Baltics24: Day 2: Stockholm – Aland

Today is brought to you by Optus Global Roaming is shite.

Legs a little stiff and sore, I got up and started the blog. made some progress, then my phone stopped talking the language of data, and what basically followed involved being told a bunch of crap from a support person who did everything to assume me, the customer, was wrong. Then eventually they went away and got someone else I was able to convince to escalate (only had to say it 3 times and Telecommunications Ombudsman once), before i got a case number and a vague timeline. Downside I spent the bulk of the day with no phone data access, but … I was going to say that it seems to have fixed itself now I’m connecting to Finland, but the data connection fell over before I could finish the sentence. So no dear reader, right now I don’t recommend doing global roaming with Optus.

The rest of the morning was wandering Stockholm on a quiet and sunny Sunday morning. Stockholm doesn’t seem to be a big morning place, it’s quiet and starts moving slowly. It’s mostly there by lunchtime to early afternoon.

My surface take on Stockholm, it’s a place I’m not sure I totally get from just a short visit. It has many old buildings, but they don’t seem that old as they are all clean. Maybe Stockholm is a city that’s never had large amounts of polluting industry, so it’s never developed the grime of London or Glasgow. Or maybe they spend a lot of time cleaning each one. It also has the feel of a city that’s undergone a bunch of “urban renewal” where nice old buildings get knocked down and replaced by the more modern, as there’s a bit of a mix in places (though the modern buildings are clean too). The city’s architects seem to have loved designing buildings with rounded corners, which contrasts with the royal palace, which is just blocky with barely a curve to be found.

The people seem generally tall, generally friendly, though I does feel weird to greet people with just “Hey”. Stockholm is also expensive, $7 a cup of okay coffee expensive. A HSP at the train station is $20. Fuel is $2.60/litre. Would I visit again? Sure, once I save up a chunk of change.

Today for lunch I had what was probably the unintentionally worst $20 burger I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. I can’t remember the name of the place, it was the “mexican” style place in the train station. I’m going to call it Taco Hell, though L had the nachos and they were passable, so maybe it was just the burger. I went with what I think was called the red burger, pulled beef with pickled red onions. I wasn’t expecting too much, train station dining generally has its limits, but figured some solid beef flavour, cheese, and I’d be ok. The bun was brioche, I’m generally not the biggest fan but they can be fine if not too sweet and not stale, and this one was in the ballpark for that, just a little scorched on top and otherwise bland. I had hopes for the pulled beef, but instead got this shredded slightly chewy mass that had all the flavour cooked out of it. Bland and watery, there had obviously been some spice in the cooking as it leaked a paprika-coloured water, but any flavour was long gone. The cheese, instead of being something melty and possibly greasy, was a salty type of danish feta, it had the most flavour of any of the contents, but didn’t manage to lift the flavour of the unfortunate burger-like bland and watery mass into even the level of average ordinariness delivered by the clown or the king.

Then we headed for the bus station for the shuttle to the ferry. It’s an interesting drive, Stockholm has a number of tunnels through some impressive rock, and the walls of the tunnels appear in many places to just be roughly rendered concrete over the stone.

The ferries that run between Stockholm and Helsinki are quite large, ours, Cinderella, had 11 floors (12 if you count the top entertainment deck where there was a bar and a guitar-playing gent churning through 1970s standards). We were on 11, and the cabin was a decent size, I’ve certainly stayed in smaller hotel rooms with worse showers. We had a window, providing a bit of a view, but also the deck outside was a smoking area and dog toilet, so a bit of foot traffic right outside.
In addition to the top deck, there were a number of places to eat, drink, a night club, a mini-casino, several children’s areas, just about anything anyone could want for amusement on an overnight trip. The ferry also had a large area for tax-free shopping, as apparently by stopping each trip at Aland Island, a small place along the way, they could sell duty free goods for part of the time. It seems to be a big thing for the Finnish especially to pick up a trolley full of beer each trip. The whole experience seems to push the boundary between a ferry and a cruise; possibly it comes down to how often it runs, and how many stops it makes, rather than the boat itself. I think once we’re talking cabins with mini-bars and showers, and casinos, nightclubs, and shopping, we’re not talking the same type of ferry trip as the CalMac experience around the islands of Scotland.

So ends less than 2 days in Sweden, with so much left to see on a future trip. So much food left untried. While I had a taste of local small-brewery beer lunchtime Saturday (very tasty it was too, loved the maltiness of the Landsort lager; the balance of the Indiaviken pale ale and the Roxen India red ale, and the smoothness of the Stockholm Noir stout) there is so much left to try, I didn’t even have any Absolut. So much weirdness to uncover (one thing, the Swedes seem to favour very small pillows, if the filling was firmer they’ve be better described as cushions). Will I come back? I don’t see why not, I’ll just need to save up more.