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.”