Flowers, water, and beautiful buildings – that’s Stockholm. Oh, and the grey skies and intermittent rain.

Our fourth stop in Sweden was Stockholm. We’ve been here once before, way back in 2010, and loved the city but still only scheduled a short three-night stop here. As the largest of the Nordic cities and the heart of Sweden, there’s lots to do here. But, we were in a hurry to get to our friends’ place up in the mountain for the weekend and then move on to Eastern Europe, so we cut our stay there pretty short.

That’s a shame because Stockholm is a beautiful city with lots to do. We love just walking around admiring the great architecture, but there are great museums as well, most of which we haven’t been to (including the Museum of Modern Art, which used to be run by our friend Lars). We did manage one important museum, though, the ABBA Museum, an homage to the pop music group of the 1970s. It was fun and not nearly at kitschy as it might have been, but definitely something you only need to see once.

Mark is kind of an ABBA fan

And then there was that museum you don’t need to see even once. We got to Stockholm late in the afternoon after taking a boat and bus from Gotland. Mark headed out while I just hung out in the room; it was cool and slightly rainy and I didn’t feel like braving the weather. He ended up going into the Nobel Museum – the Nobel Prizes are a Swedish thing – and, as he put it to me, “That’s $15 and 15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”

Besides the ABBA Museum the other fun thing we did in Stockholm was to just hang out with friends. We’ve been planning on meeting our friends Marc & David down in Dubrovnik next week. They’d written a couple of months ago that they had a wedding to attend in Italy and wondered where we’d be in late August. “Bosnia,” we told them and they might be the only people in the world who would say “OK, let’s go to Bosnia.”

A serendipitous afternoon – on an unusually beautiful afternoon – with David & Marc

Just a couple days ago, though, Mark was on Facebook and saw David’s post “We’re off to Stockholm!” Huh? Turns out there were crazy cheap flights from Boston to Stockholm and so that’s where they started their little European vacation from. And we overlapped for an afternoon, so we had lunch and then hung out in a park for the rest of the day. Very fun and serendipitous.

So that was our short stay in Stockholm. One of these days we have to come back when we have more time; I’d love to get to know the city better and actually get to some of the real museums here. For now, though, we’re heading way north up into the mountains.

OK, humor us for a moment as we enjoy the ABBA Museum. Here’s Mark posing with the four of them on a park bench.

And Mark posing in the helicopter that was featured on the cover of their album “Arrival,” seen on the left. He had that album and after all these years now he’s in the helicopter.

ABBA’s crazy attire was a key part of their show. Here are their costumes from the album “Waterloo.”

Along with the costumes from the original London performance of “Mamma Mia”

The view of Stockholm from our hotel (after the first night when our “view” was an interior courtyard)

Beautiful buildings in Stockholm

Us!

Gothenburg has some beautiful parks that are easily accessible from the city center

Here’s the thing to know about Gothenburg: you don’t really need four days there.

Again, as with Malmö, the weather didn’t help; mostly cool and wet. It would clear up, you’d get your hopes up and just like that it would be cloudy and wet again. Of course you never know about a place like this before you get here, so we figure better to leave some extra time just in case it’s really cool. And Gothenburg, it seemed, had potential. It’s Sweden’s second-largest city, with a big University population. Volvo was founded here, so at one point at least there was a lot of money here. It’s got parks and museums and is the largest port in Scandinavia. And – this is big – Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA was born here. So it had potential.

Here’s Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast on what they call the Kattegat, a sea area between the Baltic & North Seas. The city is also at the mouth of the Göta älv, Sweden’s largest river.

Four days, though, was a bit much. We struggled to find restaurants that we liked and that didn’t cost a not-so-small fortune. And ultimately after a couple tries we gave up on finding anywhere to have a cocktail; they were crazy expensive yet tiny, and the quality was limited. A martini with black olives??

Two things worth pointing out, not particularly specific to Gothenburg. One, Sweden is moving aggressively to become a cashless society. Contrary to a lot of places where we don’t know if they’ll accept a credit card, a lot of businesses have signs in the window or on the door that say “Cash not accepted.” Never seen that before. Gothenburg native and Abba-guy Björn became the country’s most prominent advocate of going cashless after his son was robbed. His point is that a great deal of crime broadly and the black market entirely is dependent on cash; get rid of cash and suddenly things become a lot safer. Not bad. And a big boost for those of us who get three frequent flyer points for every dollar spend on our credit cards.

Here’s Mark at Samara Lounge, a little Middle Eastern restaurant we found. The food was great, it was pretty cheap (by Swedish standards), the owner was friendly, and we could sit outside to eat. Pretty good!

And then there was the big observation Mark made about our SIM cards. We love having our iPhones unlocked so that every time we enter a country we get new cards and then are online pretty much all the time. The only downside is needing to get new cards every time we cross a border, even here in the European Union. Well, just a few weeks ago we were surprised when we traveled from Greece to Italy and our SIM cards continued working. Cool, but we figured it was something peculiar to either Italy or Greece.

At some point while in Italy we had to get new cards – we get prepaid 30-day cards and they expired – so then we had Italian SIM cards. But when we flew to Sweden, just like that, they continued working. What’s going on? Why are we suddenly able to cross borders and our SIM cards continue to work? Mark did a little research and it turns out that the EU declared that as of June 15 telecommunication companies could no longer charge roaming fees; that’s what the borderless nature of the EU is supposed to be all about, after all. And now our lives are substantially simpler, or at least will be whenever we travel in the EU. Who says government can’t do useful things for people?

OK, so that was Gothenburg. Next stop Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea east of Sweden’s mainland.

We spent a lot of time walking, wandering, and sitting in parks here. Until it would start raining, which it always did eventually.

One of Gothenburg’s Lutheran churches I stumbled on while wandering around the city

One more church

There was a lot of interesting stuff at the modern art museum. This Swedish sculptor Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s “Double Blind”, a piece Mark and I were both really struck by.

And then there were a couple photographs by the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja. This is a self-portrait, suggesting that maybe the images of appropriate body type and fashion sense that we all internalize may not be appropriate for everyone. Especially for her.

This might be my favorite. Again, a self-portrait of Ms. Susiraja making the whole challenge to body type norms pretty explicit.

Meanwhile, Mark loved Vanessa Baird’s watercolor “Your Blood in Mine.” I’m not sure precisely why, though it worries me just a little.

There haven’t been a lot of pictures of food since we got to Sweden, but this dish – fresh burrata with lightly baked tomatoes – was great. And a more upbeat way to close this entry than “Your Blood in Mine.”