9th May 1984 - Meeting the Ulf in Stockholm

May 9th Wednesday already. When I woke up I got up – after a while. First thing I rang up Ulf Hedström at 7.45 (I had tried the night before) and arranged to meet him at nine. [Ulf was another of my sister’s exchange student friends – in fact, they were in the same house in Texas.] So I stood in the queue for breakfast and had C.F.’s with nice milk and very nice dark bread.

   I left for the rendezvous at Sergels Torg outside Kulturhuset at 8.50 and waited outside for ten minutes. Then I thought that perhaps Ulf was waiting down in the underground part of the complex.

  Ulf was waiting down in the underground part of the complex. So we started walking, and went through Gamla Stan, which is the oldest part of Stockholm. But we did go to Central Station first to book a sleeper to Malmö for 75 crowns (that’s less than $10).

  Gamla Stan is the oldest part of Stockholm and sits on its own little island. It includes the old royal palace and lots of old buildings with little shops, and apparently during the summer the narrow streets are crowded with tourists. I suppose the wider streets are too. Anyway, we had some sweet Swedish pastries in a little shop. They were real yummy and I also had a blackcurrant drink.

  At about 11 we caught the subway from T-Central to Universitetet, which is the station for the University where Ulf had a lecture at noon. Ulf showed me the library, which is huge and has a lot of foreign language books, about 1.2 million books in this building. The campus of the university is relatively new – the move to the area only began in 1970 (it’s within the limit of the northern part of Djurgården, the former Royal deer park).

   There are thirty thousand students ranging from male to female, and there are sixty departments and fifteen institutions and centres. Most people in Sweden at least start a university degree – education is free but most of them have to take out some sort of loan at some time for money for books and to live on.

   Well, Ulf went to his lecture and I went back on the subway to T-Centralen, getting off at some of the stations to take photos because some of the stations are great caves decorated space-age, jungle-like – really quite fantastic, much more impressive than the Moscow ones (the chandeliers in the Moscow Metro mostly have neon lights). [Actually, come to think of it, the Moscow Metro stations are rather impressive, but in a different way.]

   Back at Central I bought a film for 64kr, changed a further $10, wandered around, had some fruit and white chocolate and went to the Kulturhuset library near el rendezvous place to read an English paper. By this time it had already begun snowing (just after one) – very light snow, not enough to settle and not wholly continuous –Ulf didn’t believe me when I told him it had snowed.

  He arrived after his lecture finished, and we caught the metro to Karlaplan and the bus 68 out to the north end of Djurgården where is the Krasnet Tower [actually Kaknästornet], a television tower which is 155 m tall and is surrounded by a park with lots of trees, grass and outcrops of rock. When we got to the observation platform, visibility was poor because of the driving unsettling snow. The tower is not very far from the Silja Line terminal, and you can see the Viking Line in the opposite direction, but much further away.

Kaknästornet Tower

View from the tower - Stockholm

  We had some rolls and cakes in the café there, and by the time we had finished the weather had cleared up considerably, so I took some pictures from the lofty viewpoint. The tower was built in 1967, [and was] the tallest structure in Scandinavia (155m) [for about three years after it was built], the upper lookout platform is 128m above ground level.

  We caught the bus back to a point in space and walked to the hostel in sleet to collect my luggage. We shared porterage to the Grand Hotel in the rain and got in a taxi at a cut-rate fare (the meter wasn’t turned on and it cost only about 20kr instead of I don’t know more than 50) to the station and I stored my stuff in one of the lockers. [It must have been a big locker.]

   Ulf had to go off on a date so I took a photograph of him, gave him a kangaroo stick pin (he’d rather have that than the Aussie flag pin) and said goodbye as he left. I wandered around a bit to fill in time – in a big department store I bought a small pewter owl policeman and had a look at the fantastic Swedish-designed kitchenware (air-tight containers etc,), popped into some bookshops and bought “The Last Flower” by Thurber. I read a more up-to-date paper in the Kulturhuset library and then waited in the station for the train.

  So when it was time I got on board and it left at 21.10. I was in a three-berth compartment in the top bunk; a German fellow was in the bottom one. Off we went into the sunset, past lakes, trees, clean factories, residential areas and in one small area patches of unmelted fresh snow. Went to bed.