We slept in a bit on our first full day in Sweden, enjoying the cooler temperatures before heading to the house where eventually everyone gathered in the kitchen for breakfast. I tended to wake up before most people while we were there, which anyone who knew me before I turned 40 would probably not believe at all but ‘tis true, ‘tis true. So I’d go in and make myself comfortable, and after a while the room would be full of people and conversation and that’s all you need to start the day off well.
That and food, and it has to be said that the Swedes know how to do breakfast right.
In case you’re wondering, it involves a wide variety of crackers, breads, meats and cheeses, and for those of us interested, tea. There are other options as well but I never made it past these because by that point I had everything I could possibly have wanted and to go searching for more seemed greedy. If you told me that I would have to spend the rest of my life eating meals like this, I’d look forward to it. And then you add a table full of friends and family and you know, life can be good if we let it.
Our first mission for the day was to hit the grocery story to get ready for Midsommar, the big holiday in the middle of the Swedish calendar which would be celebrated the following day. Like all good holidays across human cultures it is mainly about good food and good company and while we already had the company sorted out there was a need for more food.
Fortunately I love grocery stores, especially in new places. It’s just interesting to see what people consider normal food. Also, Sara is my grocery buddy – we can case a supermarket and get in and out with a full cart of food in less than twelve minutes if we need to, and we have. This trip was not facing such time constraints, so we wandered over to the Willy’s and to the COOP to find the various things we needed and a few that we just wanted, some of which were stranger than others. Did you know Iron Maiden is big in Sweden? Not for the reason you think they are, admittedly, but big is big.
That and food, and it has to be said that the Swedes know how to do breakfast right.
In case you’re wondering, it involves a wide variety of crackers, breads, meats and cheeses, and for those of us interested, tea. There are other options as well but I never made it past these because by that point I had everything I could possibly have wanted and to go searching for more seemed greedy. If you told me that I would have to spend the rest of my life eating meals like this, I’d look forward to it. And then you add a table full of friends and family and you know, life can be good if we let it.
Our first mission for the day was to hit the grocery story to get ready for Midsommar, the big holiday in the middle of the Swedish calendar which would be celebrated the following day. Like all good holidays across human cultures it is mainly about good food and good company and while we already had the company sorted out there was a need for more food.
Fortunately I love grocery stores, especially in new places. It’s just interesting to see what people consider normal food. Also, Sara is my grocery buddy – we can case a supermarket and get in and out with a full cart of food in less than twelve minutes if we need to, and we have. This trip was not facing such time constraints, so we wandered over to the Willy’s and to the COOP to find the various things we needed and a few that we just wanted, some of which were stranger than others. Did you know Iron Maiden is big in Sweden? Not for the reason you think they are, admittedly, but big is big.
Also, Kim found her personalized potato chips. They weren’t bad. It has to be said that until very recently European potato chips were far more interesting than the three basic American varieties that I grew up with. It’s been good watching American potato chip manufacturers explore some new flavors, though I would greatly appreciate it if they could come out with a paprika flavor. It would sell! Trust me! I’d buy some!
We also hit the System Bologet, because Midsommar does not happen by food alone. If you want alcohol in Sweden you have to go to one of these government-run stores to get it, and speaking as someone who grew up in Pennsylvania this was a real trip down memory lane. In Pennsylvania even today you can only buy hard alcohol in a State Store, though you can now get beer or wine outside of the system and even at the State Stores they have done away with the Stalinist-era dingy grey rooms with catalogues sitting on a counter that you had to look through and tell the thousand-year-old apparatchik what to retrieve from the back. These days you can actually shop in a State Store like you’re in any other store – wander around the aisles and everything. The money just goes to the state. So I was right at home with the concept of the System Bologet, and we found a pile of good things for the morrow.
After a lovely lunch of doner kebab all of us except David went to the train station to head into Stockholm.
Our goal was Gamla Stan, which literally translates as Old Town – it’s the historic center of Stockholm, and it’s one of the places we go whenever we visit. Mats, Kim, Lauren and I got off at the city center, while Sara and Frieda continued on a bit to go shopping on their own. At some point they found ice cream. Ice cream is called “glass” in Swedish, and as an English-speaker I find that funnier than I probably should. Linguistics: unexpectedly humorous!
We emerged from the train station into the sunken plaza that leads to the city proper, and one of the first things we noticed was the Normal Store, which we were please to discover outside of Aveiro. It’s the little things that make life worthwhile.
From there we walked toward Gamla Stan. Stockholm is a really lovely city in a very different way from Florence or Porto. It’s built on a series of small islands and when we were there the weather was gloriously cool.
We eventually found our way into the heart of Gamla Stan – a rabbit warren of narrow streets and historic buildings that mostly but not entirely caters to tourists these days. It’s surprisingly colorful, which I suppose you need during the long Scandinavian winters.
There’s a lot to see there.
One of the places we found was the Korpen Apoteket, one of the oldest pharmacies in Sweden. Founded in 1674 in Södermalm, it moved around a bit before ending up in its current location. It’s still a working pharmacy, though you can go in and see some of its history if you want, or buy medications. There’s no charge! Except for the medications! For those of us who find that sort of thing interesting, it’s a nice place to explore.
We wandered around the shopping area, poking our heads into whatever looked interesting.
We even found the rune stone that is embedded into one of the buildings and apparently dates back to the 11th century CE, making it older than Stockholm itself. According to a brief internet search that I just did it is officially known as “Uppland Runic Inscription 53,” which tells you that archeologists should not be in charge of naming things, and it translates at least in part as “Torsten and Frögunn had the stone erected after their son.” We don’t know the name of the son.
Eventually we ended up in Stortorget, the oldest public square in Stockholm. It has a surprising number of stories associated with it, most of which are almost but not quite true apparently. The white stones in the red building, for example, are supposedly there to symbolize the heads of 82 Swedish nobles decapitated by the King of Denmark in 1520, though the house itself was built in 1479 at the latest and the stones were added to it in 1628. It’s possible that this is why they were added, of course. People have long memories for things like that.
Similarly, there is a building on the corner of the plaza that has a cannonball embedded about halfway up and this is supposed to be a remnant of a battle from 1521, not long after the nobles lost their heads. The story is that Gustav Vasa fired the cannonball into the city during the siege that year and it hit the house and has been there ever since, but in fact it was added to the house in 1795 which is still a pretty long time ago when you think about it.
Whatever the stories, it’s a lovely plaza to walk around.
Right down the street is the Storkyrkan, which is a fascinating shade of peach and for that alone it is worth some time to see. There just aren’t many churches that color around, I find.
Also, we found one of the stone lions, and of course we had to take the same picture of Lauren that we took back in 2012 because we're traditionalists that way.
No trip to Gamla Stan is complete without a visit to the Polkagris Kokeri, which – as advertised – is where they make polkagris. Polkagris are basically Swedish candy canes. They don’t have the hook at the end that American candy canes have and they’re as long as your hand and as thick around as your thumb. They also come in a wide variety of flavors, ranging from tasty, such as blueberry, lemon, rhubarb, strawberry, and so on, to not – notably salt licorice, which is an inexplicably popular flavor for candy in Scandinavia and if you haven’t tried it I will hereby pass along my hard-earned wisdom and advise you to continue that streak as long as humanly possible because you really don’t want to know what it tastes like, especially when there are so, so many other wonderful flavors for you to try.
The narrowest street in Stockholm no longer has the blue rubber alien dangling above it, the way it did in 2012, but it’s still an interesting place to see. They’ve also put a gate at the top, mostly one suspects to prevent late night revelers from taking the express route to the bottom. It’s open during the day and you can get from one end to the other however you want as long as the sun is shining.
At some point we rounded a corner and found ourselves here.
It’s a lovely street scene, of course, but it is an exceedingly familiar one to me and to my students. Back in 2020 when we all had to go virtual for everything I had to do a thorough cleanup of my computer desktop to avoid broadcasting all my files every time I wanted to share a screen, and I figured that changing my desktop photo to something that wasn’t a family photo would also be advisable. I searched through my various archives and ended up with this view from a photo I took in 2012. It was fun to see it in three-dimensional space again.
We did a lot of wandering around Gamla Stan, poking around the streets and shops. We found some snacks at a little shop on a corner and sat for a while. Sweden is largely cashless now – I don’t think I ever saw or used a Swedish coin the whole time I was there, which was a bit sad as I collect the things and had wanted at least one to bring home. You can pay for everything with your phone these days. This was good since that was pretty much my only option after Florence, but still.
We found the little square with the chestnut tree, perhaps the most peaceful spot in Gamla Stan.
And we found the second-best warning sign in Sweden on this big yellow building.
The snow and icicles that come off that building in the winter are particularly hazardous, it would seem. Admittedly, this sign doesn’t beat the one we saw in 2018 that advised us not to drive off an island into the sea – and you know that the reason that sign exists is that enough people did so – but on a summer day in Stockholm it came close.
Eventually it was time to go back home, and we found our way to the 41 train back to Huddinge. Sometimes the best pictures aren’t really great photographs, but they capture a moment.
Our plan was to meet Sara, Frieda, and David at the Thai restaurant by the train station in Huddinge. They’d gotten there a bit ahead of us, ordered their food and found a table, so when we arrived we got in line thinking we’d do the same and then join them but apparently this place does a booming takeout business and, an hour before they were set to close, they simply announced that they didn’t have time to make our food and we could come back some other day if we wanted. Mats, Kim, Lauren, and I ended up at a different restaurant a few meters away where we had deconstructed doner kebabs.
On our walk back to the car we found a hedgehog. They’re native to Sweden, but you don’t see them out in the open very often.
Our evening was devoted to games around the kitchen table, which is a good way to wind down a day. We spent some time playing something called Hitster, an app-based game that requires you to put songs in chronological order which means I was no good at it but it was enjoyable anyway. We even got Grandma involved from across the Atlantic, since she is in fact very good at this sort of thing.
Codenames came next – it’s become kind of a go-to game for us these days, and we always have good time with it especially when there are snacks and good people involved.
Once the games were over we just sort of hung out until it was time to pack it in, and that is a lovely way to end a day.
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