We’d been hoping for a good night out in Gothenburg, but it was a Sunday and the only place that looked lively was charging 100SEK to get in. So we had a quiet evening, a bite to eat in a fantastic cafe on Haga Nygata, then some drinks in town. We spent a lot of time in Gothenburg in funky little cafes – it’s that kind of town really. Compared to the first time I’d visited, it was far warmer, and it was nice to walk around without feeling exhausted by cold. Canals that had been frozen solid last time were flowing now, and parks that had been buried by snow were grassy. We ambled around town, moving from cafe to cafe, enjoying the vibe. We decided we’d have to come back here in the summer.

Early the next morning we headed north again, to Gothenburg. We’d both been here before, five years earlier, and really liked it. That time, the city had been covered in thick snow. Now, it was just cold, so not as picturesque, but still it was great to be back. I love the atmosphere of Gothenburg – to me it feels small enough to be really friendly, but large enough to have a lot of interesting things going on. We walked through the centre, just about remembering where we were going, and eventually found our way via Haga Nygata to the Slottskogen hostel we’d stayed in last time. We headed up to Skansen Kronan for some views over this great little city.

Our journey up the coast gave us some fantastic views of the sun setting over Denmark across the water. We arrived in Halmstad after dark, with our main aim being to check out the night life. But before we could do that, we needed somewhere to stay. My guide book said there was a place 4km out of town, towards the E6 motorway, so we headed out in that direction. We walked, and walked, and walked, and I began to regret wearing shoes that I’d only bought a couple of days previously, as my feet began to hurt. We walked on, and I started cursing Eldrik for travelling with a ridiculous wheely suitcase thing instead of an obviously more practical backpack. The constant rumbling got a bit tiring after a few kilometres, and eventually he started wheeling on the grass. After about an hour, we began to think that we weren’t in the right place. The hostel was supposedly on Växjögatan, and Eldrik grabbed a passer-by to practise his Swedish on. I could just about follow the gist of the conversation, and it went something like “Excuse me. Do you know if Växjögatan is near here?” “Växjögatan? I’ve never heard [...]

When we got to the station, we found that the next train to Halmstad wasn’t for another hour and a half. We decided that as it was only a couple of miles away, we might as well pop over to Denmark while we were here, and so we jumped on a ferry heading across the sound. We stood on the deck in the howling gales, and watched Kronborg Castle approaching. Once we’d docked, we had about twenty minutes to spare for a quick walk around town, before we had to get on the ferry back over to Sweden.

We’d originally planned to head straight for Halmstad, but we randomly decided we might as well stop off in Helsingborg to see what it was like. Sitting on an exposed bit of the Öresund coast, Helsingborg was being battered by violent winds when we arrived, and after a quick walk up to a park overlooking the town, we retreated inside a cafe to avoid dying of exposure. After a few restorative espressos, we decided to head on to Halmstad.

It’s only 20 minutes on the train from Malmö to Lund but even in this short time we managed to get told off. We hadn’t realised we were sitting in the quiet carriage until we were ticked off by a stern-sounding Swede sitting behind us. “Förlåt”, we said, and sat in silence until Lund. We stayed in the very excellent train hostel in Lund. I’ve travelled on so many night trains that I was conditioned into expecting it to rock about constantly, so I swerved erratically around to compensate for the non-existent motion as I walked down the corridors. Once we’d settled in there, we went out to explore the town. Eldrik didn’t really need to explore anything, he knew the town perfectly well having gone out with a girl who lived here, but I hadn’t seen it. In the evening we went out to a club called Sargasso. It was a Friday night but it never really got going. Every club I’d been to before in Sweden had been fantastic, so it was a bit of a shame that we picked a bad one here, but then in a university town, nothing much goes on when the students aren’t [...]

January 2008. Cold, wet, grey in London. Some might head south. Eldrik and I decided to head north, to colder, greyer, wetter Sweden. Eldrik’s been to Sweden about a million times; this was only my fifth trip there. We met at Stansted on a Friday evening, and flew to Copenhagen. A quick trip across the Øresund took us to Malmö, Sweden’s third city. This was my third visit to Malmö, after two earlier trips on hot sunny summer weekends. It was certainly different in the winter, but not as cold as I’d thought it might be. We walked from the train station to a hostel in the south of the city, past locations which we recognised from “Lilya 4-ever”, the most depressing film I’ve ever seen. We didn’t plan to spend much time in Malmö. On summer weekends it’s great to sit by the sea, with views of the mighty Øresund bridge soaring over the sea to Denmark, and the redeveloped Västra Hamnen, but in the winter there was nothing to keep us here once we’d had a quick look at the Turning Torso, the city’s new landmark and the tallest building in Scandinavia. We walked out to Västra Hamnen [...]

I was right at the bottom of my bank balance, and I could only just afford to re-cross the Øresund to catch my flight home from Sweden. I had an afternoon to kill in Malmö, and I wandered out to Västra Hamnen, where upmarket new flats overlook the straits. New since the last time I’d been here was the Turning Torso, the new tallest building in Scandinavia, which spiralled up over the city and looked pretty impressive. I sat by the sea in the warm sun. I looked back over the past ten months, during which I’d been to South America, Bulgaria, Turkey, France and now here. It had been awesome, but I knew that there could be no more holidays for now. I was in urgent need of a job. As stormy clouds gathered over the Øresund, I headed for home.

Back at the hostel, there was an American in my room who fancied checking out a club, so we went to the Berns Hotel for a night out. Seeing new year in at Sturecompagniet the last time had been fantastic, but the Berns clientèle seemed a little bit less pretentious. The music was good, I met fun people, and all was good, until at 2am a fight kicked off near where I was sitting, and left someone unconscious on the floor. I decided to head home at that point. I went for a long walk the next day, from my hostel in Gamla Stan up Drottninggaten to a small park, then back down towards the harbour. I walked around Nybroviken, and across a bridge to Djurgården. It was starting to rain as I reached Skansen, and I got a boat back across the harbour to Gamla Stan. With rain now falling heavily, I spent the rest of my time in Stockholm in a cafe on Vesterlånggatan.

As evening arrived I got a bus from Sergels Torg to Kaknästornet. I’d been there last time as well, enduring a howling gale at the top which probably gave a wind chill temperature of about -30°C. This time it was a cool autumn evening, and I watched the dusk fade and the city lights come on.

In 2003 I’d been on 12 holidays. 2004 was going much more slowly: by September I had only been abroad three times, and they’d all been to Italy. A three month post-PhD period of voluntary unemployment from March until June had been fantastically relaxing, but having no income did have an impact on my travel plans. By September I’d been working for the Home Office for three months and I could afford to hit the road again. I flew to Nyköping early on a Saturday morning, and got to Stockholm at about midday. The thing that was amazing straight away was that I could walk around without risking frostbite. On my first visit here it had been -17°C but today it was 30 degrees warmer than that. It made for a very different atmosphere. All the waters of Mälaren were liquid, there was no snow, and I didn’t need gloves or even a hat. I went to a lot of places that I’d been to before, just to appreciate them in warm weather. I walked from the station across to Gamla Stan, and then south to Södermalm. I got the Katarinahissen lift up to the heights, and looked back over [...]

I felt like I’d been abroad for ages. We’d only been in Copenhagen for two days, but not having slept very much made it feel like longer. But the trip was coming to an end, and our flight home was from Malmö, so we headed back across the Öresund. Malmö is not nearly as fun as Copenhagen, and we didn’t do much except find our way to a coffee shop and chill out there. In the evening, Andrew left to get a night train to Berlin. He was just at the start of a longer trip. For me and Eldrik, though, this one was over. We got the bus to the airport, and headed home, shattered after a great weekend away.

I started this trip in a state of extreme tiredness. In a move of spectacular stupidity, the Stansted Express had decided that the May bank holiday weekend was a great time to cancel all the trains to do some maintenance work, and so to catch the early flight we’d booked, me and Eldrik had to sleep at Stansted airport. We didn’t think there would be that many people there, but by the time we rocked up at midnight, every bench and every seat had been taken. Sleeping on the floor was far from ideal. So, aching and exhausted, we flew to Sweden. It was raining heavily as we began to find our way to our hostel. I’d recently watched Lilya 4-ever, a masterpiece but probably the most depressing film I’ve ever seen. Part of the film was shot in Malmö, and as we neared our hostel we recognised some locations. The hostel itself turned out to be right next to the most depressing location in a depressing film. Luckily the sun broke through the rain. We headed into town, wandering randomly and stopping for coffees and hot dogs on the way. We ended up at Västra Hamnen, where grey skies [...]

We saw in 2003 in Sturecompagniet. It was a pretty awesome club, if a little bit more pretentious than my normal sort of place. But at some point in the small hours they played some ABBA, and everyone forgot just how cool they were trying to appear and went crazy for them. For some kind of licensing reason, many Swedish bars had casinos in them. Sturecompagniet was one, and when we finally decided to leave at about 4am, Dan was at the poker table. “You coming?” we asked. “I’m just going to win back what I’ve spent”, he said, and we left him to it. I wondered if we would ever see him again, but luckily he appeared back at the hostel the next morning. It was only -6°C on new year’s day, and it felt warm. With all the soon-to-be-destroyed hope and optimism that a new year brings, we headed back to Västerås to fly home. It was a very long journey to an airport that markets itself as serving Stockholm, but at least the two hour bus journey took us through some amazing winter scenery. People were complaining about the cold when we got back to London. The [...]

It was new year’s eve. During the day we headed through Gamla Stan to Södermalm, and went up Katarinahiss. This strange structure juts out from the hills of Södermalm and allows the lazy to avoid walking up from sea level to the moderate heights. The views of the city from the top were pretty awesome. I finished a film while we were there, and changing it required me to take off my gloves for a few seconds. The pain of the cold was stunning, and as I hurried to get the new film in I could feel my fingers becoming unresponsive. Luckily I did the job, closed up the camera and got my gloves back on before I got frostbite.

We thought that Gothenburg had been pretty cold, but Stockholm was chillier still. The skies were clear, the ground was covered in snow, the lake was frozen solid and all looked beautiful, but -15°C was punishing. We went to Kaknästornet, the TV tower on the outskirts of the city which was the tallest building in Scandinavia at the time. At the top, a howling gale was blowing, and the wind chill must have been tremendous. We discovered that if you dropped some water it froze within a couple of seconds. By wearing two pairs of gloves, three coats and two scarves, I felt reasonably content despite the cold. Ground level was a bit tamer, but finally the inevitable happened and someone slipped over as we walked to the bus stop. Dan was the unlucky victim, and in the evening we found an excellent bar for him to pay his forfeit in.

It was cold. Chunks of ice were floating down the river, and the canals around the city centre were frozen. Wandering through the icy streets was tiring. Helping us all to survive the conditions was the old Scandinavian standby of hot dog. Pylsur, pølse, pölse or whatever the local variant happened to be, they were always a cheap source of hot food.

We tried to go out on our first night in Sweden, but we came up against the breathtakingly severe licensing laws. We were all 25 or over, but not all of us could prove it – Dan had left his passport at the hostel. All the decent-looking places were out of bounds to us, and we ended up in a fairly rubbish bar, that did at least play some ABBA which was quite amusing. I woke up at 8am the next day, and it was pitch black. When daylight finally arrived we went to look around the city, which was covered with snow. We walked up to Skansen Kronan, a fort on a hill, and endured the icy wind to take in views of the city. We had a bet running: whoever slipped over first would buy a round of drinks. This was no small penalty here in Scandinavia. On the way down from Skansen Kronan, Dan had a major moment, but after a few seconds of flailing he recovered his balance. We were all buying our own drinks, for now.

My trip to Norway earlier in the year had been a fantastic one. Hoping to replicate the experience, I decided to go to Sweden for New Year. If the trip involved even a fraction of the nightlife, scenery, atmosphere and sleep deprivation that the Norway trip had, it would be a good one. John and Dan were feeling wealthy and flew with SAS to Stockholm. Eldrik and I were feeling not wealthy and we flew with Ryanair to Västerås. We were all converging on Gothenburg. We landed in darkness to find Västerås covered in snow, as we’d hoped it would be. We got a train to Gothenburg, and it was a fantastic journey through the wintry night.