Stockholm Part 1

 

After Gothenburg, I travelled to the other side of Sweden to see the capital, Stockholm. I spent three nights there, hence why I’ve decided to do two posts on this city, as I do have a fair amount to cover.

I travelled between the two cities by coach, something which gave me the chance to see an awful lot of the Swedish countryside. Now in most countries, the countryside is made up of endless fields with the occasional geographical feature such as a hill or a forest. However in Sweden the landscape is dominated by endless evergreen forests scattered over a rocky and uneven terrain. Whilst this might sound very nice, the novelty does kind of wear off when it’s the only scenery you’ve seen for the last hour. Luckily, the unchanging landscape wasn’t too much of a problem as the coach had decent WiFi, allowing me to pass the time by watching any rubbish that I could find on Youtube (although it stopped working for the last hour of the journey, leaving me doing the very traditional travel activity of looking out of the window).

The Swedish Countryside as seen from a motorway

After about seven hours of Swedish motorways, I arrived in the centre of Stockholm, the most northerly city that I had ever visited (a record that would actually be smashed by Helsinki a few days later). My next challenge was to find my hostel, something, which thankfully was a lot easier to find than it was in Gothenburg as I’d gone for somewhere that was directly in the centre of the city. It turned out to be a very typical hostel, complete with endless bunk beds, really loud snorers and a really nasty smell coming from a corner of the bathroom. After dumping my 45 tons worth of baggage I went out to have a look for something to eat, and eventually stumbled upon a reasonably priced (by Swedish standards) kebab shop.

In terms of my first impressions of the Swedish capital, it had an appearance very different to that of cities like London and Paris, yet it definitely had the feeling of a large metropolis. Being Sweden, it was naturally very clean, the buildings all looked presentable and the architecture was ever so slightly quirky. Whilst it wasn’t as warm as Gothenburg, the weather did look to be significantly drier than it had been there which was definitely a bonus. After my first evening it was definitely a city that I was looking forward to exploring further.