Gothenburg

The first I saw of Sweden was the coast. OK that’s kind of a given because I was coming in by ferry but what I mean by this is your typical Scandinavian coastline, one made up of rocky islands and outcrops speckled with the occasional evergreen tree. I’ve always been curious about Sweden, partly because it’s a country you don’t really learn much about in school, despite it dominating a large area in the north of Europe. 

Thanks to the Schengen agreement, getting off the boat was fairly quick and easy; my next challenge was to find my hostel. Not wanting to pay for Swedish data roaming, I’d taken some screenshots of the location of the hostel on Google maps. Unfortunately these were not the best quality screenshots in the world, and I soon realised that I’d started out by going up the wrong street, and getting to the correct street would involve pushing the shipping container that was my suitcase up a hill (I soon found out that Gothenburg wasn’t the flattest city in the world). To add insult to injury, the weather was awful; it was about 28°C with intermittent rain, making me feel like I was on some weird assault course in a 1990’s reality game show. Eventually I found the hostel, only to find that I’d arrived too early to check in. Whilst I was waiting, I made use of their internet cafe, and seeing as it was my first time using a Swedish computer, I was quite fascinated by the novelty of there being an ‘å’ key on the keyboard. When I was able to check in, the woman at the desk very observantly commented, ‘you’ve got a lot of stuff’. ‘Really?’ I wanted to reply, ‘I didn’t notice that when I was pushing this freight train of a suitcase up that hill’.

So what is Gothenburg like as a city? As far as I can make out, it’s a fairly typical European city surrounded by vast, mostly forested countryside. It’s a place where I’d be perfectly happy to live and if you’re ever planning on travelling there it is certainly a great location to spend a couple of days. In general I wouldn’t really say that there’s very much that’s particularly outstanding about Gothenburg, but it is certainly a very pleasant city, with a very Scandinavian vibe. One thing that did stand out to me was the Slottskogen park, which for the most part is what you would expect to find in your average city park, mixed in with unlandscaped areas, giving you a taste of the Swedish countryside, despite being in the middle of an urban area. If I ever come back here I’d definitely like to see more of the surrounding area, especially the Baltic coast, something that at least looked impressive from the ferry.

So that was Gothenburg, my next stop was the Swedish capital, Stockholm, the city which will be the subject of my next post.