Europe 25: Stockholm, Day 4

Not every vacation day has to be busy. Sometimes a good, low-key sort of day is exactly what you need.

This is especially true if people don’t feel all that well. Kim and Lauren both thought they were getting colds on Sunday, though in the end it turned out to be allergies and passed fairly quickly.

I was, as usual, the first one up and I finished all of the grading I had left undone the previous night after everyone else had gone to bed. One of the classes I teach never really ends – students sign up for a three-month “subscription” and every month one group leaves and another comes in so I’ve always got three different subscription periods rolling at the same time. They turn in work on their own schedule, and I grade it on Saturday mornings because that’s the kind of wild man I am. Fortunately there weren’t many essays turned in while I was in Florence or Porto, but in Stockholm for some reason there were a lot and it was nice to get them done. Kim lent me her laptop and I’d set it up in the kitchen, so when people filtered in I was already there to greet them.

Breakfast slowly morphed into brunch as we all sat around the table enjoying each other’s company. That’s the way to spend a morning, I think – good food, good company, nowhere to go and all day to get there.

Eventually Sara, Lauren, Kim and decided to go down to the nearby lake – if you think Sweden has a lot of islands, try counting the lakes – to take a walk around for a bit. We drove down to the nearby lot, as the lake is a bit more of a hike further from the house than we’d planned to do that day, and then walked over. Along the way we passed a property marker that looked interesting. History intrudes itself into the present in many ways.

It’s a lovely lake with a shaded trail to walk along. It goes through a park area as well and there were all sorts of people out and about enjoying the day, many of whom were grilling things since it was still the Midsommar holiday weekend after all. We’d been to this lake before, back in 2012 when the kids were little. In the first picture below you can see some trails leading up the hill, and at the bottom of the hill there’s a beach. That area is called Flottsbro and there was much fun to be had there. They don’t let you swing from the rope that hangs down from the bridge over the little canal by Flottsbro anymore, apparently, which is a shame. Lauren loved that rope swing at the time.

We figured we’d head toward the little café on the far end of the lake but in the end they were closed for the holiday weekend, so we wandered back the way we came, taking a slight detour through the heart of the park. We found a soccer game in progress and watched it for a while and generally enjoyed the scenery.

In the end we found another little café just outside of the park where we could get bureks, which are flaky pastry with meats, cheeses, and/or vegetables inside. They’re common in the Middle East and the Balkans, and Stockholm has a fairly large immigrant population from both of those areas so there’s all sorts of good food available if you look. Burek is really, really tasty and you should try one if you ever have the chance. Immigration makes places better, folks. Don’t listen to any Nativist halfwit trying to tell you otherwise, no matter how many jackbooted neo-Fascist thugs they flood into the streets to threaten people with. If you want your culture and nation to grow and thrive you will welcome immigrants, and if you want it to stagnate and decay you won’t – it really is that simple.

We also got baklava because they had it there and you should never turn down baklava if you don’t have to do so.

It was a slow afternoon once we got back. We hung out. There was laundry. Kim graded some of the exams that had come in for her summer class. It was a restful and restorative day.

The one actual plan we had for the day was to go out to dinner at a place called Hosteria Tre Santi in Stockholm. The irony of dining at an Italian restaurant in Sweden after just having come from Florence was considerable, but then in Florence we ate a lot of döner kebab so there is a certain amount of justice to it, I suppose. We drove into the city, found the place, and had a lovely meal together.

Afterward we walked around the neighborhood where Tre Santi is located, just sort of taking things in. There’s a 7/11 there and we had a good time with the clerk discussing the differences between Swedish 7/11s and American 7/11s.

Back home we made Aperol Spritz for those who wanted one – they are the most summery drink ever and you can’t spend any time in Europe during the summer months without having at least one or, in my case, because I enjoy them, several – and played Ticket to Ride around the kitchen table. As with Phase 10, Sara basically destroyed the rest of us. What can I say? I’m American. We’ve forgotten how trains work in this country.

Eventually we called Oliver to see how he was holding up after the previous day’s adventures (answer: pretty well, all things considered) and then just sort of hung out on the porch for a while as the shadows lengthened but did not disappear entirely in the long, slow Scandinavian summer evening.