A little work trip to Stockholm, that was two weeks away in a row (Ipswich was worth neither photos nor a page), a little more pressure on that one, slightly tricky, but essentially it was interesting and all went well. Weather was not as good as forecast, a fine layer of snow most mornings, and a bigger one on the last day (Friday). I had been to Stockholm once in December 2003 (so says the old site, and I trust it, thought it might have been 2002 but those years were a bit of a blur), with Ghislaine, Simon and Andy, and my abiding memory had been seeing the biggest snowflake I had ever seen. No such thing this time, just very light snow with tiny flakes. At the same time, it wasn’t that cold, never went below -4 or -5°C, so I was well equipped. Had the great chance to meet Omid (from Arseblog) on the Wednesday, who happened to work very near my hotel (which itself was fairly close to where I was working), introduced me to Omnipollo Kyrka, a nice brewery inside an old church. Not cheap for the beer, but an excellent selection, and yeah, I had to amusingly go for the ‘Belgian-style’ one, but actually it also came highly recommended. The burger was pretty good too, so I heartily recommend this place (it doesn’t close late during the week at least, so more of a post-work place than a late evening one). We had a great evening just chatting there.
Tourism? Well the vagaries of available flights to/from Orly meant I had most of Friday free, so after a little work in the morning, I checked out of the hotel, dropped my suitcase at the train station and met up with Pontus (also from Arseblog, it’s a big family, I have met quite a few Arsenal fans in their towns thanks to work, in Australia, US, Spain, etc.), for lunch at a traditional Swedish restaurant, Tranan. The trick there, is that the meatballs do not appear on the menu. You have to ‘know’. But they definitely serve them, so I had that and again recommend the place. It’s busy so you have to book in advance, but it’s worth it. And as it became increasingly obvious that timing would make meeting Pierre (another Swedish Gooner, who I re-bumped into at the City match a couple of weeks earlier by sheer serendipity) either difficult or late (in the end it proved impossible), I had about an hour for tourism. Pontus kindly suggested I took the metro to the Old Town island (Gamla Stan), so I did that and enjoyed the cold sunshine and some lovely buildings mostly. Short for tourism but pleasant and welcome, and that’s where practically all the photos below come from. I was lucky that after the morning snow that was the heaviest of the week, the afternoon turned out to be pretty much also the only day with great weather!
