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More about Stockholm
Jul. 1st, 2011 05:31 pmSome more memories from my recent trip.
( Read more... )
As I said, Sweden is not cheap. I couldn't get into the con hotel so I looked for somewhere on hotels.com and found the Three Crowns Bed and Breakfast which was close to the station, and the station seemed to be only a couple of kilometres from the con. (It turned out to be about a 30 minute walk.)
So I arrived into Stockholm Central Station around 19:30 on the Thursday evening and immediately got disoriented. The hotel was supposed to be to the west of the station and I should have been able to guess which way that was because the train had come in from the south. I found the main concourse and went out the main exit (which had a lot of building work around it). Now, I don't know why I thought this was to the north of the station but it was actually to the east, so my attempt to go west was actually heading north. When I realised this, I headed back south to skirt the south end of the station. This headed into a maze of traffic intersections but I finally got under the tracks and into the right part of Stockholm. I found I was now to the south of a hilly street and my hotel was over the hill, so I carted my wheeled case over the hill. I discovered the next morning that if I had taken the first exit from the station I'd seen signposted, I'd have come out at the north end of the station onto a road that ran west straight to the hotel.
The street the hotel was on was a fairly quiet street with a few shops and restaurants. The front of the hotel looked like a cafe. It was also closed. Fortunately there was a notice on the door in English giving me a number to ring (including international dialling code) and I had a mobile.
The woman who answered sounded slightly annoyed. There was a keypad on the door and she had e-mailed the entry code and my room number the day before. Of course, I'd been travelling for three days and hadn't seen the e-mail. (Amusingly, as we were talking, another guest arrived and used the keypad to open the door and let me in.)
So I got my room, which was entirely internal - no windows. All that was in the room were two single beds (but I had the room to myself) a couple of bedside tables a shelf and some coat hooks and hangers, and a wall-mounted flat screen TV. Shower and loo were down the corridor. Which meant, I discovered when I got up the next morning and went to the loo, if the door to the lobby was open as it often was at breakfast time, and as the front of the building was one big window, anyone in the street could see me wandering about in my pyjamas.
Breakfast turned out to be a danish pastry and a cafetiere of coffee. Most days I had extra breakfast either at the con when they had food on, or finding a coffee shop. But the place was comfortable enough and I slept well. And the staff proved to be friendly and even showed my how to get a browser window up on the computers in the lobby so I could check my e-mail. (The screens seemed to be tied into the Stockholm tourist pages, but if you knew where to go, you could get an actual browser up.)
I'd got some Swedish money on the train up the previous day, or rather the ship the train goes on between Germany and Denmark, but much of that went in the meal I had Thursday night. So I found an ATM at the station the next morning and planned to get the equivalent of about £50 and see how long that lasted. My thought process at the ATM must have gone something like, 10kr to the pound, fifty quid, that's five hundred, there's an option for 5000kr, that's what I want. At which point I realised I'd just requested £500. And they don't allow you to put notes back in the slot. I was paying everything by cash for the next five days, changed a 500kr note to Danish currency in Copenhagen and another one for Euros in Cologne, and still had two crisp 500kr notes when I got back to St. Pancras.
The main road by the con site was called Valhallavagen. Everytime I approached it, I could hear in my head Donner summoning the thunderstorm so Froh could create the rainbow bridge for the gods to enter into Valhalla. There was even a Valhalla Grill cafe in the middle of the central reservation, which amused me.
I'm a great fan of the TV series Wallander, not the British version with Kenneth Branagh but the Swedish TV version. So everytime I heard a conversation in Swedish in the street, everytime I saw Swedish police officers, I thought I was in the middle of an episode. And then I passed a theatre and Krister Henriksson, the star of the show, was appearing there.( Read more... )
( Read more... )
As I said, Sweden is not cheap. I couldn't get into the con hotel so I looked for somewhere on hotels.com and found the Three Crowns Bed and Breakfast which was close to the station, and the station seemed to be only a couple of kilometres from the con. (It turned out to be about a 30 minute walk.)
So I arrived into Stockholm Central Station around 19:30 on the Thursday evening and immediately got disoriented. The hotel was supposed to be to the west of the station and I should have been able to guess which way that was because the train had come in from the south. I found the main concourse and went out the main exit (which had a lot of building work around it). Now, I don't know why I thought this was to the north of the station but it was actually to the east, so my attempt to go west was actually heading north. When I realised this, I headed back south to skirt the south end of the station. This headed into a maze of traffic intersections but I finally got under the tracks and into the right part of Stockholm. I found I was now to the south of a hilly street and my hotel was over the hill, so I carted my wheeled case over the hill. I discovered the next morning that if I had taken the first exit from the station I'd seen signposted, I'd have come out at the north end of the station onto a road that ran west straight to the hotel.
The street the hotel was on was a fairly quiet street with a few shops and restaurants. The front of the hotel looked like a cafe. It was also closed. Fortunately there was a notice on the door in English giving me a number to ring (including international dialling code) and I had a mobile.
The woman who answered sounded slightly annoyed. There was a keypad on the door and she had e-mailed the entry code and my room number the day before. Of course, I'd been travelling for three days and hadn't seen the e-mail. (Amusingly, as we were talking, another guest arrived and used the keypad to open the door and let me in.)
So I got my room, which was entirely internal - no windows. All that was in the room were two single beds (but I had the room to myself) a couple of bedside tables a shelf and some coat hooks and hangers, and a wall-mounted flat screen TV. Shower and loo were down the corridor. Which meant, I discovered when I got up the next morning and went to the loo, if the door to the lobby was open as it often was at breakfast time, and as the front of the building was one big window, anyone in the street could see me wandering about in my pyjamas.
Breakfast turned out to be a danish pastry and a cafetiere of coffee. Most days I had extra breakfast either at the con when they had food on, or finding a coffee shop. But the place was comfortable enough and I slept well. And the staff proved to be friendly and even showed my how to get a browser window up on the computers in the lobby so I could check my e-mail. (The screens seemed to be tied into the Stockholm tourist pages, but if you knew where to go, you could get an actual browser up.)
I'd got some Swedish money on the train up the previous day, or rather the ship the train goes on between Germany and Denmark, but much of that went in the meal I had Thursday night. So I found an ATM at the station the next morning and planned to get the equivalent of about £50 and see how long that lasted. My thought process at the ATM must have gone something like, 10kr to the pound, fifty quid, that's five hundred, there's an option for 5000kr, that's what I want. At which point I realised I'd just requested £500. And they don't allow you to put notes back in the slot. I was paying everything by cash for the next five days, changed a 500kr note to Danish currency in Copenhagen and another one for Euros in Cologne, and still had two crisp 500kr notes when I got back to St. Pancras.
The main road by the con site was called Valhallavagen. Everytime I approached it, I could hear in my head Donner summoning the thunderstorm so Froh could create the rainbow bridge for the gods to enter into Valhalla. There was even a Valhalla Grill cafe in the middle of the central reservation, which amused me.
I'm a great fan of the TV series Wallander, not the British version with Kenneth Branagh but the Swedish TV version. So everytime I heard a conversation in Swedish in the street, everytime I saw Swedish police officers, I thought I was in the middle of an episode. And then I passed a theatre and Krister Henriksson, the star of the show, was appearing there.( Read more... )
