June 13th: Stockholm.

Feelings: Calm, Worried.

Breakfasted on scones and cream cheese at a Swedish equivalent of a Starbucks. Walking was the order of the day. We started with the Royal Palace—six hundred and eight rooms, biggest operating palace in the world. There was a fourteen year old boy with a gun guarding it. Disconcerting. We walked over to and around the island of Skeppsholmen Being treed and bordered with all things maritime made it a lovely couple of hours of preamble. Holidays would be about thirty-three times easier if it wasn’t for food. I find the process of finding a place to eat, speaking to waiters in Swenglish and deciding on food options a tedious chore. I think holiday-eating options should work one of two other ways: either you get fitted with a drip that supplies all necessary energy boosts for the full duration of the holiday, or, you just have coffee and cakes. I don’t seem to find it hard to have cake. After three sweeps of the Kunstradgården we decided to start easy and chose the TGI Fridays. There is fresh, nice tasting food, and then there is a weird sort of fake level of food underneath. Lunch was the latter.

Wesley, my backpack and my trousers are covered with the smell of the last third of a bottle of spilled perfume. In order that I can also smell a little as good as they, I needed to find some more perfume in one of the world’s most expensive cities. It’s a good exercise actually—forces you to look for a new smell from a cheaper source. I ended up at the Body Shop. Their perfumes are not too bad. We visited the Kulturhuset. I am not sure what the Lonely Planet was talking about though; it wasn’t quite the hive of youth art they made out. It was nice to sit on the third of fourth floor for a while and look out at (the more modern part of) the city. And there was a bit of a buzz of people drawing on the pavement with chalk on the subterranean level, which was in itself a bit funky. We each formulated a plan for the rest of the afternoon, threw the dice and followed this one: Back to Gamla Stan via the Parliament Building on the Island of the Holy Spirit, visit the Nobel Museum and then indulge in the Swedish tradition of afternoon coffee and cake.

The Nobel Museum was actually quite interesting. It was my plan (V—‘s differed in the order of coffee and cakes and museum, and in the actual museum chosen—the Armoury) but I had a few doubts. I was pleasantly surprised. There wasn’t that much to it—films showing in two rooms, some computer terminals on which you could access the web site for the museum and nominate who you thought was ‘admirable’ (Lolli and Bodhi, for being so trusting in a world lacking trust), a kid’s room where we had a puppet show, a dry-cleaner-esque rail on which pictures of all the recipients of the Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economics prizes circled the ceiling of the room, and a rather strange collection of items donated to the museum which had belonged to the recipients. Perhaps it is a sense of voyeurism that makes the last bit so intriguing. There were letters and diaries and artworks, visual notebooks, carvings and baseball gloves, instruments of experimentation and reminders of times when Google wasn’t our professor and discovery was the result of plain, hard graft and lots of numbers on large pieces of paper. Very nice blueberry crumble and coffee finished the plan.

My tolerance levels seemed to be bottoming out though and there were eek moments in the teeny supermarket where we were buying groceries for dinner as the aisles were filled with what appeared to be the key note speakers of several conferences. We had hot dogs for dinner an again fell asleep in an instant.