In the previous post I touched on some of the challenges of visiting a city when touring by motorhome. Over and above practical considerations, I think cities also present particular issues for us simply due to our personal preferences. Our predilections make them trickier to enjoy wholeheartedly compared to spending time, for instance, by a lake, coast, mountain or in a forest.
In general we enjoy all the landscapes we visit; maybe we lean towards coasts rather than mountains; perhaps Gill sees them with a geographer's eye, whereas I have a stronger sense of history and human culture, but we both love green places and find pleasure in Nature everywhere.
Nevertheless, we do have our preferences. Geologically Gill definitely leans towards the igneous, becoming inexplicably happy at the sight of a lump of granite whilst regarding limestone landscapes somewhat askance. As for me, if I cannot mooch along a shoreline, then my next best place would be a sunlit woodland.
Cities are trickier because they they present more personal challenges. Received wisdom may assert that people grow more conservative as they age; I think both of us buck that trend. Gill is far more likely to browse political news and comment than she used to. I have definitely become a little redder, rediscovered my green roots and have far less truck with the way the rich and powerful run roughshod over the poor and powerless. I think there is a simple, circumstantial explanation for this. Both of us worked in management. To succeed you have to be pragmatic, expert in the art of the possible; you may espouse certain values, but at times you must compromise personal principles and adopt corporate ones. Also, at a practical level you are so busy and driven that you don't have much time to think radical thoughts. Liberated from work we can live and think more freely.
So what has any of this to do with how we travel? I suppose it is the case I see places these days from a more political perspective than I used to. Faced with Stockholm's enormous Kungliga Slotter - the biggest royal palace in the world still in use - whereas once I might have waffled on about its late Baroque style, now I get irritated by its raw assertion of unelected power and find the pompous statuary and arcane royal rituals simply ridiculous.
For Gill it's the iconic status of religious buildings that she finds ridiculous. We gave up on 'Rough Guides' because of the column inches given over to describing why this or that obscure chapel was significant. Her straightforward views about religion extends to art. It is true, from a rationalist perspective most religious art is either absurd, disturbing or ludicrously sentimental. Add to this her sense that the images of women in western art were almost entirely produced or controlled by men for their own purposes, as representations of goddesses - sacred and profane - mother figures or sex objects, then the big galleries are somewhat off limit too. What have you got left after you subtract religious works and expressions of the patriarchy from most national galleries - a few landscapes, still lifes and modern abstract works.
So what do we enjoy about visiting cities? I suppose how they are lived in now, the street life, food culture and expressions of contemporary culture and society. We like living cities rather than museum cities. Which in Stockholm could be seen as problematic; the place abounds with museums, our Lonely Planet guide lists forty five! It would seem deliberately contrary to avoid every single one, so we are heading to the 'Vasamuseet' tomorrow.
Today we pedalled into the centre with no particular plan other than to have lunch at 'Östermalms Saluhall', Stockholm's central food market. If you click on the cycle path layer on Google maps the streets of Stockholm become obliterated by a scribble of green lines. Most roads have dedicated cycle lanes, which is excellent. As a visitor you do need to take care. At junctions cycle lanes have their own small traffic lights, locals have a tendency to ignore them and pedestrians sometimes simply step in front of you without looking. The biggest hazard are other cyclists. Whereas in Denmark we found the prevalence of sedate, sit-up-and-beg bicycles meant that urban cycling was a civilised affair; here it's dog eat dog, with men in spray-on lycra weaving among the tourists and commuters on sleek machines built for the Tour de France.
A more recent development has added to the hazards facing cyclists and pedestrians . The city has allowed free reign to small electric scooters that you can hire at the touch of a contactless card. They are a menace on both pavements and cycle lanes, surprisingly quick and totally silent. Most people using them are novices, not entirely in control; teenagers have weaponise them. The things are banned at the moment in the UK. I can see why, for pedestrians they make simply walking along into a high stress activity.
Despite all these hazards we managed to cycle the 3km from the stellplatts to a small square on the edge of Galma Stan without incident. In the corner we found a row of posts topped by chunjy iron doughnuts, designed to be more secure places to lock your bikes than a conventional rack. We managed to find a vacant one, noting anxiously as we locked them that our chain was a little less hefty than the others.
We walked through the narrow streets on the eastern side of Gamla Stan. It is the oldest part of the city with tall yellow stuccoed houses lining narrow streets, many dating from before the moment in in 1638 when Gustav Adolphus proclaimed the Stockholm capital of the newly independent nation of Sweden.
Beyond here you come across the Royal Palace, a massive, boxy Baroque pile designed to dominate the waterfront. It is so big it is impossible to photograph it as a whole.
Gill managed to capture in a single detail some of our qualms about the veneration of these places. The toy soldier in the sentry box nicely encapsulates the way innocuous ritual is used to validate unelected royal power in European democracies. The eighteenth century sculpture above reveals the roots of our modern dynasties in the ideas about nationhood which emerged in the era of Northern Europe's 'enlightened despots'.
You don't need to be an art historian to work out why a royal palace may choose to adorn it's most public facade with four statues of celebrated rapes and abductions from antiquity. Rape and despotism have a long association, from the Sabine women to #Metoo.
Still, whatever the dark connotations of the statuary I cannot entirely switch off my art historian's brain. The monumental bronzes on the facade have vigour and grandeur whereas the little putti dedicated to philosophy and the arts are more intricately posed - small bundles of energy, exuding charm not power. It is no accident that the former 'grace' the south facade dedicated to 'The Nation' whereas the latter are on the western, purporting to represent 'The Female Qualities'.
About 800,000 people visit the place annually. I suspect most admire its scale and grandeur and undoubted beauty, few, I suspect reflect on what the building was, and is designed to mean - a projection of royal, patriarchal power. The 'abduction' group was sculpted in the early 18th century but not placed on the palace until the end of the 19th. The 'female qualities' figures date from a similar time. Monarchies encapsulate notions of tradition, projecting the conservative values of the past onto the present. It will always remain a mystery to me why a minority European democracies remain constitutional monarchies when a republic would be the more obvious choice for a fully enfranchised people.
The east side of the square or taken up by the facade of Storkrkyn, Stockholm's oldest church, scene of many coronations and royal marriages. In front a large statue of Olaus Petri commemorates his role as a key figure in the Swedish Reformation.
We had become sidetracked by all this history when actually we had set off to go to the 'Östermalms Saluhall' for lunch. Next we became slightly lost trying to find it; navigating your way around Stockholm's islands is a bit confusing initially, it's very easy to take the 'wrong bridge'. In our confusion we were distracted momentarily by the passage of a mounted brass band in blue uniforms and pointy silver helmets. The Swedish royal palace has a similar 'changing of the guard' ceremony as it's British counterpart, both equally popular with American tourists no doubt.
Eventually we found the central market, it was as our guidebook promised, 'a many-spired brick confection'; today it was a fenced off, covered in scaffolding many-spired confection. Luckily the old market has a modern annexe across the street. It resembled the mouth-watering mix of food stalls and tempting eateries you get in similar places in Italy and Iberia, though here choice tuna cuts had been supplanted by a dazzling array of pickled herring and chorizo by reindeer sausages.
As ever we decided the best place to eat was the one chosen by locals for lunch. Gill opted for a prawn open sandwich, I chose lightly breaded cod with potatoes and a Béarnaise sauce. Gill reckoned that her open sandwich was nothing special but really rated my lunch's creamy sauce - 'as a chef you really do need to know what you are doing to get the balance right between the lemon, herbs and pepper,' she mused, filching a second morsel of fish and sauce off my plate.
As ever practicalities shape travel as much as more cultural matters, we needed to find a loo and an ATM. The market had a long loo queue and we struggled to find an ATM. When we did the screen was in direct sunlight and the display unreadable. We wandered along Strangvågan, a wide thoroughfare on the harbour-side opposite the royal palace. It is lined with important museums and swanky hotels. One of the hotels had a small pavement café; the seating area was roped off, a notice read, 'wait here to be seated, dress code'. Never in all our travels which have included some 'up-market' destinations, have l seen a pavement café with a dress code. Thinking back to lunch, the workers in the market café were well turned out too. Stockholm does feel quite corporate, certainly not hip or bohemian like Lisbon, or earthy and characterful like Naples, but then we are in the North with all its Protestant heritage of hard work and moral probity.
'Lets find somewhere more normal where the shops are,' Gill suggested. We doubled back towards a square marked on our map with a tourist information sign and a metro stop called T-centrum. On the way we passed a grey Tardis-like structure. It was one of those automated public toilets, but this being cashless Sweden it had gone one step further, to operate it required a contactless credit card. Mad! Gill had an e-wee; I would've too, but a Chinese tour group gathered behind me and I suspected that my attempt to break into the Tardis e-toilet may have been destined to become some Instagram sensation. We moved on.
Part way along Hamngatan we found a shaded ATM, then moments later the NK Department Store - Stockholm's 'Harrods'. We had a coffee at the top floor café, I made use of the loos without needing a credit card. The store was built in 1903 and the foyer has some lovely art nouveau marquetry. I was discouraged from photographing it by the unsmiling security guard with a spectacular Viking style beard who glowered at me as I paused, camera in hand.
Finally we arrived at the spot marked T-centrum on our map. In a sense the big square with giant triangular op art style paving does form the fulcrum of modern Stockholm. The main shopping streets with big international brands lead off from here. The place is overlooked by the startling concrete and glass Kulturhusen, home to Sweden's national theatre and a clutch of performance and exhibition spaces.
Completed in 1973, like many buildings of that era it divides opinion. Whatever it's architectural merits, the edifice and the locality exemplify 60s and 70s optimism regarding social progress, cultural egalitarianism and consumerism.
Which of the two big squares we visited today is preferable - the one that exemplifies royal power or the one which is a monument to a consumerist democracy? Difficult to approve the aesthetics of the former yet espouse values of the latter, yet most people do. Streets are as much about ideas as style - their design both reflects and shapes our values, - which is why cityscapes are intriguing.
We spent a few minutes photographing the meaningful concrete. A lone busker played a mournful trumpet in the middle of the triangled square. Heartfelt Swedish folk melodies we suspected. It was only when he attempted 'When the Saints' that the extent of his ineptitude became fully apparent.
'He's the first street musician we've seen,' Gill observed. It was true, Stockholm does not seem particularly predisposed to spontaneity.
We were reaching the three hour mark in our wanderings. Much of the old town is cobbled, a recipe for becoming footsore. Let's find the bikes, we decided. The quickest way was down Drottninggatan (how the hell is that pronounced?). It begins as a perfectly ordinary shopping street with familiar names like H&M and Ecco. There are few older buildings scattered among the plain concrete of the 1960s.
The Swedish Parliament building is situated between the end Drottninggatan and the narrow lanes of the old town. The Royal Palace and Parliament buildings similarly styled and almost interconnected. At least in Britain the monarch has to get in a coach to open parliament. Here the King barely would need to change out of his slippers. All a bit cosy for my liking!
Once you have passed the Parliament 'foyer' and crossed the bridge over Lilla Värtan you are back in the Gamla Stan. I don't think we have experienced a more trashy gift shop hell-hole, the stuff in the shops is just ridiculous, ghastly trolls, cartoon Viking figurines and inevitably, plastic horned helmets.
A few feet away from the melée there are ancient sunlit alleys as if you had stepped through a wormhole in space into a more rational universe.
We were pleased to find our bikes unmolested, our helmets still in the panniers, however my bike electrics failed to switch back on. When I removed battery to investigate further the plastic fitment which locks the bottom of the battery to the bike disintegrated. I pocketed the fragments, the bike was still rideable, but heavy and hard going, thankfully the track back to the stellplatts was along the quayside and perfectly flat.
Back at the van it was scissors and Gorilla tape time. I managed to rebuild the battery fitting out of plastic shards and sticky tape. Good enough for the electrics to work until we can buy a replacement part back in the UK.
 |
| Power!!!! |
Our bikes are now six years old. They still work well mostly, but components are beginning to fail. It is inevitable I think given they have spent 800 days dangling off the back of the van in all weathers only protected by a flimsy nylon cover.
It had been a day of many realities. One that leads you to ponder just how fragile and episodic our sense of reality actually is. If, when we arrived in Gamla Stan this morning we visited today's places in reverse order - headed straight-up trashy gift shop street then happened upon Stockholm's shopping 'concreteopia', ending our visit at the Royal Palace's 'abduction square', would our impressions of the city been significantly different? If so, then all those slightly irritating French theorists like Foucault and Barthe would have a point, what we regard as real is actually a kind of narrative - a text.
By this measure there has been only one moment of reality in the entire day, the one involving my ebike and Gorilla tape, that was not an immaterial moment, definitely reconstruction not deconstruction. It's been an odd day. Maybe we are happier among 'rocks and stones and trees' rather than streets and buildings and people.
No comments:
Post a Comment