regarded man, stepped in and told the people to let the church stay. Soon after, more churches were built, and slowly everyone converted to Christianity. Eventually it was even illegal to be Pagan! Now there are 81 churches on Gotland.

Oh did I mention I got into the museum for free because I am under 20!? Europe is great for student discounts! Clearly they think we are great ;). For lunch we had lasagna (which I am starting to really enjoy ketchup on, so don’t look at me too funny if I come back to Canada and do that..). Then we went to several nice shops in Visby.

Before we left for the day, we stopped at an ice cream shop that had 180 different flavours! Oh my, it is a good thing I didn't understand most of them or else I would have been in real trouble! Anyone who knows me well knows that my decision making skills need a lot of practice...

On the way home we stopped and got some Swedish strawberries :) Yum!