It started with a walk around Skogskyrkogården.
Host suggested it would be a fine final cultural experience of Stockholm before moving on. Skogskyrkogården is a large woodland cemetery to the south of central Stockholm and was created between 1917 and 1920 on the site of former gravel pits which were overgrown with pine trees. It occupies 108 hectares and is a Unesco World Heritage site.
We didn’t have a tremendous amount of time to visit the site as I had a train to catch at 10:30 and drinking coffee (essential) and faffing about meant we didn’t really get there until about nine. In any case, the metro is right next to the entrance so there was no rushing involved, until the very last minute when the metro was pulling into the station just as I tapped my debit card for the very last time.
We meandered over crunchy snow/slush/ice through the gardens and the woodland cemetery until we arrived at Greta Garbo’s grave which is, perhaps by design, sufficiently isolated that she can finally be let alone. From there we wandered back to the metro station where goodbye were said quickly and I hopped on a green line and that was that.
When I arrived in Stockholm on Sunday the weather was glorious, if not slightly cold; blue skies and sunshine greeted me at the station and there was time for wandering. Monday and Tuesday were both somewhat vile and today was once again fine. The forecast even makes it look as if Sweden’s weather is mocking me.
I arrived at the central station in time to find a little more art and then have breakfast in the SJ lounge. The lounge is very comfortable and has little booths so that people can make phone calls without disturbing others. How utterly lovely. I helped myself to some coffee, a smoothie, some biscuity things and some sort of mind-blowing sugary-coconut marvel that I’d like to have babies with. Aware that this would be unacceptable, even in a soundproof booth, I inserted more coffee and found my seat on the 10:30 X2000 to Göteborg, into which I melted into it as the train journey progressed.
There were a lot of people using their phones. This didn’t irk me quite as much as it could have because I’d failed to make a reservation in the quiet compartment, but I was surprised that people would want to sit on a train only to spend spend most of the three hours on the phone.
People were, for the most part, making an effort to speak quietly apart from someone somewhere behind me whose voice could demolish buildings, drawing visible surprise from everyone within literal earshot every time he answered the phone. I learned that the X2000 second-class quiet compartment has the same seating layout as first and is a place where people actually like being quiet. Not that I am being grumpy; it’s hard to condemn people for not being quiet in a not-quiet compartment when I was at fault for not booking a seat in the quiet compartment sooner.
I also stocked up on snacks, because, snacks. I might get caught in a blizzard and need Wasa crackers and chocolate to survive. And an orange. And two apples.
And a banana.
And some more Wasa crackers.
The snack stash is located at the end of the quiet compartment. I suspect everyone in it was secretly seething at me at my every passage for another packet of Wasa crackers.
Throughout the journey my attempts at scenic window-seat photography were repeatedly thwarted by the tilting mechanism of the train which somehow managed to point me at the sky every time I thought I might take a photograph of something pretty although I did manage to get a couple of lake shots. As we approached Göteborg the amount of snow lying around noticeably diminished until there was very little of it to see on arrival at Sweden’s oldest, and possibly prettiest, railway station, Göteborgs Centralstation.
I had some time to kill until check-in at my hostel-cum-hotel, I wandered up to the first class lounge to see what goodies were in store and, of course, to relax after my arduous three-hours journey of mostly sitting down.
There was a buffet lunch on offer in the lounge which was delicious and within not much time at all, entering my face one forkful at a time. Of course I tried a little of everything before I moved on to pudding (OMG cake) and as a result didn’t really need much of a meal in the evening. When I did feel a little peckish, I feasted on the spoils of my earlier pillaging.
In the evening, I hopped on a tram and found myself at the Gustaf Adolfs torg (“Gustaf Adolf’s square”, previously Stortorget, “Big Square”) where, in front of the city hall and under the statue of city founder Gustuvas Adolphus pointing at where the city should be founded, Help Ukraine Gothenburg has an open-air photo exhibition. War. Mode On is a mobile exhibition organised by the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Sweden of stunning photo-journalism detailing life in an occupied country as seen through the lenses of Ukrainian photo-journalists Evgeny Maloletka, Dmytro Kozatskyi, Sergiy Mykhalchuc, and Yan Dobronosov.
I had a pint of Guinness at a pub imaginatively called The Irish Embassy. It was acceptable but nothing special, and I’m not sure I approved of having an advert printed into the head by a machine which absolved the indifferent barman of drawing a shamrock. I’d have preferred my pint unadulterated if I’m honest, but I wasn’t given a choice so that’s that.
Slightly overwhelmed with meh, I took a tram in the wrong direction and ended up at Centralstation which is super-pretty at night. A few photos later, I was cold, so it was time to head back to my lovely warm bed.
Host sent a message observing a “G2 solar event due to hit during the night, which means Northern lights. Gothenburg rarely gets them, but if you’re up at 3 or 4am and look north, who knows you might be lucky!”
Sweden is mocking me.
