Stockholm

The train arrived in the end, of course, and we weren’t in any rush so no drama. We walked to the Generator hostel and checked in, and I decided to get cracking and do some laundry. A bit hastily, it turned out, as I only realised once I was back upstairs that I’d put the laundry in the machine, including the Copenhagen snow globe which I’d wrapped in my shirt for safety…

Ten minutes of panic imagining the clothes ripped to shreds, but fortunately once opened, the globe was broken, yes, but the shards were plastic so hadn’t done any harm. Oops.

Aurélie found a local cuisine restaurant, Nomad, not far away which had delicious meatballs with lingonberry sauce, nice beer and some musicians doing like an open mic session before the real gig later on (which would have been too late for us!).

Next day, we had a Stromma cruise out to the archipelago on a boat built in 1906…but it was very comfortable and served us an entirely tasty and satisfactory lunch as we watched the scenery go by.

Back on land, we went to the Vasa Museum, which is a “must-see” – I’d been to it on my first visit to Stockholm back in 2008, maybe?

We were starting to feel a bit overfed, and I was getting nauseous seeing the constant availability of burgers EVERYWHERE. I know this is the same all over much of the world – but it’s a challenge finding tasty, varied options that satisfy kids too, without self-catering…I guess we could do that, but then you’re (or more accurately, my wife is) doing food shopping & meal planning and as we’re on trains every couple of days, it’s not like we can reasonably take olive oil, salt, butter, pepper, ketchup (7YO) etc with us either.

Anyway, the japanese-Korean place across the road from Generator got good Google reviews, so we went for that. A great success! The kids love edamame, chicken yakitori skewers, rice, and the tempura, California roll and my bibimbap were all excellent. Swedish booze selling rules are strict – they only had “low beer” at 2.2%, but that was ok. The girls even started to get the hang of chopsticks, which was a bit of a breakthrough!

We had another full day in the city, and we’d read about the subway art as well as fika (basically, coffee and pastries). I cobbled together an itinerary starting at Odenplan – this wasn’t far from Generator and passed by a post office where I checked out sending a parcel of warm clothes we don’t need, and Astrid Lindgren’s house (which has a tiny plaque). We found the Café Pascal place and took a seat outside to eat croissants, Kanelbulle and Cappuccinos.

Most of the subway art is at platform level, but not Odenplan – it’s quite subtle and at one end of the entrance level for the non-metro trains. So an outlier.

We just took single tickets – 42kr a pop, kids ride free, so you just shuffle with them through the gates like one does on the tube. We surfaced at Odensmarmlung for some fresh air and to find a snack…the Fabrique place had sandwiches, but all too artisanal for the kids so we ended up with a 7-11. Absolutely perfect, except they don’t sell beer. 😟 Very different from Copenhagen where every place sells beer and more, and street drinking is very much the norm. No street drinking in Stockholm. But lots of ice cream! Although, the glace a l’italienne a la suédoise was a disappointment – the “strawberry” was just vanilla whipped ice cream with a flavoured sauce on top that set to a hard shell. Neither of the girls were impressed with taste nor ease of consumption.

The last day, we stashed the bags in the lockers at Generator and headed to the Paradox Museum. We’d pre-booked – it was busy! Good fun, well executed and maintained optical illusion exhibits. Fun for all the family. Then we strolled via the old town to the Ocean Bus where the girls were doing land & river tour, while I walked to the Modern Art Museum. I then e-scootered (using the Uber app) back up to the Sven-Harry gallery, which was great, then we all arrived back at Generator at the same time for a drink, a game of babyfoot, then took a bus to the ferry.

The ferry was very smart and a slight step up from the usual Brittany Ferries we know so well. The cabin was fine, nothing special – they do offer really premium cabins, but I had balked at the expense. Ours was perfectly comfortable. 🙂 I’d booked dinner at Aleksandra, the onboard Slavic restaurant, which had a good kids menu, pelmeni, borscht, Kiev cutlet, nice beer, personable waiter (Max) – all excellent. Breakfast buffet was not a good investment – we should have just bought a pastry somewhere, as none of us felt like talking advantage of the cooked breakfast and smoked salmon etc.

The boat arrived on time and Citybox was a 7 minute walk away. We were too early to check in, but reception were very helpful and gave us a keycard for the luggage room to leave our bags until later. The luggage room had safes in to stash the passport bag – all of this was without charge.