Tall Ships Festival

The Tall Ships Races stopped in Stockholm this past weekend. The Races are held every year between four cities around Europe. This year there were two races, one in the Mediterranean and one in the Baltic. The Baltic race stopped in Stockholm for its third of four stops — the first time in some six or seven years since it last did so — so the City threw a big festival to welcome them. Here are some photos of the ships. …

Here’s the biggest of them all, a Russian ship from around 1920 (you can click each of these to see a larger version in Flickr):

Here you see the Mexican Navy ship preparing to leave. During the festival, this was the most popular one for tourists to try to board, because they constantly had Mexican party music playing from their loudspeakers — classical, traditional, and contemporary pop music, all Mexican:

It’s hard to tell from the above photo above, but as the ship is preparing to leave, the sailors have climbed up onto all of the the lateral spars and stood atop them, alongside each other. They continued to stand up there as the ship motored out of Stockholm Harbor. Maybe if I zoom in a bit more you can see them: