Stockholm (Sweden)

...from a week-long holiday in Stockholm (which provided me with a lovely excuse to ignore my University reading list for a while) and will now give you the chance to share and enjoy…

I visited Stockholm with my mum. We didn’t know much about Sweden to start with, or have many opportunities to look stuff up before going, but had a variety of reasons for wanting to go. I, being about to start a Classics degree, wanted to go somewhere I ...
...in the Royal Armoury in Stockholm until January, which I was keen to see. There’s also the opening credits to Monty Python and the Holy Grail… So Stockholm was decided upon, and my mother duly booked us flights and a hotel. I was away on a Summer School at the time, so I can’t comment on the ease with which she did this or the exact prices of our flights etc, but I do know she went neither for the ultra-cheap options nor for anything very fancy, ... more

I have just returned from a week-long holiday in Stockholm (which provided me with a lovely excuse to ignore my University reading list for a while) and will now give you the chance to share and enjoy…

I visited Stockholm with my mum. We didn’t know much about Sweden to start with, or have many opportunities to look stuff up before going, but had a variety of reasons for wanting to go. I, being about to start a Classics degree, wanted to go somewhere I was unlikely to encounter Roman ruins. Neither my mum nor I wanted to go somewhere particularly hot, and neither of us had been to Scandinavia for a while, and thought it might be fun. I had also read good things in “The Sword” (yes, I read a magazine that’s been Have I Got News For You’s guest publication, and I’m not ashamed of it) about an exhibition of fencing swords from mediaeval times to the present being held in the Royal Armoury in Stockholm until January, which I was keen to see. There’s also the opening credits to Monty Python and the Holy Grail… So Stockholm was decided upon, and my mother duly booked us flights and a hotel. I was away on a Summer School at the time, so I can’t comment on the ease with which she did this or the exact prices of our flights etc, but I do know she went neither for the ultra-cheap options nor for anything very fancy, and the basic cost of flights and hotel was a little over a grand for the two of us.

Journey:

As a large proportion of flights going into Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport are with the carrier SAS (Scandinavian Air Service), with which we flew, I shall briefly comment on them. Our flight out from Heathrow was delayed about 3 1/2 hours due to a faulty aeroplane, which I was given to understand by the Heathrow personnel milling about was not all that uncommon. I saw three different types of SAS aircraft, all of which were relatively small, with about 40 rows of 5 seats. The flight lasts about 2 ½ hours, with a cold meal being provided shortly after take-off, and there is no in-flight entertainment of any sort. If you’re travelling with a child, they will be given a small colouring-book with 4 crayola wax crayons. Or in my mother’s case, if you’re travelling with a 19-year-old who looks about 14. I would have been offended, but the colouring book was really fun. The flight-crew were very friendly, but only one of the three stewardesses I encountered spoke anything approaching good English, which surprised me.

Arrival at Arlanda airport was somewhat chaotic, as due to our delay there was no-one manning passport control. When a couple of people finally arrived, they chose not to man the “EU and Schwengen” line, so everyone had to join the same queues, which took forever.

From the airport, there are three different ways to get to central Stockholm; bus, train and taxi. The taxi would cost at least 450 krone, we were told (at time of writing there are 13 krone to the GBP), the train 140 krone, the bus 89 krone (for adults, slightly cheaper for children) so we took the bus, which took about 40 minutes. We got our tickets for it at a kiosk at the airport, and were able at the same time to pay for a taxi, which we were told the bus-driver would order for us. He did indeed do this, though I’m not sure why as when the bus arrived at the Central Station in Stockholm, there was a swarm of taxis waiting. We waved the chit that said we’d paid for the taxi at a driver, who took us to our hotel, and said “140 krone, please”. We pointed out that we’d already paid, he picked up a phone and had a long, angry-sounding conversation with someone, before smiling and saying “OK!”. I will here point out that the taxi’s windshield had a very ominous looking crack all the way across it, which might say something about the standard of driving among Stockholm’s cabbies.

Things to do:

Museums:
There’s a huge variety of musems in Stockholm, with entry costs varying from 40 krone to 75 or so. I’ll describe for you the ones I went to, and mention a few of the others available.

Vasamuseet: The Vasa is Sweden’s answer to the Mary Rose (Henry VIII’s flagship, which sank in the Solent on her maiden voyage). Vasa sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, and was preserved almost intact on the seabed (in pretty good nick, as the Baltic has very little salt in it, so shipworm doesn’t thrive and so wrecks don’t get eaten away at) from which she was raised in the 1960s. You can walk around the outside of the ship and look at exhibits on her restoration, her building, the lives of 17th century Swedish sailors, her sails and things found inside her. There are also a couple of more general exhibits about 17th century Swedish life. We spent a whole afternoon there, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Entrance is 70 krone for adults, 10 kr for 7-15 year olds. All exhibits are labelled in both Swedish and English.

Museum Tre Kronor: This museum is in the cellars of the Royal Palace, and tells the story of the Tre Kronor Castle, which stood on the site of the current Royal Palace and was destroyed by fire in 1697. You can see parts of the remnants of the castle, and artefacts rescued from it. All exhibits are labelled in both Swedish and English, but sometimes the English is less detailed than the Swedish appears to be. 70kr for adults, 35kr for children.

Kungliga Slottet (The Royal Palace): The official office of the King of Sweden and his Offical Residence, though he actually lives at a different palace fairly nearby. You can see some fairly impressive rooms and halls (though I’ve visited enough National Trust places in my life to switch off inside grand rooms, so I can’t make too much of a detailed comment), and in front of the palace the Changing of the Guard is held daily either at noon or one. This is quite impressive, though nothing like that of Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle, partially I suspect because no elite regiments are used for it – every regiment in the Swedish army takes a turn at standing guard, including volunteer territorial army units (one of which was the outgoing guard when I watched, and had such bad drill that the drill instructor inside me nearly exploded). The ingoing guard when I watched had an excellent band, and did such elaborate drum routines that I suspect they were a regular regiment, though the nice officer who had been announcing things in English at the beginning had by this time stopped for some reason, so I have no idea what the regiment was. The Palace costs 70kr for adults, 35 for children, the Changing of the Guard is free, and I would recommend going to see it if you happen to be nearby, but don’t make any sort of journey for it.

Livrustkammaren (The Royal Armoury): A cellar vault of the Palace full of weapons and clothing. There’s even a stuffed horse. I found it fascinating, but as a keen fencer I have a great deal of interest in swords and the like. Until January 9th 2004 there’s a special exhibition, which I mentioned earlier, about fencing, which my mother found almost as interesting as I did, which suggests even complete non-fencers will be interested. It also has some foam swords for you to play with, and replicas of all the major swords from Lord of the Rings, which you can grasp by the hilt, enabling you to pretend to be Arwen, Gandalf, Frodo or Aragorn. The Armoury has everything labelled in Swedish and English, though in some rooms the English labels are on laminated pieces of paper you have to carry round with you. The English labels in the fencing exhibit are in a little booklet you carry with you through the various rooms it fills. 65kr for adults, 7-18 year olds 20kr, and the fencing exhibit is included in that.

Skattkammaren (The Treasury): Contains the Swedish state regalia (crowns, orbs, sceptres, swords, coaches etc) for a huge number of Swedish monarchs. A lot of things for different monarchs look very similar, but that enables you to see the gradual changes in style over the years, and lets you think about the similarities and differences between the Swedish regalia and the British regalia. One thing they have that we definitely don’t is sleighs to carry royals over the ice in winter! Everything’s labelled in English as well as Swedish, 70kr adults, 35kr children.

Stockholms Medeltidsmuseum (The Museum of Mediaeval Stockholm): This is an underground museum which, not particularly surprisingly, tells of Stockholm in Mediaeval times. There are reconstructions of small houses, which you can look into but not go into, there’s a display of 17 types of shoe found from Mediaeval times, there are partial boats, skulls, bones and the like, the occasional bit of armour, and an exhibit about the development of books in Sweden. It’s very interesting, but has one major disadvantage to the English visitor: very few of the labels have English translations, especially as you get further into the museum. It appears completely random what has an English translation and what hasn’t, and most of what English there is is very brief compared to the huge reams of Swedish, though the book exhibit appears to have an almost word-for-word translation. 70kr for adults, free for 7-17 year olds.

Skansen: Skansen is more fun than you can possibly imagine. It’s an open air museum which was founded in 1891, and claims to be the oldest and largest in the world. It has over 150 buildings from all over Sweden from all time periods, some of which you can enter and wander around. It has an operational glassworks, where you can see a man blowing glass and then buy it at rather large prices (I got myself a little “lucky glass coin” for 25 kr, the more elaborate stuff was far, far more and would break before you got it home anyway). There’s a funicular railway, a baker’s, a chander’s, a saddle-maker’s, a mine, a mill… it’s like a massive and far more fun version of those places you get dragged to when you’re doing the Industrial Revolution in history. But all the cool houses are far from the coolest part. Oh no. There’s a ZOO! It’s the only zoo in Stockholm, and relatively small, but it has moose, wolverines, bears, lynx, wolves, reindeer and seals. It also has Swedish varieties of more domestic animals, like sheep, goats, cows, chickens and pigs. I will here note that Swedish sheep baa in a different language to English ones. In addition to these animals is the “Skansen-Akvariet”, for which you have to pay extra, which houses non-Nordic animals like crocodiles, lemurs, bush-babies and meerkats. It’s the Small Mammal House and the Reptile House of London Zoo scaled down a bit and combined, and has places where you can walk among the animals with nothing separating you from them other than your own common sense.

We spent a whole day in Skansen (from 10-5, though not all the buildings are open all the time) and didn’t see everything. At other times of year it has different opening times, such as 10-10 from June-August, and is one of the only places in Stockholm to be open every day of the week all year round. Most museums, especially in September when the main tourist season had just finished, are closed on Mondays. We had the misfortune to be there on a day when swarms (and I do mean swarms, at least 500) of children were there on what I think was some sort of school trip, with activities laid out for them all round the site, but we were still able to thoroughly enjoy ourselves. Entrance is 70kr for adults, 30 for 6-16 year olds, the Akvariet costs an additional 65kr for adults and 35kr for children.

You will have noticed that I have been giving prices for things individually. I would not recommend paying as you go, as there is a far more convenient and slightly cheaper way to visit most things in Stockholm: The Stockholm Card, which gives you free entry to almost every museum in Stockholm, as well as a free boat trip on the canals and free use of local public transport. For adults, it costs 260kr for one day, 390 for two days, 540kr for three days. For children (max 2 children’s cards per adult card) the cost is 100kr, 140kr or 190kr. It’s valid for a number of hours rather than calendar days, so if you buy a three-day card at noon on day one, it’s valid until noon on day four. This is the way we went about it, which worked very nicely for us. You can buy it in advance of when you first intend to use it; the first time you use it it is stamped with the date and time, which is the point at which your one/two/three day(s) start. With it you get a little booklet detailing all the things you can do with it, listing all the museums (over 75 of them) and giving little summaries of what they are. Here are a few we didn’t get a chance to go to:

Swedish Museum of Architecture
Army Musem
Bergius Botanical Gardens
Museum of Biology
Gustavsbery Porcelains Museum
Museum of Dance
Drottningholm Palace
Gustav III’s Museum of Antiquities
Royal Mews
Jewish Museum
Royal Coin Cabinet
Junibacken (Museum about Pippi Longstocking, Moomin etc)
Toy Museum
Museum of Music
Nobel Museum
Tramway Museum

And the list just goes on and on, but I hope to have shown that there’s something there to interest most people.

Places to Wander:

Gamla Statt (The Old Town): This is on one of the smallest of the main islands of Stockholm, and is where the city was founded and where you’ll find the Royal Palace. It’s full of fascinating little alleyways with hidden-away cafes, ice-sculpture galleries and shops. The shops are, it must be said, of the tourist-trap kind, but despite the expense, and the large number of tacky things, there are some really nice things.

The waterfront: Just wander around by the water staring at the ships. See huge ferries floating placidly next to viking long-boats, see the beautiful buildings relfected in the water.

Drottninggatan: The main shopping street. Long and pedestrianised, so a bit like Oxford Street without the buses and taxis. Also like Oxford Street in that you’ll find both huge deparment stores (there’s even a Debenhams) and tacky tourist shops. The tourist shops tend to be at the southern end of the road, nearest the sea and the high-density museum area, with the department stores further north. These places are not cheap, but if you want just a little something to remember your stay by (in my case a wooden viking with an axe) if you wander around here comparing prices in the different tourist shops you’ll be able to find yourself something and not worry that it may have been cheaper elsewhere in the city.

Getting About:

Stockholm is not exactly large (if you include its suburbs, it has a population of 1.9 million, which I as a not-quite-Londoner find freakishly small) and most places can be walked to from most other places in about half an hour. This can be fun at the weekend, when buses are few and far between, and the city appears to be completely dead. No traffic, no noise, no-one about apart from tourists. I couldn’t help wondering what everyone else knew that I didn’t.

However, hoofing it everywhere is not for everyone.

There are three main transport types in Stockholm; tram, underground train and bus. The tram and underground each have three lines, which are quite simply laid out. I am not sure of prices as a) I didn’t use them, and b) the Stockholm Card gives you free transport on them anyway. What I did use was the bus. It took me a couple of days to get used to the bus and work out where the various buses were going (the only bus maps I could find were confusing and not particularly helpful), but once I got the hang of it the bus was simple to use. The buses were regular and frequent, and a couple of lines even had timers on their bus-stops saying when the next bus was coming, and I didn’t see a single inaccurate one. The buses were large and clean, with plenty of space to put buggies and the like. If you don’t have a Stockholm Card, the cost is 20kr within a specified zone, increasing as you go out of it. I never once saw anything to indicate where one zone ended and another began, but as this didn’t affect me I must confess I wasn’t exactly looking hard.

Getting Information: There’s a fairly large information centre in Sergels Torg, the main large square in Stockholm which has an underground shopping centre. Here you can pick up leaflets for most museums and things like boat and bus tours, and buy your Stockholm Card. There’s also an even larger one nearby called Sweden House, but it was closed when I was there, I think it’s having works done or something.

Getting out to see the countryside:

I only noticed one company which did day-trips out of Stockholm to show you other parts of Sweden, but I think there must have been more from the number of times people got picked up from our hotel in coaches. The tour company I experienced was Golden Tours, who I encountered because their leaflets were lying around the hotel reception. Golden Tours offer three tours, the Nobel Prize Tour (Stockholm is home to the Nobel Prize and all its trappings), though this one doesn’t leave the city, the Golden Sweden Tour, which “takes an in-depth look at Swedish society” and doesn’t venture too far afield, and the Golden Viking Tour, which we decided to go on, and which shows you an awful lot of Swedish countryside. A lot of time is spent in the coach/minibus driving between various Viking-related sights (and some non-Viking related sights), with about 7 stops during the day to get out and look at runestones and burial mounds and the like. Given that we were there out of season, we were the only two people on our tour (along with our Icelandic guide who had a very thick accent and was obsessed with Social Security) so we perhaps didn’t experience the tour the way it normally is, but we had a good time and saw a lot of things you wouldn’t see if you remained in Stockholm all the time. The tour cost 850kr each, which included lunch and a tea-time coffee.

Tours within Stockholm:

Well, there are the Golden Sweden tour (650kr) and the Nobel tour (400kr) mentioned above, and which I gained no experience of. There’s also an open-top bus company (with a bright purple and yellow livery, which makes it hard to miss) with a recorded commentary in a variety of languages. I didn’t try this either, having worked on tour buses earlier in the year and so having too much of an insider view of them to truly enjoy them, but I approve of such tours in principle, and these cost 180kr for adults, 110 kr for children, with a discount if you have a Stockholm Card. These buses are hop-on, hop-off and the tickets are valid for 24 hours. There’s also the “Stockholm Panorama” 90 minute coach tour, which costs 200kr for adults and 100kr for children, again with a discount if you have a Stockholm Card.

Given that Stockholm is built on an archipelago, there’s also a company which does boat tours. With the Stockholm Card you can get a Royal Canal Tour (about 50 minutes long) for free, and during the summer months the Historical Canal Tour, which wasn’t running when I was there. These would normally cost 100kr for adults, 50kr for children. I did the Royal Canal Tour, which my mum and I enjoyed so much we decided to pay to do the longer tour the company offers, the Under the Bridges tour, which costs 160kr and lasts around 2 hours, though part of that time is spent waiting to go through locks, and it didn’t have such detailed commentary as the Royal Canal Tour. From comments overheard from people who’d only just arrived in Stockholm, compared to us who’d been there a few days when we did the boat tours, it’s worth leaving the boat tour until relatively late, so that you have an idea of the geography of the place before the added confusion of seeing it from the water.

General Points:

Most Swedes speak English. Some say “Of course” in a somewhat offended tone if you ask them whether they do, so the language barrier isn’t much of a problem.
Films and TV aren’t dubbed unless they’re cartoons; they merely have subtitles. So if you fancy going to the cinema, an English or American film will be almost the same experience as watching it at home.
Written Swedish looks a lot like German. Don’t let this fool you into thinking it’s pronounced the same way.
There are hidden costs: Toilets in places other than museums and cafes tend to cost 5kr.
If you’re eating out of supermarkets to keep your costs down, bear in mind you’re charged for plastic bags, and if you buy something in a glass bottle, there’s a small surcharge which will appear on your bill.
Vauge price examples: a normal size tube of pringles costs about £2. A packet of Mentos is about 9kr in most places (I got a six-pack at the airport on the way home for 51kr).
Lunch is the main meal of the day.
Although there’s a lot of fish, there’s a good deal of other sorts of meat, so if you’re not a fish fan it’s not the problem you might expect.
There are MacDonald’s everywhere.
I went to Sweden with no knowledge of Scandinavian history after 1066. Things may have made more sense had I known at least some basics.
Buildings tend to be brightly coloured – many are reddish-brown (think the colour you’re told copper is at GCSE Chemistry), some yellow, some orange, I saw a few bright blue ones.
I saw one cat in the whole week I was in Sweden, and it pointedly ignored me, which is the only time I can remember being ignored by a cat. Saw lots of dogs, though.
Stockholm has lots of little parks, a bit like London’s squares.
 

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