Regular visitors to a city are often more knowledgeable than many of the locals, writes JASPER WINN
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE is always good when it comes to exploring a city as a visitor. But that knowledge doesn’t want to be too local. Why? Well, here’s my point. What, for example, does the average Dubliner know about finding a secret, best-value hotel in Dublin? Nothing! Why would they? They’ve got their own bed in their own house.
So being local but not too local is good in a guide. When it comes to Stockholm, Erika is a local only if you count living several hundred miles away in Sweden’s centre as being almost-a-Stockholmer. But she’s a frequent and keen visitor to the capital, and so full of useful information for a real outsider like me.
Her first recommendation is the wonderful Hotel Diplomat. This four-star art nouveau classic has been completely refurbished, though it has kept its elegant panelled Cocktailbaren (Swedish can be that easy to understand . . . sometimes) presided over by Clas Ryrstam now in his 30th year at the shaker.
Erika knew that the Diplomat is busiest during the week when it’s a favourite among businessmen. At the weekends, though – tempting for a direct-route budget flight from Dublin – it can offer real value. I’ve just checked online (diplomathotel.com) and found they’re offering a romantic break with grand lit room, champagne, breakfast and use of the spa’s sauna for about €150 a night inclusive for two people.
One could try to pinpoint the Diplomat’s position by saying it’s right on the quays, but in a city built across 14 islands, that doesn’t help much. Sited on Strandvägen it’s within walking distance of all the centre’s highlights – luckily, because Erika was keen on walking, claiming that it was the best, indeed the only, way to see the city properly.
Several hours of brisk striding in the snappy chill of a wintery-sun and blue-sky day took us across numerous of the city’s 57 bridges and through parks and elegant streets. The extensive grassed areas, birch woods and shorelines along the Norrstrom River and Baltic Sea where they meet in the city’s heart, helped make Stockholm Europe’s Green City 2010. Nice, but the urban-rural march had made us hungry.
"Stockholm isn't so cheap, but it can be really great value," claimed Erika. "Best is to find somewhere out of the way doing a big lunch that's not so expensive and go somewhere really good for just one night and then really pay a lot." We literally stumbled upon the Två Draker on Rålambsvägen right under the offices of the Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's equivalent to The Irish Times. The décor was Social Democrat chic, with utilitarian birch-blonde furniture and a help-yourself canteen functionality. The day's lunch menu, for under €10 a head, included the traditional winter fare of rich pork and pea soup, followed by pancakes doused in cream and lingon berry sauce, while the journalists scribbling notes or interviewing people at adjoining tables gave our lunch a Girl With the Dragon Tattooatmosphere.
Our afternoon’s wanderings took us climbing zigzag flights of steps high into the arty Södermalm quarter, and from cafe to cafe before gravity pulled us down again to the medieval walled island of Gamla Stan, where Stockholm was founded in the 13th century.
The cobbled, traffic-free Västerlånggatan was lined with an intriguing mix of shops selling the kitsch and the cool, the odd and the hip. If I’d wanted a plastic Viking helmet complete with blonde braids, or a Pippi Longstocking kitchen apron I was in the right place. As I was, too, if my leanings were more towards Scandinavian glass, Baltic amber jewellery, or Nordic handknits.
The dissonance between adjoining shops, one a temple to minimalist Swedish design, say, and the other perhaps a hole-in-the-wall selling elk-dolls and novelty underpants, seemed to underline something about the Swedish – their ability, perhaps, to migrate back and forth between the cheaply cheerful and the expensively simple.
Maybe Erika was proving this with her suggestions for the evening. “We’re going to have a real traditional delicacy . . . strömming from a stall in the square in Slussen. It doesn’t cost much but it’s so good – fried Baltic herring, with mashed potato and pickled cucumber and red onions. And then we can cross the street and take the Katarina lift for a drink.”
She gestured to a stark metal tower rising up a to high walkway that ran back to the hillside of Södermalm, just where Lisbeth Salander, when not busy playing with fire or kicking hornets’ nests, retreated to her 21-room apartment hideaway. Under the walkway hung a long, glassed-in box, the Gondolen cocktail bar.
“It won’t be cheap but I’m going order the på kanelen cocktail, which means ‘on the cinnamon’ which is what we say for getting drunk in Swedish, because it really gives you the best thinkable drunkness.”
I wasn’t quite sure what “thinkable drunkness” might be like, but guessed it was another bit of local but not too local knowledge, and so probably not a bad thing at all.
* Information on Stockholm in English on beta.stockholmtown.com/en