Next to Stockholm, where we have more friends (an expat Aussie who married a Swedish guy). We went to their place to watch the Eurovision final and looked from their flat to the apartments across the road to see all the TVs we could see tuned to the same channel. After winning last year, all the Swedes seemed to be hoping for a repeat. It wasn’t to be but it least it will stay in Scandinavia with neighbouring Denmark taking the prize.
We were staying in an AirBNB apartment in Vasastan, three metro (or Tunnelbana, rather) stops to the north of the centre. It is a great neighbourhood, quite well placed for transport, parks, bars & cafes and generally everything. Both here and in Malmo we stayed in what we gather is a typical vernacular Swedish apartment building, with the front built to the street line, but the internal facades all really well oriented around a central courtyard. Each building seems to work hard at establishing and maintaining this courtyard as as a common resource. Once you extend this arrangement around an entire city block you realise the city has a lot more ‘open space’ than you really are aware of, and it’s quite lovely to look out over this unseen parkland from your balcony or window.
The other characteristic of Swedish apartment living is the shared laundries – hardly anyone has their own washing machine. There’s a shared laundry in the building for which you must book your time on the building’s noticeboard. Whilst we managed to negotiate the system reasonably well, we think, there’s quite a folklore of passive-aggressive note exchanges threatening escalating violence over booking misdemeanours and socks left in dryers. It seems like negotiation your life around the laundry is part of a Swedish apartment dweller’s lot.
Stockholm is a bit like Sydney, with an former industrial waterfront now making way to tourism and recreation, interspersed with a wad of parkland. Lots of activity including ferries and tourist boats on the water.
We spent a lot of time hanging out with our friends and their children including weekend sport activities, a trip to Grone Lund, the equivalent of Luna Park, and an amazing lunch with their extended family in the countryside just outside Stockholm: lots of great food including herring, trout, Swedish meatballs and lingonberry jam, followed by a walk in the forest
We also got to see firsthand how the Swedish paternity leave system works: Parents are entitled to take up to 365 days leave, split between them however they wish, choosing full time or part time or a combination. Our friends have a 15th month old, and mum had just gone back to work, so we got to hand out with dad as he did the daily routine. We arrived one week into this new arrangement and I think we were a welcome diversion!
Whislt we didn’t do a great deal of sightseeing, we did manage to see the Vasa, A nearly 400 year old ship raised almost in the 1960s after lying on the harbour floor – the museum in which it is housed is amazing architecturally and tells the story of the mishap really well. We also took a cruise in the archipelago to a Vaxholm, a small town on one of the myriad islands that make up the surrounding area.
Not so much sightseeing but more of a pilgrimage for me was a trip to the Woodland Cemetery (or Skogskyrkogården in Swedish), a seminal piece of landscape architecture from the early 1900s by Gunnar Asplund. It is truly beautiful and is serene without being depressing. Near to where we were staying was another of Asplund’s works, the City Library or Stadsbibliotek with it’s famous circular rotunda.
But again, living in the place rather than seeing the sights seems like a better way of experiencing it.
