Stockholm

Last weekend, taking advantage of the bank holiday, I visited Stockholm.

I've always been distrustful of weekend visits: they're too short, they can be too intense (trying to visit every single "sight" in a city in a weekend can be exhausting) and they are (usually) comparatively more expensive than a longer visit. However, this time I was pleasantly surprised. I have to admit I cheated: a friend of mine is currently on Erasmus working at the Karolinska Institutet, which meant that I didn't pay for accommodation (although this isn't that rare, I could have couch surfed) and, more importantly, that I had a guide to the city. Not that I was following my friend around the whole time (I think this would have ended up annoying both of us), although she took me to some really cool places, but even when I wasn't with her she suggested places to go. Not just landmarks or sights, but also nice walks, restaurants and cafés, making me feel a lot less like a tourist than I might have otherwise.

Stockholm is beautiful. I can't say this enough. Several islands interconnected by bridges make up the city, and each island has its own distinct personality, but this doesn't detract from the feeling of the city as a whole. All the neighbourhoods are necessary, the disappearance of any of them would be the disappearance of an integral part of the city. There are many parks, and most areas are nice to just walk around, with beautiful buildings in Östermalm and Gamla Stan, cool shops and cafés in the area around Katarina-Sofia and Södermalm, and a more commercial area around Norrmalm. The city is alive (although this might just be an impression gained from going there on an amazingly sunny and warm weekend in spring), and walking around it and traveling in its excellent transport system has led me to draw a few conclusions about the people who live in this city.

I visited Stockholm for the first time a few years ago, when I was about ten or twelve, and even then certain things surprised me (not just about Stockholm, also about other Scandinavian cities/towns/countries, but since this weekend I was only in Stockholm I can't really generalize). Firstly, children, and teenagers. I saw more children this weekend in Stockholm than I would normally see in London in the same period of time. There are children in the parks, on the trains, doing the shopping with their parents, out for ice cream. There are children everywhere. Teenagers too seem more common than in London, and they seem a lot more diverse (although this might just be because of the ever present uniforms in British schools). This is probably due to the fact that Stockholm is smaller, and so parents feel safer letting their kids go around, but it doesn't explain why in London I see plenty of children and teenagers taking the tube to school on weekday mornings yet I don't see them around much on the weekends. Secondly, and this is a big one for me, young parents. If children are more common in Scandinavia than elsewhere, it is also true that parents are younger. I didn't see a single parent with kids who looked older than, say, 35. This isn't to say they don't exist, of course, but I suspect that it is a lot more common (and a lot easier) for young people to be parents in Stockholm than it is in London. The free school system and family benefits go a long way to explain this, but I still find it surprising to see men and women just a few years older than me walking around with one or two kids. In Stockholm this weekend I found myself thinking, more than once, these people (as a society) take care of their children, these people truly believe their children are the future, these people have truly created a system where children are the most important thing. These thoughts made me happy for a reason that I have trouble explaining, something to do with "this is how the world should work", but a bit more irrational, probably to do with the fact that nearly all humans feel the need to protect children (this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but that's material for another time). Thirdly, and this one has nothing to do with the other two, culture. I won't say that Stockholm is more cultural than London. Museums are expensive (as are most things in Stockholm) and the quality isn't as high as you might get in London or even in Madrid (yes, Madrid has the largest, and perhaps the best, paint gallery in the world), and there may not be as many theatres as there are in London or New York, but one feels that the culture is there, on the streets, that it isn't a side project that belongs to just a few, but that it is of the people and that everyone is involved in it. I may be completely wrong about this (since it is just an impression, I haven't lived in Stockholm, so I can't know whether people are actually more involved in culture than they are anywhere else), but of the cities I've been to, Stockholm is one where I felt people were interested in culture, in music, in dance, and where I also felt that these things weren't exclusive.

While in Stockholm I visited just two museums. The Moderna Museet and the Fotografiska. The first one I enjoyed a great deal (I never thought I'd say this, but I am becoming more and more fond of modern painting. Modern art as a whole doesn't do that much for me, but modern paintings are special), the second one was an altogether different experience.

The Moderna Museet had an exhibition on Duchamp and surrealism that I enjoyed especially, highlights of this were Dalí's "The Enigma of William Tell" (I give the title in English since I am uncertain whether the original title was in Spanish, Catalonian or French, and a quick google search hasn't shed light on the matter), Duchamp's "50cc of Paris Air" (again, don't know for sure what the original title is), Duchamp's "Nu Descendant un Escalier n.2" (either the lighting in the museum was incredibly good, and I looked and it didn't seem anything special, or the lighting in this piece is incredible, which I suspect is true) and the screening of "Un Chien Andalou" (Dalí and Buñuel) and "L'Age D'or' (Dalí and Buñuel again). They also had a couple of rooms dedicated to Niki Saint de Phalle, which I really liked for a different reason. Her paintings (if they can be called that, they are more like posters or postcards or letters, or diary entries, and they were at some point all these things) are almost childish, except they can be explicitly sexual, and they evoke (for me) happiness, they are somehow instructions about how to be happy, how to love, how to live. I get the feeling (from both her paintings and a movie she collaborated in which I watched part of) that she had issues with sex, but this fed into her art, and created something that speaks to me.

The Fotografiska started off OK, an exhibition of the work of Ruud van Empel of the last few years, collages made using photoshop to create new worlds and people (especially striking were the creations of faces of children from parts of children's faces, not always successful, and sometimes slightly disturbing). Although I enjoyed walking through the images I don't especially like this type of photography, because I feel that it's fake, and to me photography should be real. I have no clue what I mean by this, since photography is never "real", one chooses the exposure, sometimes the pose, the situation, and so the photograph is nearly always a construct of the photographer, a reflection of what the photographer wants to show... In any case, although I thought Ruud van Empel's work was nice, it didn't strike me more than to create a slight tension while I was seeing it.

On the second floor was an exhibition of some of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work. I admit (rather to my embarrassment) that I don't think I knew his work before. It was impresionante. I have no word for it in English, it caused an impression, I can't stop thinking about it. The images are vivid even now, and come into my head as I'm doing things. Not shocking, not strange, not surprising, just so vivid. They are images taken in different countries, at different points in the 20th century, all in black and white. There are images of Germany after the Second World War and of Russia during the Cold War, images of Spanish cities (Madrid, Seville and and Valencia) in 1933, and images of the States in the 50s and 60s. They were all pictures of people. Real people, people going about their every day business, happy people, alive people. Pictures from India and China and other Asian countries were (to me) the least striking, probably because they feel like they are the most contrived. Pictures of children playing on the streets behind a wall that has a hole in it, in Seville in 1933, are the most vivid. The children are (to me) inequivocally Spanish children. The US pictures hold in them somehow the idea of what the US was in the 20th century, or more than that, the idea of what the idea of the US was. This exhibition was probably what will most stay with me of what I saw during my visit to Stockholm.

Other than the art, I got to enjoy a few of Stockholm's cafés (they truly have a huge coffee culture, and a really good one too) and a three excellent restaurants: Pelikan, for Swedish fare, they really know how to cook meat; Jebena, a restaurant in a tube station serving delicious Eastern African food, which we had to eat with the help of Injera, a delicious bread; and (last but not least) Hermans, a vegetarian buffet that I would recommend to anyone who thinks vegetarian food is boring/can't be tasty or any variation on that theme. I have Justine to thank for these places, since I might not have found them/gone to them if she hadn't been there to tell me about them.

The best thing about the weekend, though, were the people. A huge thanks to Justine for having me, and for the conversations (I never get tired of discussing anything from science to feminism with her) and for the company, and thanks to her friends for making me feel welcome (drinks on Friday, hall party on Saturday and a long afternoon chat on Sunday come to mind).

In conclusion, the Stockholm weekend experiment was an all around success. As always when I travel, I should do this more often.