Island wedding

Welcome to Lido

Lido Island, Sweden – The thousands of islands that make up the Stockholm Archipelago are something of a summer playground for Stockholmers. There’s apparently more than 50,000 summer homes on the 25,000-odd islands.

The island of Lido, where the wedding was held, seemed to be typical of the islands. A rock-ringed shoreline, tall pine trees and quaint red wooden cottages greeted us when the wedding party disembarked from the small ferry.

Having a wedding on a fairly remote island threw up some interesting challenges. By the time the rest of the guests arrived shortly before the ceremony there was a queue five deep for the only iron on the island as travellers pulled their wedding clothes from the bottom of their backpacks at the last minute.

I also rued the decision to use a borrowed beard clipper just minutes before showtime. The battery died haflway through, leaving me looking slightly crazed with half a beard. I had about five minurtes to shave off two week-old stubble with a blunt razor and not enough shaving foam. Not a job you’d want to rush in the best of times.

The wedding itself was great. I watched a good friend get married under a clear blue Swedish sky. I caught up with people I hadn’t seen since I was last in Australia almost two years ago. And when the formalities were over we got down to the business of drinking and trying to keep up with the Swedish girls on the dance floor.

Heading north

Bride and groom to be

Norrtaljie, Sweden – This little port town an hour north of Stockholm was the staging ground of sorts for the wedding.

As part of the bridal party I had travelled up the day before the wedding. From here the plan was to catch the first ferry out to the island of Lido the next morning, where the ceremony and reception would take place.

In Norrtaljie I stayed in a big guesthouse on the hill above the town with my friend Stas, who was getting married, along with his father, uncle, the best men and a couple of other support players.

The town itself was surprise. For the first time during this trip I felt a sense of genuine warmth and community spirit about a place. It seemed to be an example of the real Sweden. White wooden houses lined the cobblestone streets. A stream ran through the centre of town, providing those classic photographic opportunities of bubbling waterfalls, overhanging trees and quaint cottages.

In the park by the entrance to the small harbour a festival was in full swing. While kids jumped on the inflatable castle and belted out karaoke on stage I tucked into a warming pea and ham soup from the local army reservists. At just 5 crowns it was about the cheapest meal I’d had in a week. I ate it Swedish style with thyme and mustard and a rye cracker on the side.

Later I sheltered out of the increasing wind and rain in a coffee shop in the centre of town. I wasn’t sure what the Swedish equivalent of the Danish ‘hyggelig’ (cosiness) was but I was certainly starting to feel it in the coffee shop and the town itself.

Even the fairly mean looking skinheads gathered at the table next to our party in the pub that night to watch Sweden in the Euro Cup seemed fairly benign compared to the English equivalent. A Swedish friend translated their boisterous conversation for me at one stage. They were talking about how they spoke better English when drunk.

I couldn’t imagine a table of drunk British wide boys back in London talking about how their French or German improved after ten pints.

Stockhom stag party

Gamla Stan skyline, sometime after midnight

Stockholm, Sweden – It was like a scene from Ocean’s 11. A motley band of friends from all corners of the world arrived on the old ship, one by one. We all shook hands, slapped backs and caught up on the last five or ten years in two minutes.

We met on the deck of the Logg Inn, an old ferry converted into a cosy hotel moored on the Sodermalm riverbank, just across the water from Stockholm’s historic Gamla Stan (Old Town). We were there to celebrate the wedding of Stas, an old friend from Perth in Western Australia. He was to be married to Veronica at the coming weekend on an island in the northern Stockholm archipelago. But first we had to get through the bachelor party.

As far as bachelor partys go, it was actually a great way to see the city. Rather than a roving band of drunks going from one bar to the other terrifying the natives, we spent the day outdoors. We jumped a ferry across the water to Djurgarden, one of Stockholm’s many islands, on the way crusing past the city’s quirky, almost fairytale riverside buildings in their hues of orange and red and yellow.

Cycling through Djurgarden parkland

On two wheels
The best man had organised for us tour the island parklands on bikes. The mistake was that the sit-up-and-beg city bikes we rented had pedal brakes. And so ensued an afternoon of sliding stops, trying to run each other off the road with sudden braking and downhill skid competitions. There was barely an ounce of rubber left on the back tyres when we turned the bikes in.

After a fortifying beer on the river bank overlooking Strandvägen’s majestic nineteenth century apartments, we set up an impromptu game of touch rugby under the shadow of a centuries old church. It was a surreal experience, playing four-a-side rugby with an international group of friends in Sweden.

Stepping out in Östermalm
While we may not have been a band of drunks with matching t-shirts – the sort you see in Tallinn or Prague – there was no escaping the fact that we were a group of beer-fortified blokes sending off our mate. And so I felt slightly sorry for the upmarket clientele finishing their meals at the steakhouse that we rampaged into at a quarter to ten that night.

In fact, the whole neighbourhood was upmarket. We had chosen to go out in Östermalm, perhaps the most expensive and exclusive suburb in Stockholm (and that’s saying something in a town where a beer costs £4.50).

We left the restaurant a couple of hours later with full bellies and one very drunk groom, who went from tipsy to almost falling over after a flaming Chartreuse and a Jagermeister-bombed beer.

Stockholm’s unfailingly polite but stern door men were having none of us. Their reasons for turning us away were varied, from “regulars only after 11pm” to “no under 25s”, but the answer was still no.

And so we staggered and rugby tackled our way down the street, looking into cool minimalist bars bursting with tall, beautiful blonde people. The men in expensive denim and blazers, the women in dresses and heels.

Finaly the doormen of an Irish theme pub took pity on us and let us in. Before he could change his mind (and he almost did when he saw the state of the groom) we charged up the stairs, threw money at the barmen and sat down to get riotously drunk on £5 pints of Kilkenny.

For more photos of Stockholm, check out the Flickr photo album here.

Into Sweden

Daniel at home in his Goteburg apartment

Goteburg, Sweden – I arrived at Copenhagen train station to catch the 7.30am to Gothenburg in Sweden with just three hours sleep to my name.

The night before in Copenhagen I’d got talking to a bar tender originally from Sydney. When he shut the bar a little after ten we formed a posse with his female Danish co-worker and headed down to Island Brygges to catch the last night of the week-long Distortion Festival.

For a bloke who had an early morning train to catch I ended up drinking far too much and dancing for far too long. But I had a plan. As soon as I got to my seat on the train and stashed my bag I would sleep it all off and arrive at G-burg refreshed.

The plan started to come apart when I realised I had booked a slow, intercity service instead of the high speed one I had envisioned. I’d also neglected to pay the £1 extra to reserve a seat and was soon asked to vacate my place. And so began a rather painful four hours of standing, sitting in between carriages and jumping onto recently vacated seats. Only to arrive at the next station where someone else clutching a seat reservation would come down the aisle and evict me.

Hello Goteburg
So it was with slightly woozy head and sweaty palms that I stumbled off the train at Goteborg H and into a big Swedish hug from my host for the next few days. I had met Daniel a few years previous at China Beach in Vietnam in 2006. It seemed unlikely our paths would ever cross again after that, but then the Swedish wedding invitation arrived and suddenly a catch up seemed feasible.

In Goteburg (pronounced more like Yotee-bor-eh) my initial un-sureness of Scandinavian cities continued. Like the people who inhabit them, the cities seemed quite pleasant to look at but they also apeared to be a little calm, a little too well organised. There was always the feeling that you needed to scratch the surface, or even dig through the bloody surface with a shovel, to find the real vibe of the place.

At just 500,000 people Goteburg was a decent size for a university town, with its mix of old and new campus buildings spread throughout the small CBD. Haga, the historic neighbourhood of 19th century wooden houses, was good for a couple of hours of strolling with the camera. But overall the city seemed more like a laid back place to chill out in coffee shops or friend’s houses than pound the streets visiting the few museums.

Back on the bike
Thankfully Daniel was plugged in. Within a few hours I had swapped my heavy pack for a single speed bike and we raced each other through the quiet, tree lined streets to the beach.

My first swim for 2008 was an exhilirating, refreshing one. We found shelter from the strong breeze amongst a bay formed from large granite boulders. Afterwards we soaked up the sun on the rock and ate a makeshift picnic lunch of wholemeal Swedish bread, cheese, yoghurt and fruit.

Daniel conquering the trails

The following day the relentless pace continued as we conquered the trails in the park behind Daniel’s house on mountain bikes. It was my first time on serious trails and also my first time clipped in to the pedals. Suprising then that I only fell once, at the apex of a hill when I had lost all momentum and slowly toppled over sideways, unable to get out of the pedals in time.

In between all this outdoor activity I spent most of my time chilling in my host’s stylish pad talking cameras, playing CDs on his giant component stereo and eating my new favourite snack, caviar in a tube on rye crackers.

It was a relaxing few days. I did notice my bedtime was continually stretching later and later into the illuminated night, but long sleep-ins were covering it so far. Which was good because as it turned out I wasn’t going to get much sleep when I got to Stockholm for the Bux Party and wedding…

For more photos of Goteborg, check out the Flickr photo album here.