Olga had a conference in Lithuania, and found cheap tickets with a layover in Stockholm. She’s got family there, so she arranged for a weekend visit and managed to convince me to come along. Here are a few photos from the trip. If you don’t want the commentary, just check out the gallery; if you stay for the commentary, click through the photos for full-size and possibly-not-square versions.

First night there Olga’s brother Giorgos took us to Sjätte Tunnan, a medieval-themed mead bar. It’s a cavernous candle-lit place, shields on the walls and the staff in generic medieval costume. Mead is delicious, but the effects can be startling. Here’s Giorgos before and after his first quaff:1

Apparently they have a lot of live music there, and probably quite a lot of mead-fueled impromptu singing. These signs greet you as you enter:

And indeed, we were treated to Skrömta, a decidedly Swedish five-piece. On the left is Matti Norlin playing the nyckelharpa (a mad crossbreed of the violin and hurdy-gurdy: bowed, sympathetic strings galore, and keyed rather than fretted); on the right an audience member sporting period dress and cameraphone.

We spent most of the weekend being proper tourists: wandering the old center taking photos of everything, including each other. Here are: Babis and Anestis (cousin of Olga and a friend, whose travels coincided with ours); a statue of St George and the Dragon; and a smiling lion that can be found (and sat on) all over the city.

Other activities included playing with Olga’s cousin Olga’s birds,2 rowing, and emphatically not going to the amusement park with the terrifying rides. Well, actually the boys did go, but I stayed well away. The hangy-swingy-thing you sit in runs all the way around that track and you have to strap yourself in because it rolls and turns upside down at some parts. What’s fun about that, I ask you?

The highlight of our touristy adventure was a visit to Skansen, Stockholm’s zoo and historical park. We arrived after all the historical stuff had closed down for the day (they have a whole lot of buildings set up as they would have been two or three hundred years ago) but we got to enjoy the animals.3

I took a trip through the ‘aquarium’: first a walk through the lemur cage, then past the baboons, then fishtanks and controlled-environment enclosures for snakes and the petting zoo for enormous spiders (sadly that was closed by the time I arrived). Oh yes, and incomprehensible turtles.

Here’s a puzzle for you. One of the objects in this crop is a sweet potato, and one is a naked mole rat. Can you tell the difference? Click through for the full-size version, but be warned: naked mole rats are pretty durned ugly.4

I caught a squirrel somewhere he shouldn’t have been (rubbish bin), doing something he shouldn’t have been doing (grifting):

The Swedish really know how to work with wood. It’s visible all through the city, as a construction material but also in edgings and finished surfaces. I was particularly taken by the construction of the fences all through the zoo. The ‘horizontals’ are laid at a constant angle to the ground, a wonderfully elegant way to avoid having to bind them together. Even stacking a woodpile has to be done elegantly. Of course not all the aesthetic decisions are equally successful…

Most of the historic buildings were closed, but we poked into what we could. I mean ‘historic’ literally, they’re not reproductions; some parts of the first structure here (a storage room) are supposed to date from around the 15th or 16th century. I don’t know the age of the other, but those stairs are absolutely beautiful.

Olga kept herself amused while I admired the architecture:

Notes:

  1. Quaffing is pretty much required if you’re drinking mead. If I remember my Pratchett correctly, it means you spill most of it. [↪]
  2. Olga’s cousin’s name is also Olga. Just to keep us all on our toes. [↪]
  3. That nose had me in fits of giggles for a good half-hour afterwards. I have spared you the picture of her using it to snuffle at her privates, but believe me it was an extraordinary sight. [↪]
  4. Incidentally, one of our DIP speakers some months ago tried to make a point about norms of truthfulness in philosophical discourse by telling us that Stockholm is full of naked mole rats. I found it somewhat bizarre at the time, and seeing them there hasn’t improved matters. [↪]