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/