stockholm revisited

give me half a chance and i'll wax lyrical about stockholm and the idyllic time i spent there as an exchange student 2009/10. it was a different season of life, one i thoroughly enjoyed and probably spend a little too much time dwelling on. trying to distil into words just what made it so special is difficult. it was the first time i was away from home on my own for an extended period and a journey of self-discovery, to sound so very cheesy. i learnt what my trigger points were, how i function best and just how many loo rolls i go through in a month. granted, much has changed, i've changed many times over, but it was a time where life was simple. my biggest decision was whether i wanted a cinnamon roll with my coffee in the morning. 

have sort of resisted going back too soon after leaving so as to better avoid going down the nostalgia rabbit hole, but i think half a decade is a good enough length of time. and what struck me was the power of the subconscious. went for a walk the first morning with absolutely no agenda but muscle memory won and i ended up retracing steps i didn't know i'd remember.

stayed at a hotel next to ostermalmstorg and went past cafe opera, along the water by the grand hotel, passed old town, the ferry docks where we took the hell-ish overnighter to hellsinki, then up the stairs to hermans (closed) where i chuckled at the bus loads of tourists at the designated view point, not about to tell them the soder is more picturesque, the down to medborg, the anthony bourdain kebab stand and ventured into sofo before heading back via slussen.

what was also funny was how i remember tunnelbana stations by who lived at which one. J was at st erik's, I was at slussen... there was literally a memory on every corner even though the names of places had changed, the streets were the same. there was cafe where my parents interrogated F (A chickened out) before letting me travel to portugal with two german strangers, the city garden i left f11 for because drunk swedes was not my thing, berns where i'd lunch but not club at, cafe opera for wednesday nights. 

was also conscious to discover new things and not merely try to condense an entire exchange into 72h. hadn't expected to feel so strongly being back in the city i once called home (but proud resisted going back to uni or old flat) and sorely missed the friends i'd spent glorious swedish summers (and less glorious winters) with. but hey, people move on. and if i could do anything differently, it'd have been to utilise the time and learnt svenska, and maybe audit more law classes taught in english. more social, more hedonistic then and i wonder what regrets i'll have five years down the line.

will be posting some photos and thoughts over the next couple of days if you'd like to see :) also, have added some commentary to the previous photo posts!