“Stadshustornet,” you’re asking? What’s a Stadshustornet? Let me tell you.
I forget when it was, but in at least a couple of my posts during this trip, I wrote riffs on how Swedes like to ram two words together until they fuse into one. For example, “konst” means “art,” “museet” means “museum,” but “art museum” is “konstmuseum.”
However, they’re not consistent or, at least, I couldn’t see a pattern that would make it consistent. For example, “Moderna Museet,” not “Modernamuseet,” is “Modern Museum.”
In one of the riffs on the subject, I wondered whether the Swedes ever merge more than one word. Today I learned, they do! “Stadshustornet” means “The City Hall Tower.” (“stad” = “city;” ‘hus’ = ‘house (hall);” “torn” = “tower;” and, as best I can tell, “et” on the end of a word is the definite article “the” that we usually hang loose in front of the associated noun.)
Needless to say, I went up Stockholm’s Stadshustornet. Otherwise, there’s not a chance in hell I would have looked up the above.
I also tried to see a church, but ended up only being able to view it from the outside.
I leave early tomorrow afternoon to return home to Toronto. So this will be my last post from Stockholm and, more generally, from Sweden for this trip. I say “this trip,” leaving open the hope that I’ll get back. If not in this life, then in the next.
A consequence of this being the last post, so to speak, is that you’ll find summaries of my time in Stockholm and Sweden as a whole below. Try to contain your excitement. Just try.
Stadshustornet, but I Digress
When I arrived in Stockholm, I visited its city hall. In the post I wrote about that, I mentioned that the city hall has a tower. They let people go to the top of it, but only a strict limit of 27 people at a time. And they let people in only every 45 minutes. Another group can’t go up until the previous group, which is strictly limited to 45 minutes, comes down.
When I visited the city hall that first day, all of the remaining time slots for the Stadshustornet were sold out for that day. (Huh, I just realized that, if I’m right about “et” being the Swedish definite article when placed at the end of a word, then “the” in “the Stadshustornet” is redundant. I don’t care. It feels wrong without it in English.)
Yesterday, after I decided to go to Drottningholm in the morning and bought ferry tickets for the jaunt, I also bought a Stadshustornet ticket for a time slot half an hour after my return ferry was scheduled to get back. The ferry dock is less than a five-minute walk from Stockholm’s city hall.
As it turns out, the company lists the ferry arrival time as when the ferry turns around and leaves to make another run, not when it arrives at the dock. So I got back 45 minutes before my scheduled tower time.
The city hall wraps around a cobblestone courtyard. There’s another grass-and-paving-stones courtyard between the city hall and the water. There’s a small garden to one side of the latter courtyard.
I spent my wait time alternating between sitting on benches and strolling the courtyards. During both the sitting and strolling periods, I did a lot of people-watching.
Speaking of people-watching in my post about the tour of Stockholm’s city hall, I mentioned that the tour went through a small, circular room with beautiful, very old tapestries on the walls.
The guide said that the room was used for weddings, and all weddings were held on Saturdays. Today is Saturday.
The wedding room is small. So the wedding parties had to be small.
There were a lot of individual wedding parties waiting in the courtyards. Some were dressed in formal wear. A couple of the brides wore traditional white wedding gowns, one with a long, flowing train.
Not all of the wedding parties wore formal wear, but I didn’t see any in jeans. Then again, the city hall was still open for tourists. It’s possible that a few jeans-wearing groups that I thought were families of tourists were, in fact, wedding parties.
There’s a separate entrance off the courtyard for the wedding chapel, so the wedding parties don’t have to push past the tourists to get married. Now that I’ve said that, I wonder if they run the city hall tours on Saturdays? Maybe they change the tour route on Saturdays to avoid the wedding chapel. I don’t know. That’d be a shame because the room is beautiful.
After considerable sitting, strolling and, particularly, people-watching, it was time to climb the tower.
(It just occurred to me that I didn’t take a picture of Stadshustornet today. You can see it by going back and looking at one of the pictures I posted of the city hall in other entries. The one I took from across the water on Evert Taubes Terrass in Gamla Stan shows it off particularly well.)
Stadshustornet, no, Really
Stadshustornet is 106 metres tall. Upon entry, I was offered the option of an elevator or stairs. The elevator goes only half the way up the tower. After that, everyone has to climb the remaining stairs.
Despite only 27 people being allowed in at a time, there was a bit of a line-up for the elevator. My left foot, which had been hurting me for a few days up until yesterday, and excruciatingly so for a day or two of those days, was completely better today. I decided to join the few people tackling the stairs all the way up.
One or two of my one or two regular readers are probably screaming at their screens right about now, yelling, “Joel, you are a complete and total idiot for doing that. You’re just going to trigger your foot problems again.”
Oh, really? Not only did I tackle all of the stairs up, but I also took all of them down. And my foot came through it like a trooper. Not a pain felt. Not only that, but afterwards, my left foot sent me the loveliest of hand-written, ebullient, personal notes thanking me profusely for having confidence in it. (I might have imagined that last part. But my foot is still fine.) Now you’ll have to fall back on one of the 5,683 valid reasons for labelling me as a complete and total idiot.
About halfway up Stadshustornet, where the weaklings who took the elevator got off, there’s a dome in the interior. There are a series of busts around the base of the dome.
One more level up, there is a ringed balcony that allows you to see down onto the dome. From there, looking down on the level below, I also saw a giant statue that appeared to be on the same level as the dome and the ring of smaller statues. But I didn’t see it when I was on the lower level. I don’t know how I missed it. It looked huge from above. The funny thing is, when I went down after visiting the observation deck up top, I meant to pay attention to look for it, but I didn’t. And, again, I didn’t see it.
There are also some statues on this second middle level.
After that, it’s all hallway and stairs to the top.
At the pinnacle of Stadshustornet, an observation deck fully surrounds the core of the tower. Heavy, metal planks form a railing about waist-high, sitting on columns that look like urns to create a wall. I don’t know if that would have been enough to quell my acrophobia. But it didn’t matter. Immediately beside that, on the inside, is a vertical bar fence that goes all around the deck.
That fence is taller than the tallest person alive. It has to be because between it and the wall around the core of the tower, there’s a similar horizontal bar ceiling.
That was more than enough to eliminate my acrophobia.
The spacing of the bars was ample to point the lens of my iPhone camera through it and get some great pictures. And if I were a better photographer, I would have. Instead, you’ll have to make do with the pictures I did take. Suffice it to say that the views of Stockholm from the top of Stadshustornet are amazing. What a knockout of a city.
Klara Kyrka
There’s a church that’s less than a 15-minute walk from Stadshustornet, and just about a ten-minute walk from my hotel, Klara Kyrka. I’ve passed within a block or two of it several times on this trip. I couldn’t miss it because its spire sticks up above the other buildings around it.
My guidebook suggests taking a look at it, but doesn’t give it a strong recommendation. What sets Klara Kyrka apart is that it’s in a section of Stockholm that’s fairly modern, but it’s not. It’s one of the last bastions of old Stockholm left in that district.
There had been a convent on that site since 1527, but a church replaced it in 1590. That church stood until 1751, when a fire destroyed it. It was reconstructed shortly after the fire. Its tower was added in the 1880s.
I walked to Klara Kyrka and looked at its exterior from all sides. On the front door, there was a hand-printed sign in Swedish. Google Translate told me it said that there was a concert there today, and the church was closed. It would open again at 5:30 p.m. for the free concert.
At that point, it wasn’t even 4:00. The sign said nothing about what sort of concert it was. And I was too tired to even think about coming back for it, so I didn’t see inside Klara Kyrka.
And that, friends, concluded my reportable activities for this trip. It has been, as they say, a slice.
Stockholm Summary
I can’t say enough about Stockholm. I love it. I particularly love its delightful Gamla Stan. (Literally, Old Town. That’s the translation and what it is.) You can’t get more charming than Gamla Stan’s cobblestone streets and warmly coloured buildings. I don’t think I’d ever tire of walking around there.
There are a couple of main streets in Gamla Stan that get a lot of tourists. And I suspect it’s even worse during the high season, which starts about now and crests, I don’t know when, but the smaller streets were fairly empty when I was there. (Again, that may change at the height of the high season.)
But Gamla Stan isn’t all there is to Stockholm. There are lots of interesting museums, parks, churches, and other attractions scattered about. And even outside of Gamla Stan, there are a lot of attractive and/or charming districts in the city. Some districts looked interesting from a distance, but I didn’t have time to venture into them.
I’ve found my walking tour app more helpful in Stockholm than any of my three guidebooks. There’s only one of the guidebooks that I ended up using in Stockholm at all. (However, there were other cities in Sweden I visited where that guidebook and my walking tour app offered nothing, but one or both of the other guidebooks did. So I needed all of them.)
I never use the walking tours feature of the app, but I often use the attractions list feature that allows me to sort them by name or by distance from where I happen to be standing at the time. That feature also lets me see all of the sights it has listed, or just those that it rates as “must-sees.”
I mention this to answer the question I have almost always answered since I started including these summaries. Did I spend the right amount of time in the visited city?
Quick answer, no. I could have used more. I was here for seven nights, which is around the maximum that I usually spend in any one city on a trip.
I didn’t see three of my walking tour app’s “must-sees.” Two of those were by choice, both museums. One is a photography museum. It didn’t hold a lot of interest for me, but I did consider going. The other is an ABBA museum. Sorry. I have nothing against ABBA and their music, but I have no interest in going to a museum dedicated to them.
The third one is a park, Kungliga Djurgarden (Royal Djurgården). It’s farther away on the same island as the Vasa Museum, the Nordic Museum, and Skansen. It’s supposed to be spectacular, but I didn’t have time to get there.
Oh, wait. I just remembered that there is another “must-see” that I chose not to visit, a children’s museum.
The Stockholm Archipelago contains a lot of islands that look interesting and are accessible by ferry, but I didn’t have the chance to explore them. And, the full Stockholm Archipelago touring season started yesterday. If I were staying longer, I probably would have enjoyed taking another archipelago tour.
I would likely have found at least another couple of days—and probably another several—in Stockholm to be very enjoyable.
Everyone has different tastes. I have no doubt there are at least some people in the world who have been to and hate Stockholm. I believe the proper term for them is crazy people.
Sweden Summary
Long story short, because I’m getting exceptionally fatigued: I loved Sweden. Pretty much everywhere I visited.
As I related in my post at the Historiska Museet, I hit my touring wall yesterday. If I were younger and had more vigour and stamina, I’d be thrilled to keep going. But I’m not younger. And even when I was a young man, I probably had less than the average stamina and vigour for a man of my age then. And now I’m an older age.
Were it not for that, I would have appreciated longer in Sweden – several days or even weeks longer.
Of the stops I made on this trip, Uppsala, Gävle, Örebro, Gothenburg, Malmö, Linköping, and Stockholm, the only one where I didn’t think I’d enjoy at least one or two more days there was Linköping.
But even though I didn’t love Linköping as much as I did the other cities I visited, it had some lovely features, such as its beautiful river walk. If I had skipped Linköping entirely, maybe I could have avoided my travel burnout. However, apart from that, it was enjoyable.
And there was so much of Sweden that I didn’t just like, but loved. Apart from Stockholm, my favourite was Örebro. Its central old section is the epitome of old charm. Until I got there, I said the same about the preceding cities I visited, Uppsala and Gävle. And the cities after it, Gothenburg and Malmö, are also delightful, with lots to do. They didn’t captivate me as much as Örebro. Nevertheless, a trip to Sweden without them would have been much less of a trip.
And I only visited southern Sweden, and then just a few notable cities in it. I’ve read and heard that northern Sweden is exceptionally scenic, with abundant natural beauty. I didn’t get there. So I don’t have any first-hand knowledge.
About timing. The trip was both too short and too long. It was too short because most of the places I went to, I left wanting more. Plus, there are all those places in Sweden that I didn’t visit at all.
But then there’s that exhaustion thing. I don’t think I could have gone many more days even if I pushed myself. And, as I said, I hit the wall yesterday. Perhaps, somewhere in the middle of the trip, I should have found a scenic spot with both nature and enough urbanity to have some good cafes, restaurants, and hotels. If I spent a couple of days in such a place, not seeing specific sights, but just taking in the ambiance and ambient scenery, and reading a book in a park, it would have recharged my batteries, and I could have gone on much longer. Maybe.
Sweden, this is it. It’s been grand. Thank you. If I were younger, I’d say I’d definitely be back. But I’m not younger, so I’ll just say, we’ll see. There are other places I’ve said the same thing about. So much world. So little time and money.
Aside
The Burden of Time
Walking from Stadshustornet, about a block away from Klara Kyrka, I passed the clock statue pictured here hanging off a wall of a building. In my exhausted state, after my almost three and a half weeks of travel, I looked at the statue of a man, looking weary, hunched over from the burden of time and thought,
“I know the feeling, man. I know the feeling. I’ve loved my time in Sweden. I’ve seen only a small fraction of it, but that fraction has been fabulous. However, I’ve been travelling for more than 3 weeks. Time is getting to me, too. Be well, good sir. Be well.
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