Subterranean Stockholm syndrome
I know many countries through their movies, and my main motivation for going somewhere foreign can be because of film directors. So Russia will always be Tarkovsky, in Finland there’s the one and only Aki Kaurismaki, Belgium has André Delvaux, in the Czech Republic it’s Jiří Menzel and Sweden, well, Ingmar Bergman towers over their cinema like ABBA towers over their music (with death metal a close second). There’s also Bo Widerberg and I’m a fan of Lukas Moodysson – his second feature, Together, starring Michael Nyqvist from the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Swedish title: Men Who Hate Women), who died of lung cancer a few months ago, aged 56 – was an unalloyed joy, even if his later films can be very demanding and explicit – close-up shots of vaginal reconstruction surgery, anyone? Nevertheless, I applaud him pushing the boundaries of cinema as Swedish filmmakers have done ever since Vilgot Sjöman’s scandalous I Am Curious (Yellow) in 1967. Special note to Let The Right One In (filmed in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg), one of the most original vampire films ever.
Culturally, Sweden has changed since the 1970s. Back then, there was Bergman, ABBA and Swedish au pair blue movies. Now it’s IKEA, meatballs and crime novels.
We didn’t get around to watching Blade Runner 2049 in Stockholm, as we’d planned to do, but luckily we made our own entertainment in the Stockholm metro, where many of the stations look like sci-fi film sets. Commonly referred to as the longest underground art gallery in the world, out of 100 stations, 90 of them are adorned with some form of artwork, be it installations, paintings, sculptures, tiles or mosaics (amazingly, scenes of the subway in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo make it look like the epitome of urban squalor – it’s anything but). So with only 72 hours in Stockholm (perfect for a 3 day travelcard which gives unlimited travel on the metro, bus, tram and boats to nearby islands), and rain set in for the whole weekend, we set about exploring art in the subway.
I’d arrived on the Friday with a tease of sun; the coach from the airport passing red wooden farm houses and beautiful autumnal trees all golden yellows and reds. Then a cloud the size of the sky passed over and that was it – until leaving Monday lunchtime with another tease of sun, and most amazing of all, on the coach back to the airport I saw, over a stretch of water between two islands, perhaps the biggest, clearest rainbow I’d ever seen in my life. I looked around; everyone was on their phones. I almost shouted out ‘Look!’ but you know what? Their loss.
Things happen when one travels. Not necessarily big, life changing things, but surprising, unexpected things, which could (but tend not to) happen at home. I met my brother Daniel at a coffee shop in the bus terminal. I had my first taste of ordering a £4.50 cup of coffee. We were sitting chatting when a nearby customer’s bottle of fruit juice exploded. She was sitting with her friend at the window. The deep red juice went everywhere – all down the window, on the table, on their clothes. They were dumbstruck. They sat there stunned for five minutes before even attempting to clear it up. I quipped to them that it looked like a bloody murder scene or work of art. Not sure they understood. I then had to use the toilet. No toilet in the cafe, so went out into the concourse and upstairs. It was about £1 to use the toilet. I had no currency on me, I told the assistant. That’s okay, he said, use the chip and pin reader. For a toilet! Once in the unisex toilets – toilets everywhere are unisex; and there usually being only one (if at all) in cafes, results in large queues – I had to wait for a free cubicle. Once inside, I noticed someone had left their phone and wallet, so had to dash outside and find the person who left it. Anyway, as I say, small things.
Daniel’s bike is in a huge cardboard box, which we – i.e. he – has to carry to our Airbnb in the suburbs. This involves Daniel pushing it along the platforms of the metro, inviting many stares. What, has no one seen a tall, wild man in shorts and unkempt beard pushing a huge box before? Then catching a train, then a bus (and missing our stop as we were chatting), then carrying the box through an estate to our flat in Bredäng, about 5km south west of central Stockholm.
Not only did we score a cheap room but got to explore an area which no tourist would go to – this is the magic of Airbnb. Bredäng is a relatively poor area with large council estates. 60% of the population are immigrants, including a lot of Turkish, and mentally disturbed; full of, as Daniel dubbed it, “special people and kebabs”.
Let it be known at this point that I did virtually no map reading (though I had done some research, a first for me and even bought a secondhand guidebook, though I never actually opened it); having Daniel with me meant I was never lost. He uses offline maps on his phone and knows where he is all the time, wherever he is in the world. I usually just followed.
I had a list of things to see and do but had a feeling Daniel wouldn’t do most of them. There was Gamla Stan, the old quarter, with its pretty houses and cobblestones (“cobblestones are for tourists”, he said); there was City Hall, the Nobel Museum, the Fotografiska museum, the Vasa museum, and probably a bunch of other museums and buildings. “All boring” Daniel would say (though amazingly I did manage to get him into the art nouveau Engelbrekakyrkan church, chiseled out of rock, and the large rotunda that is the Swedish National Library). And costing about £20 to get in. The only museum we did go to was Moderna Museet, the modern art museum. Free admission, but they managed to sting us on the coffee and cake in the cafe.
With coffee and cake – referred to as fika, a part of every Swede’s day – costing £10, I always knew food was going to be a problem, especially with Daniel being a vegetarian and eating twice as much as anyone else. I never even saw any meatballs, pickled herring, reindeer, or smörgåsbords – it was all pizza, pasta, falafel and fika for us. We popped into the “third best coffee shop in the world” but didn’t fancy their cakes. A lot of coffee shops are cashless (though not contactless). Having hot milk in your coffee seems to double the price.
We spent a lot of time wondering the city, trying to find either a toilet or a place to eat more substantial than a £10 sandwich. It’s a beautiful city surrounded by water and consisting of 14 islands; clean, no litter, not much graffiti. Friendly people. With a population of less than a million (though being one of the fastest-growing regions in Europe, this figure is expected to more than double by 2024), the city never feels crowded; the long tunnels of the Metro look eerily empty. We jaywalked all the time, as everyone would in London (we’re in a rush to get our lattes!), but people here wait patiently at the lights for the green man, even when there’s no traffic.
Saturday night, 9pm in the trendy Södermalm district. The vegetarian restaurant Daniel wanted to go to was shut. All restaurants in Stockholm close at nine on a Saturday, we were informed. We trudged around in the rain until we found a poncy pasta place that was open. Vapiano was high concept: with no waiters, instead you’re given a card that you swipe at the different counters – salad, main course, bar – whilst your food is prepared in front of you. Well, first of all they had no risotto. Then no spaghetti. Then no cucumbers for the salad. Then my card didn’t work, in fact my next four cards didn’t work. We eventually got a main course each, salads, bread and a beer. After eating, I popped out for a smoke. There was no one at the till at the exit when I left. Daniel came out five minutes later, saying “Let’s walk fast”. He’d paid for his meal on his card but nothing else (all my cards had been taken away). The service had been terrible so I wasn’t hugely bothered, but all the way back I was paranoid we were being followed or tracked (I’d carelessly used wifi in the restaurant).
We’d had fun spending most of the weekend on the metro stations; looking around about twenty, photographing about ten. At some of the most popular stations – T-Centralen, Solna Centrum, Kungsträdgården, Stadion, Tensta – we ran into the same folk photographing them several times. One was a young Swede with a camera and tripod, who kindly marked on our map the best ones to go to; another was two young Chinese women, studying in Sweden, who wrote us a list of the best ones and taught us some Swedish and Chinese.
Then suddenly it was time for me to go; Daniel stayed another day before heading back to NZ. By chance, we did pass by the bank (though now a hotel) where the Stockholm syndrome got its name from; as well a plaque designating the place where former PM Olof Palme was shot dead. I mainly agree with my brother: touristy things are boring. Even the sight of a selfie stick had him walking in the opposite direction.
Funny how once you’ve been somewhere you suddenly notice it everywhere in the news: Swedish model Arvida Byström has received rape threats for her hairy legs... Swedish journalist Kim Wall beheaded in a submarine... Women-only music festival in summer 2018 in Sweden after spate of sexual attacks... Radioactive wild boar spark concerns in Sweden 31 years after Chernobyl [the seemingly random Chernobyl reference is because a cloud of radioactive dust spread over Sweden after the disaster]... Nobel prizes for literature [just a day after this announcement there’s a large screen in our local library advertising the books of Kazuo Ishiguro – only in Stockholm!] and economics awarded.
Previously on Barnflakes
White Clouds, Dark Skins
Lookalikes #23: Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman
City Syndromes
Swedish Dark Arts