venta

If you're following along, you'll know that my holiday write up has been to Helsinki. Now, we catch a boat to Stockholm...

Our boat trip from Helsinki to Stockholm was billed as a "cruise", which left us both a bit perplexed. How exactly does a cruise ship that just plies back and forth between Sweden and Finland differ from a ferry? (Incidentally, we still haven't really answered this one: although the cruise ship was much more upmarket than the North Sea ferries I remember from the late 80s, it wasn't hugely different from the ferry we caught a few days later to Denmark. Except I think perhaps you can book onto a ferry without booking a cabin.)

Anyway, we found our cabin, which was perfectly nice with two single beds. One was a fixture, the other folded up against the wall rendering the cabin a perfectly nice and spacious place. We watched Helsinki recede into the distance (a surprisingly unpopular pastime, given how pretty the harbour is) then went exploring. The central shopping "street" contained cafés as well, and a three-piece jazzband (later, a surprisingly interesting DJ-and-saxophone duo) and an aerialist.

The nice people at Discover the World had included an evening meal for us, so at 8pm we trundled down to the buffet and ate until we were approximately spherical. I discovered that the all-you-can-eat buffet also included all-you-can-drink wine, and cheerfully had a couple of glasses as I worked my way through all the food on offer (the white was surprisingly good, but the red was equally surprisingly awful).

The boat had two night-time venues in it - one was a really rather civilised "night club", with a small band playing covers. The other was something which we gave a wide berth as we suspected it of hosting karaoke. The whole ship was decorated with a definitely 1920's vibe, which made everything feel slightly more glamorous.

Monday 7th

After some confusion about when we had to get up for breakfast (was it 7:30 Swedish time or Finnish time?) we had a gigantic buffet breakfast, which was lovely except for the omission of any kind of pickled herring at all. We watched the ship dock from the (deserted) deck, disembarked (deck 7, amidships) and caught the underground (Tunnelbana) into Stockholm's Old Town (Gamla Stan). Our hotel had a very welcoming chap on the door and yes, our room was ready even though check-in wasn't for several hours. We went up in the world's tiniest lift, and unpacked ourselves into a splendid and spacious room. Thus at around the time we'd normally be contemplating breakfast, we were all ready to take on Stockholm.

We walked through the Old Town and around the harbour - lovely stately buildings, and pleasant sunshine - to the island of Djursgården. Stockholm has very tidily shuffled almost all its museums onto one island, the easier to tourist round them. After a bit of faff we decided to start with Skansen, a large park into which people have for some decades been moving interesting examples of endangered architecture. The first thing we saw was a tiny furnicular railway, so we rode it up the hill. And then we realised that Skansen is (a) vast, (b) immensely confusing to navigate (despite plenty of signs and a map) and (c) full of quite a lot more than buildings.

I mean, there are buildings aplenty. Incredibly old wooden structures, a crazy red-painted free-standing belfry, schools, houses, windmills, an entire Sami winter encampment, all manner of things. Many of which came with costumed staff happy to expound their surroundings (in perfect English, of course). There are also workshops, so we watched a glass worker making elephants, and a furniture-maker doing something bewildering among a mass of belt-driven equipment. The blurb in my guide book had mentioned a small collection of animals, so when we found the farmstead with various goats, cows, pigs and chickens I ticked them off my mental list. Then we walked a bit further, to where it promised Nordic animals... and there were elk, reindeer, wolves, lynx and actual bears. Despite the animals having large enclosures, they all seemed to be very sporting about doing their things near various viewing platforms. It turns out that you can spend quite a long time watching two juvenile bears play-fighting in a waterfall. Or indeed some wolves having a three-way tussle right beside the glass-fronted hide.

In fact, even the free-range animals seemed to be quite OK with humans. While the peacocks at Kew scuttle away from people, a Skansen peacock seemed to be stalking ChrisC and constantly turned up under his heels. A squirrel jumped up onto the picnic table to demonstrate its interest in what we were eating. When, half-joking, ChrisC offered a finger to a small colony of blue-tits he was immensely surprised when one immediately took him up and flew up to his hand. (The non-scarediness of birds was something we noticed everywhere, and an ornithologist friend of mine confirms that outside of the UK birds are, generally, more inclined to approach humans.)

Anyway, having intended to spend a couple of hours in Skansen, we threw ourselves out shortly after closing time, having never even made it down to the main entrance and the aquarium. And possibly a monkey house. After more than six hours of walking around we were a little weary, so took ourselves back to the hotel and decided on a nearby gastropub for dinner. However, when we got there the menu was uninspiring (and expensive), and we found ourselves in embroiled in the sort of conversation that makes you immediately put you hand on your wallet and try to work out what the scam is. So we escaped round the corner and into a deserted-looking bar. Which turned out to be a nice, quiet place serving simple dishes at sensible prices, with a friendly waitress and Regina Spektor on the stereo. Their dessert pies were truly giant (raspberry for me, blueberry for ChrisC).

Tuesday 8th
We squeaked into breakfast a minute or so before they notionally stopped serving. Two kinds of herring were on offer, plus an exciting fry up which mixed peppers and broccoli with its eggs and sausages. Given that we seemed to have settled into a routine of large breakfast, skip lunch and maybe have a small nibble later afternoon, the quality of the breakfast was important :) Interestingly, as well as doing the washing up and replenishing the plates, the lady in charge also at one point whipped out a temperature probe and went round checking on both the hot and cold dishes. This was a relatively small hotel (the breakfast room would seat perhaps 40) - I don't know if the checking is compulsory in Sweden, or just something they chose to do.

We walked ourselves back to Djursgården, and headed into the Vasa Museum. Now, Vasa was a 17th century wooden ship which sank on its maiden voyage (the take-home message is: do not let the King design his own ships. Get a shipwright). The Baltic is apparently just the right level of saltiness to deter both ship-worm and rotting, and so in the 1960s the ship was raised almost intact. It is amazing, and the museum around it is large and interesting. If you're ever considering going to Stockholm, I'd say it's worth going there to see Vasa alone.

Having learned that there is a Swedish verb for "to have a coffee and a cake" (fika) I insisted we did so in the museum café, but other than that we stayed there until, um, it closed. Given that we hadn't much time in Stockholm, I had suggested we should consider attaching ourselves to one of the tours I'd read about. I'm glad we didn't, as the tours are (I think) aimed at cruise ship clientèle who have approximately 10am till 4pm in the city. The tour I'd considered fitted in a cruise around the Stockholm coastline, the Vasa museum, and (I think) three other museums in less time that we spent looking at Vasa. I'm happy that "a little bit of everything" is a valid approach to a city, but I think personally I'd rather see one thing thoroughly.

The Vasa museum had done something quite interesting with its extra space, putting together an exhibition about the history that was going on in the rest of the world at the time Vasa was built. Sadly, the exhibition seemed to have spent its entire budget on iPads and big screens, and the net result was a rather bewildering whirl of things going on all around. An iPad works well as an "if you want to find out more" in an exhibition, but without anything else, beyond a few artefacts, it just didn't work for me.

We trotted back to Old Town, having worked out that the Nobel Museum was just around the corner from our hotel, open late, and free on Tuesdays. The museum itself is tiny, with a some interesting donations from Laureates, and a quite strange, and rather high-concept, temporary exhibition about the Nobel "legacy". The best bit was a bizarre circular track on the ceiling which carried A4 paper pieces of paper displaying biographical details of Laureates around. It was too far away to read properly, but had a Great Egg Race madness to it that I rather enjoyed. On the whole, I'd say only go to the museum if it's free - though apparently the tours are worthwhile.

We sallied out to Södermalm for dinner, which readers of the Millennium books might recognise as one of the cooler bits of Stockholm. We had two restaurants in mind, but failed to find the first one. We almost failed to find the second as well, but eventually made sense of a Swedish sign stuck to a liftshaft in a residential estate, and got ourselves there. We'd chosen it based on the fact it had a lot of stars, according to Google, and all the reviews were in Swedish. We'd gone in ready to do battle with the Swedish-only menu and do lots of pointing and smiling, but of course they whipped out English menus and the waitress spoke to us in perfect English. I had a wonderful veal schnitzel with red wine sauce and rosti; apparently ChrisC's dinner wasn't quite so exciting. It was a lovely, cosy place, though.

Wednesday 9th
Having tidied our luggage into the hotel's luggage room, we headed back to Södermalm for a little light shopping. Sadly, a lot of shops seemed closed (some advertised surprisingly late opening hours, others were just closed). A couple of clothes shops I browsed into were sufficiently eye-wateringly expensive to catapult me straight out the door again. We did find a few shops worth wandering, but bought nothing in the end.

Back by the hotel, there was a highly-intriguing cake shop which sold handmade things that looked like giant teacakes (of the marshmallow-filled kind, not the bready-curranty kind). We bought two, and stashed them away carefully. We were booked on a train at just before 4pm and, determined not to miss it, we took ourselves and our luggage over to the right side of town early. Having pinned the station down to a location, we stowed our luggage away again and strolled up Drottinggatan. It's Stockholm's main, pedestrianised shopping street with an extremely hilly bit of park at the far end.

Other than the people scavenging for bottles and cans, for the refunds, I don't remember seeing any begging in Finland. There were many more people in Stockholm asking for money - and I couldn't help but notice that almost all of them were not ethnically of European descent. On the other hand, it was in Stockholm we first started seeing people wearing jackets that said "refugees welcome" on the back, and the foyer of Stockholm station was a frenzied reverse jumble sale of people donating clothes to be sent to Syrian refugees.

Having grabbed ourselves some sandwiches from a Co-Op (which took longer than it should, because foreign supermarkets are fun) we boarded the train to Oslo.

Pictures on Flickr.