Feelings: Comfortable, Cheerful.
Maybe it is time to grow up. I don’t know. I always got the impression that growing up was over-rated but today I had hoped to be childish and it turned out to be ultimately a little boring. Our destination was a parklanded island called Djurgården. There is something lovely about getting to walk around in green spaces in cities, don’t you think? Like trying to find buildings in the countryside?? We visited—as recommended in the ‘Stockholm for Children’ section of the Lonely Planet—Junibacken, which is a place where ‘tykes and their parents “fly” through the strange and fantastical world of Pippi Longstocking’. I think I can’t remember Pippi Longstocking after all now. Ultimately I just ended up subjecting the poor V— to a long wait in a queue of anxious parents chasing after screaming kids in order to ride a basket over a ‘It’s a small world’ like display of the different stories written by Astrid Lindgren which were all run together into a weird incomprehensible narrative that ended with a disabled brother taking his dying brother on his back and jumping off a cliff. The basket train dumped us at Pippi’s house and a wooden version of her horse. It was not worth the money unfortunately. Sad smiley face.
Dagens ratt is a way to have economical meals in Scandinavia. If I have understood the history correctly, the government originally subsidised the ‘worker’s’ lunch in order that the proletariat ate a decent meal in the middle of the day and continued to be the productive worker in the afternoon. (That is me paraphrasing). It means that for a reasonably reasonable price you can have a hot meal, a salad, a glass of water and a coffee. The meals are usually along the lines of meatballs with mashed potatoes and ligonberry jam (I’m asking for the dagens ratt next time I have that particular meal at Ikea) or a giant meatball on fried potatoes with an egg or fish and boiled potatoes. We had the dagens ratt for lunch.
The rest of the day we wandered around the green bits of the island, had coffee as I complained of my sore knee, and caught the ferry back to Gamla Stan. Laid back, possibly not overly absorbative of all the possibilities of Stockholmian culture, but nice enough. Bought V— a belt to hold up his trousers from the outside and ice-creams to hold both of our trousers up from the inside. Dinner in the apartment again, and sleeping.
I did forget to tell you that there was a ghost in the apartment on the first night. He unscrewed the light fitting over the shower so that it hit the rail and smashed in the sink. He seems to have accepted our presence in the place now, but I still think it may be he who is responsible for the fact that no matter how closely you look to make sure the glass has been swept up, there is always another little piece that inserts itself into the sole of your foot.
Showing posts with label Stockholm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stockholm. Show all posts
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
June 12th: Stockholm.
Feelings Flash Cards: Tired; Annoyed.
The feelings were inevitable results of the twenty-two hour flight in economy. I’m not going to say who was which—just let you know that the order is always the same, and let you see if there is a pattern to be discerned. Qatar is bigger; I would have to say it is true. And possibly not just by millimetres. I had the middle seat on the thirteen hour flight and while it was never, ever, ever, going to be enjoyable, it was bearable (-ish). I did have movie disappointments. I watched Rango (okay, I really thought the goldfish would figure more), Just Go With It (mmm, predictable and deja-vued/viewed, but with a couple of funny moments) and Unknown (not bad, good twists, but is it a re-make of something like it?), but couldn’t do anymore. Possibly because there was not anything I wanted to see enough to stay awake—not implying here, however, that I actually slept in the truest sense of the notion.
We arrived in Stockholm about two in the afternoon, Sunday, breezed through immigration, waited for our bags forever and then caught the train into town. That was a little exciting—it combined the maritime feel of wooden window frames with the technological advances of a train that travels effortlessly at two hundred and five kilometres an hour. In twenty minutes we were in town, and twenty after that we were greeting Martin at the door of the Old Town Apartment we had booked. It is the cutest and tiniest little apartment you ever did see. Stockholm is made up, as its nickname (Venice of the North) suggests, of a number of islands (did I read somewhere there are fourteen?), joined by an even larger number (fifty-seven?) of bridges. The Old Town Apartments are on Gamla Stan, on a cobbled street lined with cafes and pubs and antique shops; tacky tourist shops and old bakeries; ice cream shops which beckon with waffle smells to die for; funky fashions and beautiful craft; even shops where chain mail armour or Viking headgear (authentic and in-) is to be had. Anxiousness, unfortunately, plagued me on our afternoon and evening soirees into the streets because although I have looked and read and tried to memorise a few choice phrases of Swedish, I am completely useless and succumb to allowing myself to find the easy way in the Swede’s superior grasp of my language over mine of theirs. I feel guilty. It’s part of the weird transition into holiday-in-a-foreign-country mode and will hopefully not last long—or will be perceived differently soon.
Aside: Lots of people wear very bright green, and the sound of the wheeled suitcase is ubiquitous.
We spent the afternoon walking the island of Gamla Stan, followed by beer, dinner in an Italian restaurant and ‘home’. Shattered didn’t begin to describe it, and sleep was easy to find.
The feelings were inevitable results of the twenty-two hour flight in economy. I’m not going to say who was which—just let you know that the order is always the same, and let you see if there is a pattern to be discerned. Qatar is bigger; I would have to say it is true. And possibly not just by millimetres. I had the middle seat on the thirteen hour flight and while it was never, ever, ever, going to be enjoyable, it was bearable (-ish). I did have movie disappointments. I watched Rango (okay, I really thought the goldfish would figure more), Just Go With It (mmm, predictable and deja-vued/viewed, but with a couple of funny moments) and Unknown (not bad, good twists, but is it a re-make of something like it?), but couldn’t do anymore. Possibly because there was not anything I wanted to see enough to stay awake—not implying here, however, that I actually slept in the truest sense of the notion.
We arrived in Stockholm about two in the afternoon, Sunday, breezed through immigration, waited for our bags forever and then caught the train into town. That was a little exciting—it combined the maritime feel of wooden window frames with the technological advances of a train that travels effortlessly at two hundred and five kilometres an hour. In twenty minutes we were in town, and twenty after that we were greeting Martin at the door of the Old Town Apartment we had booked. It is the cutest and tiniest little apartment you ever did see. Stockholm is made up, as its nickname (Venice of the North) suggests, of a number of islands (did I read somewhere there are fourteen?), joined by an even larger number (fifty-seven?) of bridges. The Old Town Apartments are on Gamla Stan, on a cobbled street lined with cafes and pubs and antique shops; tacky tourist shops and old bakeries; ice cream shops which beckon with waffle smells to die for; funky fashions and beautiful craft; even shops where chain mail armour or Viking headgear (authentic and in-) is to be had. Anxiousness, unfortunately, plagued me on our afternoon and evening soirees into the streets because although I have looked and read and tried to memorise a few choice phrases of Swedish, I am completely useless and succumb to allowing myself to find the easy way in the Swede’s superior grasp of my language over mine of theirs. I feel guilty. It’s part of the weird transition into holiday-in-a-foreign-country mode and will hopefully not last long—or will be perceived differently soon.
Aside: Lots of people wear very bright green, and the sound of the wheeled suitcase is ubiquitous.
We spent the afternoon walking the island of Gamla Stan, followed by beer, dinner in an Italian restaurant and ‘home’. Shattered didn’t begin to describe it, and sleep was easy to find.
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