Pretty much the only way to Stockholm from the airport is the express train. While convenient, it is by no means cheap. A single fare is about $50. For two of us that probably cost more than the flight. Fortunately there was a cheap deal Thursday – Sunday that allowed us to get into town at virtually two for the price of one. It got us there in about 20 minutes but as it was now about 2:30pm it was already getting pretty dark. Last time I came to Scandinavia, there was snow in Helsinki and none in Stockholm. This time it was the reverse. The snow was all over the footpaths and the sides of the roads and there was black ice everywhere so we had to be pretty careful walking to the hotel with our packs. I got us moving in the right direction and I got us across the water to Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town but I couldn’t for the life of me remember which direction I needed to head in to get to Vasterlanggatan, the street where our hotel was – eventually we found it and then proceeded to walk straight past the non-descript entrance.
Eventually we made it to our destination, the Lord Nelson Hotel., the skinniest hotel in Sweden. The hotel is about one room’s width plus corridor across. Last time I stayed here it was in a single room and that was quite cramped so I had prepared Dan for a tiny little room. In fact the room was quite spacious by hotel standards, although the bathroom was tiny – about the size of a Hong Kong hostel bathroom, except much more poorly laid out. Essentially, the shower, which had a shower curtain, was half the width of a normal shower. The first night, before I had worked out how the nifty tap system worked I had a lukewarm shower with no pressure, which made the whole bathroom situation terrible. The tap system was kind of one hemisphere of a cylinder attached on the flat side horizontal against the wall. The ends of the cylinder turned – one for heat, one for pressure. It turns out that if you pressed in the buttons on the parts you turned, you could increase the heat and pressure, making it a quite pleasant, if still tiny shower. What the lord Nelson has in spades is charm – it is nautically themed, helpful staff and location, right in the middle of the old town, one of the prettiest I have seen in the parts of Europe I have visited. What it doesn’t have is a laundry.
My travel agent laughed at me several years ago when I planned my hotel choices based on being able to access washing facilities every seven or eight days. Well here we were in Stockholm on day eight, where we would spend the next three days, with no laundry. And apparently no Laundromats. In Sweden, all apartment blocks are built with a basement that includes washing facilities so all you can find is drycleaners. The hotel provides a laundry service but given washing a pair of socks costs almost as much as what I paid for them at Aldi in the first place, I needed to explore other options. Essentially this amounted to washing my smalls and thermals in the tiny sink without a plug and constructing a Chinese laundry in the hotel room. (I wanna be your dog – The Stooges – a song with what has to be one of the world’s most copied guitar riffs. I remember seeing I gay at Big Day Out a couple of years ago – could have done without the closeup shots on the big screen. The years had not been kind to this punk legend. Although he is one of the few icons of his time still with us.)
Domestic chores, we decided to go for a wander through Gamla Stan. It is a labyrinth of little cobblestone lanes, twisting and weaving through the 15th century townhouses. People still lived in the tops of many of them -0 we could clearly see someone’s kitchen across the narrow lane next to our hotel window. The street level floors though now house restaurants, specialty stores and purveyors of touristy souvenir tatt, as you’d expect. Every now and then, as you walk along, you get a voyeur’s peek at normal life here – some of the laneways opened out into an apartment block courtyard, some of them with locked iron gates decorated with a Christmas wreath. Others just open. As you walked through the alcove into the courtyard though, you felt conscious that you were invading a private space, a refuge from the hoards of tourists that come through here each day. Today was a perfect example of that – a Sunday, there were so many people about that I took the hotel’s pickpocket warning seriously, clutching my bag close in the tight packed streets. There is always a surprise when you turn a corner her, an apartment courtyard, a communal square or the Christmas market!!
Our first proper, open Christmas market. It was gorgeous – little red huts selling Christmas decorations, delicacies and gifts. And of course the traditional Swedish Christmas drink – Glogg. And here it is alcoholic – 25 per cent in fact. And to Dan’s glee it comes with Pfefferkuchen – a traditional spiced Christmas biscuit from this part of the world. I make them at home but nowhere near as successfully as these. I might hiver to try harder next year as I think Dan enjoyed the biscuits more than the Glogg! The Glogg was pretty tasty though – spicy and sweet, with cardamom pods floating in it. After sipping our glogg, we decided to head back to the hotel to chill out for a bit before we headed out for dinner. One of the disadvantages of the sun setting at 2:30pm in the afternoon is that by 6pm you feel like it’s about midnight. It doesn’t help with the jetlag adjustment either. I was hoping to go to a jazz club in Stockholm but by the time most of them opened, I was ready for bed.
When we went back out, we decided to just wander down the street until we found something that wasn’t too expensive – a tough ask in Gamla Stan. We came across an Italian restaurant that looked vaguely affordable. There was a compulsory coat check – 8 SEK or about $1.50. I’m not sure what it is about Gamla Stan and bad art in restaurants but it seemed to be a theme – here there was a rip off of the Sistine chapel murals, painted very poorly, out of perspective and proportion. I know the Swedes aren’t prudes or anything but if you are going to paint David’s penis rather than a fig leaf, at least don’t make it shaped like a cigar. It looked like it was about to fall off at any moment. I ordered a pasta with salmon , tomato and blue cheese – the house special pasta and Dan had Carbonara. Dan had his first taste of Swedish beer and I just had water. We were calculating on dividing the price by four. The exchange rate was actually closer to one to six so this meal ended up costing about $60. After dinner we collected our coats, went for a bit more of a wander and headed back to the hotel to sleep.
Christmas themed activities – 4 War museums and model shops – 0
