Stockholm - Day One

Stockholm is a lovely city. The first impressions were very good; waiting for the bus outside the airport terminal there are woods in the middle distance and what looked like fields (but actually later turned out to be concrete service areas for the airport.) The weather was sunny and comfortably warm, with a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. The environs of the airport were idyllic; lots of trees, mostly a mixture of evergreens, gave it a very Nordic forest feel; very rural. The rest area with the Shell station and attached McDonalds looked totally out of place.

The driver of the airport bus was fluent in English as well as Swedish, but I had got my directions confused and so still managed to get off at the wrong stop and landed in what looked like a Tech park on the outskirts of the city. Fortunately a friendly local at the bus stop pointed me in the direction of the suburban bus service so I only had a twenty-minute wait.

The area where I had ended up had a kind of fond familiarity to it; the large modern architecture with plenty of glass, emblazoned with huge HP, Canon and 3M logos; groups of men in their twenties to forties, dressed mostly in jeans and t-shirts but with a few shirts and trousers, all of them with company ID badges either around their necks or attached to their belts, all heading off to lunch together while earnestly discussing either football or technology. It was all very familiar.

The bus eventually dropped me at the North Station, where Brett met me and took me out for lunch.

In the evening we headed out to the Pride Park (It’s Stockholm’s Gay Pride week this week, culminating in this weekend,) where we bought (rather pricey!) tickets for the three remaining days of the event and had a wander around. The park was pretty busy. They had a couple of stages and the usual selection of food places, ‘gay merchandising’ stalls and ‘community’ tents. The only things that I didn’t see that I would have expected were the ‘club’ tents, run by the big nightclubs. Maybe the club scene isn’t such a major focus in Sweden?

We had a good wander around to check everything out – including the Gay Police Association and a military (recruitment?) information tent. (I seem to recall from somewhere, although I don’t have Internet access as I write, so I can’t confirm it, that Sweden has a total equality policy in its armed forces and openly gay men can serve without issue.)

There were a couple of activity events; a rock climbing wall, a bucking bronco and an arena where you stood on pillars and fought your opponent with padded quarterstaffs. Unfortunately Brett wasn’t up for it… Maybe tomorrow…