Day 18 - Sunday May 7, 2017 - Stockholm
We were awake early again, not surprisingly as we didn’t draw the cabin curtains and it was light by about 4 am. We sail on, the occasional other ship on the horizon or the odd rocky outcrop and, at one point, a beautiful moon, low in the sky.
There is a one hour time change between Helsinki and Stockholm though when that occurs we don’t know…… and as I write this at 5.31 am, the sim card in my iPad gets service from ‘SWEDEN’ and the time resets to 4.31 am. As we continue to progress, we pass numerous small islands. Looking at the map, the sea to the east of Stockholm has hundreds of islands; the ferry route marked on the map takes a very northerly route, before turning south and then turning west again, presumably as the easiest way of threading its way round these islands. Even so, it is remarkable how close we seem to come to some of them – presumably the seabed must shelve very quickly. The same was true when we left Helsinki – as we threaded our way out, we sailed very close to Suomenlinna (the original Helsinki fortress, now a summer playground …. which we really must visit next time we’re in Helsinki).
We headed down to the Viking Buffet at the appointed time (8 am Finnish time, 7 am Swedish time) and joined the breakfast line scrum. There weren’t enough people there yet for the ‘wedge’ outside the door to have fully developed but as we all start to shuffle in, someone does an end run around us, only to be immediately pulled up when he gets to the ticket checker because he doesn’t have the right ticket – ha!
Coffee and juice and a suitably moderate amount to eat and we’re done. We go back to watching the landscape slip by. We’re fairly close to shore so lots of houses to see, some rather palatial looking and some rather more modest, many of them the ‘rusty red’ colour that is very common in this part of the world.
Eventually we dock in Stockholm and make our way down to deck 7 to disembark. The usual scrum has already developed so there’s no alternative but to add to it. It seems to take an age for the doors to open but eventually they do and off we go, accompanied by a certain amont of pushing and shoving. We finally make our way out of the terminal and find the bus (for which we had already booked) waiting outside and so we clamber aboard. I say ‘clamber’ because we literally had to do that – board in the middle of the bus with your bags, up three very steep steps. The bus was already fairly full but we manage to find two seats. It’s a ‘bendy’ bus and we end up sitting in the bendy bit, from where we can see virtually nothing. The bus drops us at the back of the City Terminal so we go inside and then out again, in the direction of the Central Station next door. For a major city, the approach to the Central Station seems singularly unimpressive but then, when we exit again later, we realise that, like the City Terminal, we were going in the back door and the front entrance is rather more grand.
We have an early morning train on Wednesday so we wanted to check out the station and, more particularly, see how long it takes us to walk to the AirBNB apartment where we’re staying in Gamla Stan (the old town). We stop for coffee first. In the event, the walk takes us about 30 minutes, which isn’t too bad. I had reckoned that it should take about 20 – 25 minutes so, considering we didn’t really know where we were going and had to keep stopping to consult the map, we made good progress.
Gamla Stan is everything the guide books say it is. Old buildings and narrow, cobbled streets full of tourists. We cross Vasterlanggatan, the main street lined with souvenir shops and cafes etc. and thronged with tourists, on our way to the apartment on Lilla Hoparegrand. Like Tallinn the other day, the streets are a mixture of quiet streets with no one around and then, suddenly, streets clogged with the tourist masses, many of them playing follow-my-leader. The quiet streets are a delight, the crowded ones less so.
We find the apartment easily enough and the codes we’d been given for the street door and the apartment door (which is on the ground floor) both work. The building is – obviously – very old. There are stairs leading up from the small entrance lobby but it’s not clear how many other apartments are up there. Our apartment has a small, but perfectly adequate, living room on the ground floor, wth a small kitchen, a small kitchen table to one side and a laundry room, with the shower and toilet. The bedroom is downstairs in the basement, down some very steep steps. The exposed barrel-shaped brick ceiling in the bedroom testifies to the age of the building.
After unpacking, we went for a walk, north towards the city centre so Anne-Margaret could check out a clothes shop she wanted to visit. The cardigan she had seen online turned out not to be quite so good in real life, so no puchases today. We meandered back, past the Opera House and round past the Royal Palace, before heading down Vasterlanggatan, clogged with tourists. We chanced upon a 7-Eleven so stopped to buy some supplies before heading back to the apartment. The only ‘supermarket’ we have been able to track down is a ‘Coop Nara’ at the south end of Gamla Stan.
After a rest, we head back out again, this time south in search of Coop Nara. We find it easily enough, across a square wih a few cafes etc. where a lot of people were enjoying the afternoon sunshine. Experience has taught us to be wary of cafes and restaurants in picturesque squares as they tend to be over-priced tourist traps and you usually do much better in the back streets. We wandered back to the apartment with our additional supplies, stopping on the way for a drink in a very quiet bar/restaurant. Having had enormous buffets for breakfast and dinner for the last couple of days, we were quite content to stay home and have some bread and cheese and a beer for supper.