One Week In

10:30pm, City Public Hostel, Copenhagen, 31 July 2009

It is now 6:30am in Melbourne, Saturday August 1. One week ago today I was sitting with my family, my girlfriend and my best mate, getting ready to board my flight. Just one week, but it seems like an eternity. I am now sitting in my third city proper, and my (quick finger count) eighth including all stopovers and flying visits. Today has been a day of travel, communication, rest and planning, but tomorrow I launch into Copenhagen, the city I have found myself in almost by chance, even as my current plans veer still further from the original itinerary. But I should return to the beginning.

After a long flight Melbourne – Sydney – Adelaide – Singapore, I arrived at the delightfully simple Changi Airport to be greeted warmly by my Uncle and Aunt and whisked back to their apartment in Mandalay Road (via many of the island's landmarks, if Simon's running commentary was anything to go on). There I showered, changed, and was taken out for Vietnamese food. The food was quite reasonable, the night air a pleasant thirty degrees, but the highlight was probably the reaction of the restaurant's patrons and staff to the enormous rat that darted along the overhead latticework about two-thirds of the way through the meal. Simon's cry of “Oh, a Tarantula” had me flat against the opposite wall long before he had corrected his assumption.

My short stopover in Singapore continued along similar lines, a sort of guided tour/running commentary from Simon, interspersed with suggestions from Ly, sumptuous feasts of Asian and Colonial cuisine, and diversions to purchase an Armani suit, an electric blue handbag and a stack of books almost as large as my travelling baggage. One of these went to me; Simon of course refusing to let me pay for anything despite repeated assurances of how marriage and unemployment are driving him to destitution.

The tome in question is now my most prized possession short of Joe's music box, my external hard drive and my much loved teeny puter: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. I have only read a little, but it is a triumph in the fine tradition of Studs Terkel, who wrote the definitive oral history of WW2. Apparently published in 2006, how this gem has escaped my browsing is a mystery.

My plundering of Singapore's literary resources completed, I journeyed onwards, and (skipping all the exceedingly dull parts in between) I found myself stepping through a set of glass automatic doors onto Swedish soil. Or Swedish floor anyway. Arlanda Airport and it's zippy yellow connecting train are a breeze (silly bloody Melbourne Airport), and I was soon strolling north on Vasagatan, delighted by even this rather ugly part of Stockholm and immediately regretting my choice of a shoulder bag in combination with my backpack. There is simply no method for comfortably wearing both together. Lesson for future travels, I suppose. Although I suspect the best thing would be to have no permanent daypack at all...

Yay, new packing goal!

I was delighted to find that the hostel I had booked, CityBackpackers in Norrmalm, was everything one could hope for. It occupies the ground floor and basement of a delightful eighteenth-century building in the Swedish neo-classical idiom, complete with yellow-washed plaster, white and marble trim, round corner towers and a peaked, well verdigris-ed roof. The facilities were modern, yet sensitive to the building's heritage, the large central courtyard and public areas were attractive and cosy, the security was top-notch, the staff helpful and friendly and freebies included: wireless internet, sauna, 2hrs bike hire per day and all-you-can-eat pasta. There was also a sweet little cafe and the offer of a bike tour of Stockholm, which I accepted enthusiastically.

I can't possibly list everything I saw and did in Stockholm...even in three and a half days there was much too much, and still more than a weeks worth of top notch stuff entirely unseen. I could probably get another four days or so out of the things I've already had a look at, to be honest.

Personal highlights included wandering through the narrow cobbled lanes of Gamla Stan, the old city, and it's neighbouring island Riddarholmen, particularly the cathedral Riddarholmskyrken and the unexpected and utterly delightful vistas which revealed themselves with every twist and sag and lean of the medieval buildings, streets and alleyways. Unexpectedly pleasant also was pushing up through the 1960s ugliness of the Centrum (all the more horrifying if one stops to consider what must have been destroyed) to the beautiful heights of Norrmalm, including the breathtaking City Library and the Observatory hill, where I saw a wild rabbit darting among the trees in the heart of the city. Wandering the foreshore of any and every aspect of Lake Mälaren, exploring the green spaces and and bobbing boats of the old naval island of Skeppsholmen, or riding the powder-blue vintage tram to Djurgården, Stockholm's pleasure garden; all have their own joys.

I visited the National Museum, which features pre-twentieth century art (no Hermitage certainly, but some very fine and well-known Rembrants and some fabulous Rodin bronzes) and a fantastic temporary exhibition on Swedish design from 1900-2000. I spent hours in the Vasa Museum, which houses an almost perfectly preserved 17th century warship raised from Lake Mälaren in 1961 after 333 years on the bottom. I rode a bottle-green and gearless Scandinavian-style bicycle through much of the city to the tops of the cliffs at Södermalm and on to a picnic in the park on the picturesque former prison island of Långholmen. I spent several happy hours among the scale models in the Architecture Museum, enjoying it's clear and articulation explanations of the evolution of Swedish design, housing, town planning, and public and private architecture. I took guided tours of the City Hall, where the architecture echoes Byzantium and Venice, and of the Riksdagshus, where the Swedish system of “consensus building” politics that first drew me to study here goes quietly about it's business, and I watched the changing of the guard at the Royal Palace. I ate ice-cream in the shadow of the royal cathedral Storkyrken and sampled fried, crumbed herring in the sun beside the locks.

I don't think I've ever fallen for a place quite as much in such a short space of time. “The Venice of the North” is more than worthy of its title.

Tomorrow I will see how Köpenhavn, “the shopping harbour”, compares. But I don't have much hope that anything can beat the beauty of Stockholm.

Look out for pictures in the near future...As you can imagine, I took over 5GB of photos, and I need to pick just three or four to illustrate this...