Tim Child

So another week goes by and some more food eaten. First up is Östgöta Källaren on Östgötagatan, and basically we didn’t eat here because of the extremely rude service we received upon trying to find a table. I would avoid this place in the near future as there are so many other places worthy of your business in the area. Vampire Lounge underneath though can be recommended for the great cocktails available.

Back A Yard on Folkungagatan 128 is the exact opposite, the service was great, the hostess extremely friendly and as long as you are not in a rush for the bill (perhaps to give an authentic Jamaican feel) its very good. They serve a nice range of Jamaican style food like Jerk Chicken and Ital Stew, though Curried Goat was off the menu they did manage to serve up a very tasty Curried Lamb stew which went great with Red Stripe. This is definitely one I would go back to and try the Red Snapper.

Koh Phangan was a slightly different affair, but again very pleasant experience, this time Thai food which went down well with sitting outside on a sunny day. Can’t exactly remember what noodle dish I had but it was good, and if I feel like Thai I might be inclined to visit again if I was at Skånegatan 57 Stockholm.

Stiernan at Renstiernas gata 22 – as they say in other reviews about this, don’t look for the name – just a star above the door and you will find this restaurant bar. Again a pleasant well priced experience, I like the beer menu with Newcastle Brown Ale on tap, and the food menu for the restaurant looked great, both of us choose Pork Medallions mine with port sauce and the other with Chilli Bernaise. I say I would prefer the port sauce if I could choose again but that largely down to personal choice. Service was good enough to leave a good tip. If you are tight for money the bar menu is very cheap.

Have been borrowing a couple of cars quite recently and I have just noticed that its cheaper to take a car from inside the city and pay the congestion charge than to pay the average day car parking fee, now I am not sure how that helps matters. Surely it would be better to leave the car at home and just use public transport until I need the car. I haven’t looked at how much a monthly permit is but I wonder whether it is cheaper than the 25Kr a day it costs in congestion charge at the times that I use it…

And speaking of driving, Sweden is fairly safe particularly when compared to England perhaps due in some part to not having so many cars per square kilometre but I am fairly stunned that most of the roads that I have driven on at night do not have Cat’s eyes. Of course these would be completely useless in the winter due to snow, but they have additional road markings then anyway, but I really miss them in normal driving.

Finally finally! On Friday we got the keys and sorted out the paper work, moved all our things from Solna to Södermalm and started to unpack! It feels great to finally be in though there are lots of things to sort out, though the most important room is pretty much there.

More of an update soon.

The move continues to happen. After spending a long weekend in Karlstad we came back to pack even more things, a room a day or there abouts. Can’t say I enjoy packing, but tomorrow it will all be worth it for thats when we move in! WooHoo!

Its been a long wait.

So we have 16 more days to go before we move in to the new apartment and the wait is getting frustrating – I want to be in already. I think what is frustrating is that we have all these ideas of what we want to do, but we can’t really finalise them until we have a good idea what everything looks like and in typical Swedish house buying style we haven’t seen the apartment for weeks now.

I find the buying process rather strange: go and see a viewing of the apartment with lots of other couples and in a day or two later the bidding process starts. This can go very quickly – in our case just a day I think, and then you sign the papers and its more or less yours. After this you don’t really get to see the apartment until you move in. I guess that we could make a request to go and see it but that doesn’t seem like the done thing. So its been almost 3 months without seeing the place!

All that furniture we have/want – where is it going to fit? Is it going to fit? How big was that space again – the documents drawn up by the estate agents for the plan are not exactly accurate.

So now is the frustrating wait to the en vitiable pain of moving, and the fun of unpacking and deciding exactly where the forks are going to live in relation to the dish washer.

Longest 16 days of my life – spent looking at furniture and cat trees (probably the ugliest things you can put in an apartment).

This weekend was a busy one, but strangely relaxing at the same time.

Kristin and I hired a van, and took some things of hers from her apartment back to her home town of Karlstad roughly located between Stockholm and Oslo. In the new apartment we decided that a lot of her furniture was of the wrong period predating the apartment quite significantly so what we didn’t want we stored. It took about 3 and a half hours to drive there, not bad going in a van and we arrived at 1pm after spotting the odd Badger and Beaver along the way.

After a good nights sleep we moved the furniture in (including many of her collection of chairs) and also helped her family move some of their items around and throwing out what we didn’t need.

We got a bed that was more suitable from her mother – a kind of a bed that is a sofa, or is a sofa that is a bed? But one thing is for sure its not a sofa bed in the manor that we would describe in England, and is much prettier. On further investigation it is what in English is referred to as a day bed – but instead of sleeping parallel with the bed we are going to fit a double mattress so that the back of the sofa becomes the head board.

After a trip to Ikea on Sunday to collect some lamps that we both really liked, two small ones for the bedroom and a larger free-standing lamp we headed back to Stockholm in time to drop everything off and return the van. The lamps look very white here, but we choose some warmer bulbs to change the colour temperature so I think they look a bit more attractive than the picture that you see here.

So, lots of thing have been doing on lately and I have been rather remiss in updating this old blog, I suppose getting things done takes a precedence over writing about things that are happening at the moment..

So a couple of weeks ago my Mother came to visit me in Stockholm as I hadn’t seen her in ages, and it was a good way for her to see the town that I lived in, not having been to Sweden before. It also gave her an opportunity to meet Kristin which was good.

On the night that she came over it was her Birthday so we took her out to Sonja’s Greek, just around the corner from us in Södermalm. On the Friday we just relaxed a bit, as I had to work, then on Saturday after working we met up at Medborgarplatsen for a couple of drinks before going to Humlehof on Folkungagatan for a nice meal. Sunday we had booked Falstaff at the Royal Swedish Opera house which was really nice, I particularly enjoyed watching the music being played, and the hall itself is splendid.

Monday was mum return home, but for us the start of lots of things to do in preparation for the move in to our new apartment. Cleaning, packing, moving things is now the order of the day and whilst not on its own the most fun thing to do with our spare time – I think that its worth it.

So on Thursday we had done a little shopping and hungry as always we decided to go for some food and fate took us to Odenplan in Vasastan. We ended up going to a “sushi” bar called itamae located at Odengatan 62. I had been here before, but its worth visiting more than once, though to call it a sushi bar is in line with Stockholm’s bastardisation of the word (and Itamae means sushi chef) – its more of a wok/thai place I think and the food is really good and really cheap.

Its basic in the way the best Eastern food places are, quick, the food is delicious and the menu choices are set into three areas, then you choose whether you want vegetarian, chicken, prawns or (I think) pork.

Friday we meant to meet up with some friends of mine and go to Restaurang Himlen (also known as Skybar – not to be confused with SkyBar in the SAS Radisson) located in the old tax office on Götgatan 78 in Södermalm but unfortunately I wasn’t notified early enough to a change of plan by my friends that they had gone somewhere else. We tried to get in anyways at about 7:30pm but greeted by the typically bad doorman Stockholm had to offer was asked to wait outside in the cold for 20 minutes. This despite our party of four matched the numbers of those leaving, and the fact that no one else was waiting led me to believe all the wanted to do was start a line to prove how popular the place is.

I have heard good things about it, but that the doormen are typically bad as is the custom in Stockholm, the drinks really expensive – even for Stockholm and the service terrible.. Mmm. Should we try again?

Instead we ended up going round the corner to the Vampire Lounge on Östgötagatan – a place I have been quite a few times now and well known for their excellent cocktails. We appeared to have arrived in happy hour as the prices of drinks was extremely reasonable – about 29Kr for a Beer and 59Kr for a cocktail, but this soon ended but I would never call the drinks expensive for that you get.

Saturday we tried to go out again to a large party that was happening in Telefonplan but the 13 dance floors and 49 DJs on offer seemed to be over subscribed – good for them, but the queue to get in was apparently from the place all the way to the train station, and getting on the t-bana in the same direction many more seemed to be joining them. Instead we went out in Söder – to SöderTeatern which was hosting what it described as Flamenco music – which it briefly touched upon but it was ok music anyway.

Sunday I wasn’t feeling too good – coming down with the flu but we made it out to a apartment viewing in Södermalm – always interesting, but I think that we will carry on looking but it did have potential thats for sure. Coffee break on Götgatan (will try and get the name of the place) and then back home.

So this weekend went to a few more places, after work I went to Belgobaren (Bryggargatan 12 just off Vasagatan), not the first time that I have been there but its a good place with an excellent range of Belgium beer and it was located very close to T-Centralen. Unfortunately the service that we got for food was non-existant so we left as it took 20 minutes to get just a menu, so I would recommend it for the excellent Kwak, Chimey or Duvel they have but I am not so sure about the food.

From there we went to meet some friends at Akkurat on Hornsgatan in Södermalm, a place which I wasn’t particularly happy about going to – it doesn’t seem to have the best clientele from walking past but in its favour you can get Chimey and Guiness there and seems to sport a broad range of drinks, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

And I revisited Indigo Bar, on Götgatan in Södermalm, a nice little place although everytime that I have been there its been packed. Still its easy and one of the better places at the north end of Götgatan.

Looking for a brunch spot in Södermalm we decided to try Dolly’s Saloon on Götgatan, probably way after brunch time as it was advertised as having brunch, though I can’t say anything we saw to eat there was brunch and we ended up ordering lamb racks with potato wedges and a steak with fries – it was priced the same as a normal priced good meal in Stockholm, but was probably less than average and way more filling than we needed at the time. I don’t think that I will be going back as we have had far better meals for less. Some of the paintings inside though are laughably bad..

Following on from this we went shopping in Söder and including the usual places ended up in the Adidas originals shop and on Sunday Filippa K in Bruno mall, Götgatan 36. It also houses Whyred, Reiss, Stuk and American Apparel amongst others.

Last night we went out shopping, ended up buying something in Keihls store in Stockholm. As always the service was great and we found out that if you are not happy with a product you can take it back and exchange it for something different. Very unusual for a cosmetics company.

After that we went to find some food, originally we thought about going to get some Tapas, but instead ended up around Rådmansgatan, and after a short walk decided to try Paladar de Cuba, Tegnérgatan 19 and I must say that we were quite impressed. Both ordering the same thing, Beef with Chorizo and with Cassava and it was excellent, particularly the Cassava – I think the first time that I have tried this root vegetable and hopefully not the last. The surroundings in the restaurant and the service was both good, so I would definitely recommend Paladar again

From here we went around the corner to the Cinema on Sveavågen, and choose to see Before the Devil knows you’re dead and what a disappointment that was, its probably one of the most pointless and boring movies I have seen at the cinema and the only highlight was getting to the end of it and going home. One to miss at the cinema, ignore for rental and definitely don’t buy it in the shops…