Stockholm

On Easter Monday we flew to Stockholm for a five-day stay there. I’d only been to Gothenburg in Sweden (with the St. Olaf Orchestra fifty years ago) so I was glad we could see this great city. Our hotel was just one block off the shopping street where the terrible truck attack had happened on 7 April, and on Easter Monday there had been a special memorial in the cathedral. So once again there were flowers everywhere along the way. It was powerful to see the continued outpouring of real strength and unity by the Swedish people. Very impressive.

We looked around our neighborhood, found some good fika in an espresso place, and checked out some possibilities for dinner later in the week. Fika is the lovely Swedish practice of coffee and pastries any time of the day!  In the evening we found some Swedish food very near our hotel and had a simple dinner.

On Tuesday we headed out to see things. We had fabric stores to find and good recommendations of things to see from our friends Ann and Peter Cohan and John and Lynn Williams who have all spent a lot of time in Stockholm. We started out to go to the City Hall and never got there. (We had two more attempts as well! Another trip.) We went to the Palace and did a tour of that and then stopped for fika. It was good that we stopped, as its was starting to snow in earnest. We enjoyed our fika at a good café call Grillsta Huset in Gamla Stan. It was very good. We spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the Gamla Stan neighborhood, which is Stockholm’s old town.

 We finished the day at a terrific restaurant called Knut - amazing cooking with an emphasis on food from the north of Sweden. Larry’s starter was divine nettle soup!

Wednesday we completed our palace tours with a walk through treasury. Then we went to the Changing of the Guard at the Palace. It was as good as Buckingham Palace with a little more initimate setting! The band a was very good and had a little concert in the middle that included an arrangement of Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling which had the audience (and the band) swinging and swaying!

We went for fika again at Grillska Huset, and the walked again through Gamla Stan and found a couple beautiful things to buy. We then headed off to the Södermalm neighborhood to a fabric store and a coffee shop. The fabric store was amazing and huge with lots of clerks and customers.

The coffee shop, called Drop, was very good indeed.

We checked out some things for dinner and ended up back in Gamla Stan at a long-standing café called Marten Trozit and once again had an excellent meal.

Thursday was a real treat. John and Lynn Williams had connected us with their friends Anders Bodén and Ingrid Backmark. They joined us for the whole day. We went to Skansen, the open air museum (the first of it’s kind in the world) and enjoyed it very much.

Sami Storage House at Skansen

A very clever Swedish Brown Bear

Ingrid and Anders confer over coffee.

After a nice fika there, we went to the Vasa Museum, which was amazing. Nothing like an exciting story of a failure from the 16th century to make for an extremely interesting time!

The Vasa

  When we left the Vasa, we had time (in the cold and rain) to indulge in the Swedish street tradition of Korv - hot dogs! Very tasty. The wind and rain were really picking up now, so Anders and Ingrid took us back to their home. Here we all are waiting for the tram:

They have recently - two months ago - moved out of a house where they lived for 32 years and into a condominium. It was very nice, and they fed us with a traditional Swedish meal. That also included snaps (schnapps) and lot of skoals! It was just a wonderful day, and their hospitality to strangers was amazing and beautiful We so enjoyed their company.

On Friday we did a little more shopping (chocolate, fabric, and Gudrun Sjöden). At 2 p.m. we went on a four hour food tour that Michlle had arranged ahead of time. It was really good. We went to all kinds of local purveyors and enjoyed significant tastes of what they serve. Our guide Gunnila was exceptional. If you are in Stockholm we really recommend this: www.foodtoursstockholm.se/en/

London

            O, To be in England                
            Now that April 's there,   
            And whoever wakes in England   
            Sees, some morning, unaware,   
            That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf            
            Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,   
            While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough   
            In England—now!

The opening of Robert Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad was our experience last week in London. It was rather cold and damp, but spring was definitely locked in wherever we turned. Browning was having a pretty good time living in Italy when he penned these poignant words, but his nostalgia for the homeland is truly understandable!
                               
Larry and I are traveling with my cousins Sharon and Michelle Stoffel on a rather whirlwind journey to London, Stockholm, Luleå, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Oslo, Vangsnes, Ålesund, Bergen, Manchester and back to London. Phew! 9 plane rides, three car rentals, two train trips and a boat - a lot more moving around than we usually do when we travel. But we’re doing a lot of family places. Sharon and I are cousins by virtue of our fathers being brothers. Her maternal grandparents came from the area around Luleå n Sweden, and mine came from Vik i Sogn and Ålesund (my grandmother) and Bualandet (my grandfather) in Norway. Sharon and I are almost exactly one year apart in age and the same grade in school - even went to the same Junior High in Seattle - Marcus Whitman. Our families were small and we got together a lot all through the year, so we knew each other’s maternal grandparents as well as our fathers’ families. Our Winder ancestors are English, and we’ll be visiting that area in Lancashire as well.

We started out in London (always the best start!) and a convenient beginning. Michelle owns an  internet fabric business (www.stylemakerfabrics.com) so they’re looking for fabric stores everywhere. Michelle identified certain places she wanted to see along the way. So in London we headed right off to Liberty of London and also to other smaller shops. It’s interesting to have a theme like this when you travel as it often puts you in neighborhoods you wouldn’t normally see.

Easter Saturday began at the the Borough Market - a big favorite of mine. Larry hadn’t been there before either. Larry and Michelle had a great time with their cameras, and we stopped on Monmouth Coffee, one of the roaster on Michelle's list. Along with her fabric business she works for Seattle Coffee Gear - - www.seattlecoffeegear.com - and was looking for highly rated local roasters to bring some treats back to her colleagues.

 On Saturday afternoon we headed for two fabric shops: Sew Over It in Islington and the amazing Shaukat fabrics in South Kensington. Going to Sew Over It also allowed me to go to my favorite London knitting shop, Loop. Here are a couple shots from the fabric shops:

Just one room among many at Shaukat Fabrics!

This was the Easter weekend, which is a big holiday not only in the UK but all through Europe. Friday and Monday were Bank Holidays, and pretty much everything was closed on Sunday as well. We had our Easter feast on Saturday by going to tea at Fortnum and Mason, which was lots of fun and really good. Then we made our way to Westminster Abbey for the Easter Vigil there. Right next to Westminster Abbey is St. Margaret’s Church. Way back there in the 11th century. The Benedictine monks of the Abbey were annoyed (really!) that so many people were coming to the services at the Abbey. So they built St. Margaret’s right next door for the “regular” folk. Our 6th  great-grandparents were married there in the 17th century, so here’s a picture of Sharon and me in front.

We waited in line in quite cold wind to get into the Abbey for the service, and had a nice time visiting with people from around the world. The vigil was was beautifully done, with baptisms of two the Abbey choristers,  and we enjoyed welcoming Easter with about 500 other people in that glorious building.

On Easter Sunday we took the Tube to Kew, to the Royal Botanical Gardens. It was a moderately nice day, and it is clearly an Easter favorite for the London area. There were lots of families there enjoying the rather cold and windy day. The children had a scavenger hunt featuring the Finnish character Moomin, and it was fun watching them all run around looking for the botanical features for the next step of the hunt.

There is an incredible current installation at Kew called The Hive. It actually connects digitally with a real hive so. The lights on the installation turn on and off when the bees move and you can hear their hum inside. Here's a picture of this amazing construction:

We made our way back to London in the later afternoon. Easter night’s dinner was an excellent pub meal at The Victoria near our Paddington Hotel.