Stockholm, Sweden

I just got back from an almost three week trip to Stockholm. I wanted to write up something similar to what I did for my Tunisa trip.

To some approximation, this was my first time traveling internationally alone. Overall I had a great time, but I was a little surprised by how much trouble I had deciding what to do or getting over the activation energy of getting out the door of my apartment. Working full time on BIOS didn’t help.

The trip reminded me of a recurring conversation with Erin. Erin and I are both positive people, and like most humans we enjoy spending time both on activities and on other people. But Erin schedules and prioritizes around her activities. She wakes up and says, “This is what I’m going to do today”. Then, she’ll message people and see who, if anyone, wants to join her. If you wanna spend time with Erin, your best bet is to be where she’s going to be. One the other hand, I’m pretty indifferent to the specifics of the activity. I’m going to have a good time doing pretty much anything, as long as I’m doing it with people I like and care about. But it’s often difficult for me to say, “I want to go do XYZ”. I’m not saying I’m bad at being alone. I’m great at being alone. I’ll read, I’ll go on a walk, I’ll workout, cook, play games, do research, start a coding project. But I’m probably going to be at home. There’s some barrier to me going out and paying money on some event or activity. My hypothesis is that it’s just a function of growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Entertaining myself at home is just how I grew up.

Despite my hangups, I still did stuff, so let’s talk about it!

Groceries

One of the first things I did was go to the grocery store. There were so many little differences!

• The back wheels of the shopping cart pivot
• It was multi-story and you had to put your cart on an escalator
• The potatoes and onions came out of a funny dispenser thing
• A lot of the fancy food was from Italy
• The eggs weren’t in the refrigerator

It was kinda fun shopping when I didn’t know the language. Pictured are things I bought that I wouldn’t normally buy at home and/or I didn’t know exactly what they were.

The mangos with ginger and lime were amazing. 10/10

Steaks

One of the starkest differences I noticed was the color of the meat, particularly the steaks. They were a deep red, verging on purple, color. They looked rich and delicious.

To be fair, while the steaks were good, I didn’t notice a huge difference in taste or texture. I did go to Restaurant AG on my final night. Their Polish steak that was dry age and cast in beef tallow, on the other hand, was probably the most unique steak I’ve ever had. Funky, and frankly not my favorite, but a unique experience nonetheless.

Night walks

Stockholm has water everywhere, which makes walking at night even more peaceful than normal.

Everytime I travel, I want to read at least one book related to the country. A history of the country, a fiction novel by an author from there, whatever. I happened to be re-reading The Girl with the Dragen Tattoe just before coming to Sweden, but I still wanted something else, so I listened to The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly. Tying the act of listen to the visuals and physical reality of a place makes the book all the more memorable.

Backrooms

Not much of a story here. This is where my apartment’s gym was was: a backroom’s basement.

If you zoom in enough you’ll see the three inch thick steel doors…

Dungen

Another photo without much of a story, but I liked this lighting. There were a handful of bars in downtown Stockholm that were below ground in these stone rooms. In terms of bar ambiance, they really solidified Gamla Stan’s medevial vibe.

LOTR in the Park

Movie night in the park was excellent. I haven’t seen Lord of the Rings in longer than I care to admit and it felt pleasently nostalgic to revisit it. Reconsuming media is something I’ve been doing more in the past couple years, I’ve noticed.

The other notable aspect of the gathering was how many kids and teenagers were out and about without any chaperones. I’ve never seen anything like it. Before the movie there were hundreds (1000+?) of teens in small groups. The coolest thing was that they seemed well behaved and intensely social. They’d mostly be in circles of 5-10, but the circles would regularly intermingle or people would move from one circle to another.

I have to assume that coming of age in an environment like that would yield social-skill dividends as an adult.

hike

As cliché as it is, I have to talk about how good the public transportation was. A typical trip was: walk seven mins to the bus stop. Wait two mins. Commute for 15 mins on a train that was clean and quiet. Walk seven more minutes to your destination. I could do this anywhere, any time. Basically for free because I paid for a month pass that was cheap enough that I don’t remember how much it was.

One time, I decided I wanted to get out of the city and take a hike. I picked a trail that I though I could get to without a car if I gave myself 2-3 of the day to get to and from the trailhead. In reality, the train took me to within two minutes of the trailhead.

Wonderful.

The Nobel Prize Museum

This was a clear highlight of the trip.

The Nobel Prize Museum wasn’t particularly big, but it had a very dense display of items that had been donated by the prize winners. Apparently they were asked to give the museum anything that was important to them or their work, so there was a very wide variety of stuff. A lot of the hard science donations were pieces of equiptment that were vital to whatever discovery had won the Nobel Prize.

The reason this art piece from Aziz Sancar was such an eyecatcher for me is because I was working in the same building as Aziz the year he won the Nobel Prize. I attended his prize party.

I was at UNC in my second year as a Bioinformatics PhD student. As cheesy as it sounds, it was an incredibly inspiring moment for me. The idea that I’d managed to work my way into a building where people were doing some of the best science in the world? That was some trickle down-validation.

Congrats Aziz!