Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
12. Stockholm
In the morning it was still raining, and I gave up hope of exploring Gothenburg before catching my train.
Instead I went to the station and spent my children's inheritance on two cups of coffee and a leaden iced
bun. The train left promptly at 10.05 and after four hours and twenty minutes of riding through the endless
pine forest that is Sweden, I was making my way through the throngs at Stockholm's pleasantly gloomy
central station.
I went to the station tourist office to have a room found for me. I had to fill out a form with about 700
questions on it, but it was worth it because the hotel, the Castle on Riddargatan, about a mile from the
station, was a charming little find, friendly, clean, and reasonably priced - in so far as that statement can be
made about anything in Sweden.
I headed first for Gamla Stan, the old town, on the far side of the Strmbron bridge. It had an oddly
Central European feel to it: narrow, hilly streets lined by severe, heavy buildings the colour of faded
terracotta, sometimes with chunks of plaster missing, as if they had been struck a glancing blow by tank fire,
and often with pieces knocked off the corners where trucks had carelessly backed into them. It had a kind of
knocked-about charm, but was surprisingly lacking in any air of prosperity. Most of the windows were dirty,
the brass name plates and door knockers were generally unpolished, and almost every building was in
serious need of a good coat of paint. It looked much as I would expect Cracow or Bratislava to look. Maybe
it was just the rain, which was falling steadily again, bringing its inevitable grey gloom to the city. Did it never
stop raining in Sweden?
I walked with shoulders hunched and eyes cast down, avoiding the water that rushed down the steep,
slickly cobbled lanes, glancing in the windows of antique shops, wishing I had a hat or an umbrella or a
ticket to Bermuda. I retreated into a dark coffee shop, where I sat shivering, drinking a $3 cup of coffee with
both hands, watching the rain through the window, and realized I had a cold coming on.
I returned to the hotel, had a lavishly steamy bath and a change of clothes and felt marginally better. I
spent the closing hours of the afternoon studying a map of Stockholm and waiting for the weather to clear.
At about five the sky brightened. I immediately pulled on my damp sneakers and went out to explore the
streets between Norrmalmstorg, a nearby square, and Kungstr￤dg￥rden, a small rectangular park that ran
down to the waterfront. Everything was much better now. It was a Saturday evening and the streets were full
of people meeting friends or partners and repairing in high spirits to the little restaurants and bistros
scattered around the neighbourhood.
Starving as ever, I looked carefully at several and finally selected what looked to be the cheeriest and
most popular of all, a cavernous bistro overlooking Norrmalmstorg called Matpalatset. It was friendly and
crowded and wonderfully warm and snug, but the food was possibly the worst I have ever had outside a
hospital cafeteria - a grey salad with watery cucumber and mushrooms that tasted of old newspaper, and a
lasagne that was not so much cooked as scorched. Each time I poked it with my knife and fork, the lasagne
recoiled as if I were tormenting it. I was quietly agog. Nowhere else in Europe could a place serve food this
bad and stay in business, and yet people were queuing at the door. I ate it all because I was hungry and
because it was costing me as much as a weekend in Brighton, but seldom have I felt more as if I were
engaged in a simple refuelling exercise.
Afterwards I went for a long walk and felt more charitably disposed to Stockholm now that the rain had
stopped. It really is an exceptionally beautiful city, more watery even than Venice, and with more parkland
per person than any other city in Europe. It is built on fourteen islands and within a few miles of the city there
are 25,000 more, almost all of them dotted with cottages into which the city drains its population every
weekend. I walked far out onto the broad and leafy avenues and narrower side streets to the north of the
downtown, all of them lined with six-storey apartment buildings, stern and stolid and yet oddly homy, and at
least three-quarters of the windows were darkened. It must be a burglar's paradise between Friday evening
and Sunday afternoon.
I grew up wanting to live in buildings like these. It needn't necessarily have been in Europe - it could
have been in Buenos Aires or Dar es Salaam, say - but it had to be in the midst of a big foreign city, full of
