I’m not used to sleeping on a plane, even one as accommodating as the Finnair flight I took. I almost didn’t catch this flight, as my parents arrived just minutes before the gate would close and the flight would leave from the Chicago Air Terminal 5 that hosts all international flight.

One tip if you travel to Chicago O’Hare for international travel: There apparently was a shuttle which left Terminal 1, which I didn’t take advantage of since I had hours until my next flight, and they had a little less than a hour.

We flew across the Atlantic to Helsinki while I nursed an adrenaline rush. Minutes prior, I considered contingency plans to find a Chicago hotel and negotiating another flight to Stockholm should my parents arrive too late.  Even with that fear averted, I still had trouble falling asleep.  I’ve been on flights that require even longer waits, but for whatever reason I only received perhaps an hour of REM sleep. When we eventually arrived in Helsinki, it was a relief that the smaller airport’s next flight and customs was a much simpler process than the Chicago one.

When we arrived at Arlam airport servicing Stockholm and made our way to the transit center to catch the train, the experience immediately reminded me of SeaTac airport’s tram that goes to Seattle.  In fact, you’ll hear me juxtapose Seattle and the Puget Sound area with Stockholm and perhaps other Scandinavian cities with the brackish water fjords, light rain throughout the autumn days, cloudy skies, and similar humidity and temperature.

There are some tricky transit systems to navigate in Stockholm, but we finally located our VRBO in the Island neighborhood of Sodermalm, chosen for its close proximity to several key tourist attractions in Stockholm, such as the City Hall.  Our Stockholm arrival provide much opportunity to examine Stockholm’s unique cityscape as our jetlag gravitated us towards finding a train.  The city’s directions are amazingly English-abundant, as virtually all the directions have Swedish and English, and most if not all denizens can understand English.  But nevertheless I find it challenging with Swedish pronunciation when I practice the language basics.

Like many subways I’ve been to in Boston and New York, Stockholm’s metro system can pack its riders like sardines, which made me nervous around my parents who are from rural Idaho, and not used to this routine.  The Swedes are nonetheless friendly despite this awkwardness, for example, a nice young lady let me put my grandfather’s old trunk case – one of my prized inherited possessions – on her roller luggage to make space during our subway ride.  So far I try my best with my Swedish, particularly the phrases for “Excuse me”, or “Ursäkta mig” and “thank you”, “tack”. However, almost every Swede we’ve met, even the elderly to a marginal extent, knows English as a second language. The response to my practicing is less appreciated and typically shrugged away than, for example, the Italian from the Dolomites I spoke with on the plane to Sweden whose face lit up when I asked him, “Dove in Italia?” 

Stockholm is not a particularly difficult city to navigate and much more pedestrian-friendly than virtually any city in the US I’ve encountered. I’m willing to bet Stockholm isn’t exceptional compared to the rest of Scandinavia or perhaps the rest of the EU.  That of course is to be determined.  It has almost as many bike and moped lanes as car-and-truck-designated roads, and unlike in the US they are not lanes that run parallel to automobile traffic, but exclusive for biking, walking, and moped purposes. The streets are numbered and named roughly just like the US.  One really doesn’t need an automobile here, especially if you work in the city.  It is only the need to remember these Swedish street names into the phone and compute or write them down into notes that can be cumbersome.

I wanted nothing more than to get a shower and good night’s rest after starting this trip a day-and-a-half ago, but my mother’s stomach called, so I only received half my wish.  We searched the nearby local restaurants, which had pubs and coffee shops a-plenty, reminding me of Seattle’s Capital Hill district, but it did take us a while to find an appropriate place to eat that would meet my parents’ specific food allergy tolerances.  We settled on a sports bar to order some Swedish Meatballs and fish and chips which had ten screens devoted to the same soccer (football) tournament between a Stockholm and a Malmo league, which according to the waiter was akin in competition as Chelsea and Manchester United in the UK.

On my return to the VRBO, I received a limited amount of sleep like the night before.  The next morning, coffee was my savior at a local café after making some light breakfast from a grocery run the previous day. 

Our top itinerary for this day was to visit perhaps Stockholm’s key attraction: Drottingholm Palace.  We purchased tickets to the palace at Klara Mälarstrand near Stockholm’s other must see, it’s city hall or City Stadshus (pictured above). While waiting for the ferry to take us across Lake Mälaren, we visited the City Stadshus, but just the exterior, as guided tours inside conflicted with our plans to go back and forth from the palace.  I had planned to meet with a local running club, Run Collective Stockholm which met at 18:15 at a salon/restaurant/meeting place called Bacchi Syre in the Gamal Stan district.

We boarded the small ferry and chatted with the few passengers, including a nice Taiwanese family living in Warsaw, Poland, and visiting Stockholm.  They had a cute kid who had a habit of mimicking animals he heard, like seabirds flying overhead.  We also met our first local whose English was minimal, an lady maybe in her late 70s to early 80s. 

The ferry ride truly reminded me of the south Puget Sound, with several green forested semi-inhabited islands along the route to the palace.  The cloudy skies didn’t yield much rain and even when it did the humidity helped with the lower temperature for a pleasant natural setting. 

Anyone who has been to Stockholm can identify the color schema of the city with brightly painted colors reminding me of silent movies in the 1920s which tinted their film to give the illusion of color in select movies.  This palace was no exception.  Though the royal family doesn’t live here anymore, there is some reverence paid to the royal traditions of the Swedish monarchy as evident from the portraits at the entrance of this palace-turned-museum.  Its vast gardens are comparable to Versailles according to a Rick Steves video I watched.  What I particularly enjoyed was the lack of people at the palace this day in autumn, an ideal time to go to Europe according to some travel experts since School’s back in session. 

Inside the palace is a variety of art ranging from oil paintings, busts, tapestries, and so forth from when Sweden’s Imperial Monarchy was prominent and battled Russia, Denmark, and other nations and empires over territory.  While several of the Swedish royals’ portraits were displayed, there was also a consistent amount of art collected featuring foreign leaders, perhaps as foreign gifts from other monarchies, diplomatic visits from other nations that enveloped every hallway.

The outside garden had plenty of closed off areas so as not to disturb the artwork, but nonetheless hosted pleasant forest trails to walk through.  According to Bill’s journals of when he and Sam explored Sweden toward the end of their summer vacation, what stood out to Bill was the Chinese Theater pavilion which can be read about in an edited version of this post once I upload it tomorrow — I’m tired, sorry! 

Unfortunately, there was no entry to the theater’s interior on the day we came to Drottingholm, but here is the exterior nonetheless.

Returning back to Stockholm, I prepared to meet the running club I had networked with to join a familiar setting.  In Spokane, I routinely congregate with a couple of running clubs as I find it’s a good way to meet locals over a familiar hobby/lifestyle.  This was my first run club outside of the United States, and without any expectations it reminded me very much of the routine of run clubs in the US where we’d meet at a local vendor, usually a pub, a restaurant, a grocery store, etc., run around the city’s pedestrian friendly zones, and meet back to mingle over a drink and/or food.  This group was only about half Swedish locals to my surprise, as there were many internationals who’d found work in Stockholm, all of which knew English.  

One intriguing change from the US, is that this group assigned pace leaders and the group warm up also had a group-lead stretch.  As expected, I started conversation with my fellow runners by introducing where I was from and that I was on a holiday, my race plans in Oslo, Norway, and this family history project. 

After the run, I ordered a non-alcoholic beer and invited to join an outdoor table with two older gentleman, one Swede and one French-Swedish about the state of the EU and other political chit chat.  There even happened to be a Swedish election in a week.  As I predicted, like in the US, a local run club a good way to meet locals and internationals abroad while traveling.

Returning to the apartment, my parents managed to find a restaurant that served vaunted halibut which I’ve heard is a must to try in Sweden.  It was delicious and perhaps a little too rich, which is why I’ve found time to write and post in the late midnight hours of today while I digest it.