Tuesday morning George got up REALLY early with us and got us to the airport to fly Ryanair, an Irish airline, to Sweden. Really cheap flights, slightly smaller baggage allowance but slightly more legroom than the absurdly tight Play airline we took to get to Brussels via Iceland. T’was a short flight, but the airport experience was a little stressful. Just a massive, strange, signless cattle call to get through security and then some explorations and wrong turns to find our plane. We actually had some down time upon our arrival and had our first Kanelbullar which, despite Ana’s horror that our first traditional Swedish pastry was purchased at the airport, was still pretty awesome.
Alex and Ana picked us up in their little Kia and from there bring us to our hostel on Långholmen Island. Thick stone walls and big steel doors hint at it’s history…
Sweden.
I have little to NO context for Sweden. Ikea. Meatballs. The devil (Spotify). The Swedish Chef.
A nation the size of California but with a quarter the population. A kingdom? A sea kingdom? Vikings?
A cell block converted to hotel rooms that lock from the INSIDE! Långholmen Hotel and Hostel outside Stockholm, Sweden.
It’s a member of all the clubs (NATO and the EU and stuff) and sounds pretty inoffensive, and I read that it ranks highly in all the indexes and whatnots that you want to rank highly on (gender equality and Happiness and GDP) and provides universal healthcare and education and guarantees a Right to Nature and I think, possibly, people may ride unicorns, but I’m not sure about that last part.
Our first couple of nights here will be spent in prison, so I guess we’ll get to see the underbelly and then work our way up.
Now that my mother is done having a heart attack, I mean we’re staying at the Långholmen Hostel which was a prison from the time it was built in the 1870s till it closed in the 1970s. Home to Sweden’s last execution and first and only use of the guillotine, it’s been a hotel (the bigger rooms) and hostel (the smaller rooms) for the past 40 years and what time I’ve spent waiting for the shower or the WC or just being awake but unwilling to stay in my surprisingly-air but unsurprisingly-cramped room I’ve generally spent looking at all the little exhibits scattered around the wonderfully charming space.
Though Kristen and I are sleeping in separate bunk beds, our cell / room is surprisingly airy! This is our first night of two, June 28th, and it’s taking time to wrap our heads around the fact that it’s 10.28pm, twilight as foretold, and the sun will be coming up before 4am.
Stockholm is such a strange combination of old, ornate and ultra-modern. Strangely plain-looking at first, until my eyes had adjusted to the lack of ornamentation compared to the baroque and Gothic and Medieval architecture of Brussels it almost seemed Eastern Europeanish (not in the above photo, this is a terrible example) but with freakin massive SURPRISE video screens advertising The Boys and Game of Thrones with animations and FLAMES on 400+ year-old walls.
It’s amazing what some paint will do. Plus locking the doors from the INSIDE.
Well. And a prison population forced to dredge mud onto the island so it can be a lush, verdant paradise compared to the rocky ones around it. THAT plus some paint has made for an incredible little island for us to base our wanderings out of for the next couple of days.
It’s interesting, in all of the reading about the freedoms of Sweden, that in reading Wikipedia’s list of most notable prisoners of Långholmen, other than the aforementioned executionee / murderer, they were ALL journalists.
These buildings on the first row are a better example of what, at first glance, seemed “plain”. Ana points out that Stockholm is a many-layered city, with buildings built over buildings and bridges crossing bridges crossing buildings over canals. It’s a beautiful sea-front port city that draws incredibly cold air in off the Baltic Sea and feels refreshing and alive even in blazing sunshine.
Another boat tour! I’m glad Alex and Ana recommended this. Over the course of two hours you run all over the city, but it’s a big boat so you don’t poke into the tiny watery crevices like we did back in Ghent – but it was a fabulous way to get a broad swath of sights and historic notes in one concentrated dose. UNLIKE in Ghent where we had a fabulous tour guide named Sarah swapping languages back and forth, this tour was perpetrated by a browser-based application that gave us AI-generated anecdotes with an AI-generated voice based on our GPS location. That kind of bugged me – buut at least we could all choose our native languages. Note : I HATE when AI generated materials refer to themselves in the first-person, or refers to “us” or “we” as if “she” experienced things through history as part of our species. Maybe “hate” is too strong a word. I’ve got complicated feelings about it and it doth give me the “heebies” and also “jeebies”.
Ahhh… Stockholm!
We’ve hooked up with my old friend Ana and her husband Alex here in Stockholm. They drove north from their home to pick us up from the airport and take us to prison. We’ll be spending the second half of the trip with them and I’ve kept myself purposely in the dark about what we’ll get up to. Ana and Kristen are both Planners and I’m confident that I’m in good hands if I just stay out of the way. I’ve never been more “just along for the ride” than I have been for this trip and I … I THINK I’m Loving it.
Right from the get-go, trying to fit into their little Kia, it’s clear that Ana has enthusiastically and excitedly overpacked (she has extra boots and coats for all of us, boardgames and what I THINK are badminton rackets?) but with some ingenuity and patience we manage to get ourselves, them, and everything into the car and down the road. We squeeze ourselves into our prison rooms and then stretch our legs all over the city.
The language is… not going to happen. Though written signage and instructions often have enough close-to-English bits that if you sound it out you can guess at their meaning, most of it is long, strange and lilting, and the spoken language, though musical, is spectacularly foreign to me. I’m still thinking in French half the time, something that was stubbornly NOT happening in Belgium where it would’ve been useful.
So very, very grateful for Ana’s patience and Alex’ chill.
The Royal Palace in Stockholm. Very prim, very proper. Very sans king, actually, who apparently REALLY Lives some place else. Neither here nor there. I was struck, perhaps inappropriately, that of the two guards out front that I was too shy to photograph, one was a woman. Yeah. I’m still old school about military guard positions I guess? It’s just not what I visualize. Reading further, apparently Sweden ranks first in equality of the sexes and over the course of our time here, I see almost every uniformed gaggle of humans, be they cops, construction workers, or the Ordningsvakt. The latter are sort of an “order police” that kinda make sure the populace doesn’t get too rowdy! I was a little uncomfortable with these guys (well, obviously not just guys) at first as Ana and Alex explained them, but as I read more about them it seems to be more that they fill one of the holes that we have in America : a branch of the police force that… well… doesn’t use as much “force” and isn’t as militarized.
During one of our walks around Stockholm I spotted this very atypical boat which looks remarkably like my Dad’s old Austin Healey – same colour and same rounded back!
In Stockholm Ana and Alex took us to a fancy hidden bar (red light at the unmarked door means no seats without reservations, green means use you can come in IF you’ve got the code!) where I had fancy drinks and a pretty man explained them in-depth before we were allowed to drink them. I think I’m drinking something rhubarb and ginger. The bathroom was all black and looked like Darth Vader’s WC. I didn’t know I’d get an opportunity to see HIM later!Speaking of bathrooms! PULL THINGIE!!!! (from our hostel)Gosh I’m an easy tourist. Just find me a game shop. An AMAZING scifi and game shop. Muhahahaha. They go swimming a LOT in Sweden actually.Wandering the city for our last night, we take a longer-than-expected walk home and are kind of really walking with a PURPOSE… but I stop us for this jazz band outside of the “Half Way Inn” in Stockholm. Great quintet with a solid front woman, we stopped to catch them play Bobby Hebb’s tune “Sunny”. Good keys, good drums, guitar, but the star of the group was the bass player.Our last night in the hostel, massive party on the beach outside our window. This is about 10pm and the bass is audible from literally miles away. I didn’t recognize the significance of the Life preserve visible in this shot till a week later when I realized that almost every body of water is deemed swimmable in Sweden and has a little Life guard station! In any case, it was our last night in prison and now we’re off to find our Air B&B in Sala!
