Today we made the 3 hour journey from Jönköping to Stockholm, arriving here in time for some lunch. By the time we had found our way to our Airbnb and returned the rental car near the central train station it was 4 pm so we decided to explore the old town area of Gamla Stan. The area is home to the Kungliga Slottet (Royal Palace) and the Riksdagshuset (Parliament) which together with tall buildings and narrow streets makes it a honeypot for tourists!
Driving up here I had time to reflect on our time so far here in Sweden. A couple of observations. Firstly, the country is becoming completely cashless (so much for bringing plenty of cash). Want to use public toilets – you have to use your card for a 5 kr (approx 50 p) transaction. Buying lunch at a coffee shop like Costa in a mall we visited today, yeap no cash – only card. Want to pay for your car parking – the machines will only take cards although most will have downloaded the App and paid that way. No surprise are supermarkets where you can use both but hopefully there is an assistant manning a check-out which means, typically, you can use cash.
Like home, the countryside is extremely dry, and like our holiday last year the country is subjected to forest wild fires. Link to map of wildfires (in Swedish). Actually, the power of Google comes into its own on these occasions since as we entered one of the areas subjected to the wild fires my phone came up with a fire warning and safety information. Very useful. To be honest the fires here are not on the scale that we experienced in the US and Canada, but nonetheless, its sad to see so much peoples lives affected by these fires.
Our drive was relatively flat on the way up and we oscillated driving through arable farm land and forests on a regular basis. The other fact of note is that this area of southern Sweden is sparsely populated. This is perhaps brought home in the factoid that Sweden has a whole population of just over 9 million compared to London’s 8.1 million. Stockholm’s metropolitan area comprises 26 municipalities and accounts for 2.2 million of the total of 9 million.
