Chapter III / In which Stockholm presents an impossible choice

After a quick (30 minutes flat) pit stop in Helsinki airport, to have my passport stamped and to change planes, I reached Stockholm, which looked every bit as lovely as I remember from a lovely holiday in 2009:

The flight from New York to Helsinki was pleasant; I was seated next to a friendly, stocky young Finn on his way back from a very short holiday in New York. His chief interest was ice-hockey, a sport where "they try to beat the sh!t out of you, and you return the favor". After our 9am landing he was due at ice hockey training by 11, and he cheerfully predicted that the red-eye flight would make him 'angrier and crazier than usual' on the rink. This was apparently no mean feat, since the main reason the coach had him on the team was 'to beat the sh!t out of the other players'. Despite this (and perhaps because of my lack of sleep the previous night in Seattle) I had no qualms falling asleep next to him for the best part of five hours, aided by a Zzzquil and some tasty beef stew. 

Either side of sleep, I watched Admission, a new movie starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd. Fey plays Portia, an undergrad admissions officer at Princeton who goes out of her way to admit Jeremiah, a brilliant student from an underprivileged background who goes to a startup school run by John (Rudd). Wallace Shawn (who I still think of as Cyrus, Eleanor Waldorf's partner from Gossip Girl) makes an appearance as Clarence, the outgoing Dean of Admissions. (Yesterday he popped up in A late quartet as the leader of a piano trio; perhaps soon he'll be satirizing himself in This Is The End 2?) I recently read Tina Fey's autobiography Bossypants, in which she describes feeling torn between having more kids (she has one), keeping 30 Rock running (she inferred that the show would fold if she took maternity leave, which I wasn't wholly convinced of), and taking up some of the exciting movie opportunities which were starting to arrive. It seems she's chosen the latter for now at least, and it's working out well.

In Stockholm I met up with Sabina, a friend I met when we were both working in San Francisco. She was extremely gracious in hosting me and showing me around many parts of town I hadn't seen on my previous trip, including Kungsholmen, Gamla Stan, and some fun parts of Södermalm. I learned that Stockholm has much less rental housing stock than most cities of its size, and so it's not uncommon for young people to buy a small apartment to live in rather than renting a shared group house. Sabina had done this, and her clever renovations to her sun-filled apartment overlooking the Klara Sjö canal in central Stockholm. She introduced me to a bunch of her friends and together we enjoyed the lovely summer evening over monitors and tasty pizza on her rooftop. My lasting regret will be the jetlag that led me to collapse at 10pm, missing out on what became a fun night if dancing and bar-hopping. I literally could not stay awake after 33 hours on the road. Although the next 9 hours of sleep were blissful, I swore the next morning that on my next visit I wold to short-change Stockholm in the same way. 

I spent a leisurely Saturday morning munching a fresh pain au chocolat and reading on Helgeansholmen, one of the smallest islands in central Stockholm, before realizing the time, running desperately to the bus station, and with thirty seconds to spare, boarding the Flygbus to Skavsta airport to board the plane for Riga and my first taste of the Baltics.