Stockholm, 23–26 August: ABBA and Islands
I’m still making up my mind about Stockholm, although I’m reserving judgement on Sweden until we can visit and travel a but further afield. My response may be somewhat swayed by the fact that we were ripped off blind by some bastard cab driver (dropped us in the wrong place and charged us $120 for his pains, or ours), and the cost of everything. This is a very expensive town and we are lucky to be staying in an apartment so we can defray the expenses we might have incurred when eating out for dinner, lunch and breakfast.
Stockholm is clean, friendly, accessible but that tiny bit regimented. Gamla Stan, the old town, is not real Stockholm, which is newish and busy. There’s a sense that the locals see themselves as superior due to their past independence from the world’s troubles. Like them, we will pass over their tendency for right-wing nationalism and willingness to trade with the Nazis. Nobody (except John Eales) is perfect.
We have to mention our host, Nils, who was very helpful and clearly did not have permission to sublet his flat while he went and stayed with hi boyfriend. We think Nils is a camera operator or cinematographer and his boyfriend is a set designer who was clearly given free reign when it came to Nils’ place. Eclectic is hardly adequate to describe the decor! However, it was comfortable, right beside the metro and thus ten minutes into town, and Kungsholmen island has good green spaces and supermarkets.
We did a bit of a drop and run and headed out the door for the Strandvagen area, where many of the tourist ferries leave from. We were on a renovated old steamer, cruising around the archipelago that we had glimpsed from our cabin window as the overnight ferry came in. As an aside, we had woken up at six in the morning to see islands slipping past within a hundred metres of the ship. The lucky few in Stockholm seemed to have inherited or purchased summer houses in the islands and islets, some of which didn’t have a ferry service. I’m sure it is too remote in winter has the whole archipelago freezes (I’m sure the Finns, who build and own all the icebreakers, lend a hand).
We stayed around the Old Town for a coffee and cake (fika) while we waited for our tour. Our guide was late and we were the only two on the tour, but he was good company and we learned quite a bit of history and culture, before heading of for dinner. Paula, gastronomic guide book in female form, had chosen a gastropub, which struck the right balance between good food and drink, and a bill in krone the size of a lotto win.
Sunday was our day to visit museums, saving those of high culture for the morrow. Unfortunately, and who could have predicted this, all the good burghers of Stockholm decided to have Sunday off as well. Clearly atheists to their collective bootstraps, they eschewed Sunday sacraments at their local Lutheran church and all 2.5 million of them decided to get on our tram. Drunk uni students and Minis had nothing on this. By the time we got to the Abba museum we were so compressed we could have got in on a single ticket.
The Abba museum was professional, nostalgic and a lot of fun for those of us who had lived through Countdown. Paula was definitely eyeing off a reproduction kimono.
Vasa, on the other hand, was overwhelming and the sheer scale of the material recovered from the wreck sight is difficult to describe. Check the slide show for some sense, but note that the sterncastle was six floors about the keel.
Monday was spent at Drottningholm Palace, which was fascinating, although our guide was a little off-putting. Her English was faultless and her script full of informafion but almost totally devoid of idiom, which meant irony and humour were absent. As my guiding technique very much relies on those skills, my attention occasionally wandered!
Our afternoon booking with high culture was the Nordic Museum, which had a fascinating collection that led us through a thousand years of history and culture but was almost impossible to capture on a camera or phone. My feeling is that it was curated to within an inch of its life to ensure that one understood that modern Sweden was the direct and uncomplicated result of deep northern forests, snow-bound isolation, mystical spirituality caused by the struggle against nature and neighbour, and national destiny. Or is my suspicion of nationist movements getting the better of me?
Anyway, onwards to Oslo in the morning.
