Stockholm Swiftie

While I love to travel, I'm not the most spontaneous of travelers. I like to plan my trips well in advance, as a big part of the pleasure I take from traveling is the anticipation. 

While I like and admire Taylor Swift for her music and for her business savvy, I'm no one's idea of a Swiftie. 

But last Tuesday evening, I got a text from my niece Molly - also on the thread, my sister Trish and niece Caroline - asking whether we would be interested in going to Stockholm - yes, that Stockholm - to see The Eras Tour. 

Molly is a mega Swiftie. Trish and Caroline are pretty avid fans as well. And we'd all been talking about trying to catch the tour in New Orleans, making a fun trip out of it. But the tickets for the handful of North American Eras Tour dates - the 2023 leg of the tour had plentiful US stops - were super expensive, astronomically so. Molly had seen New Orleans tix for $1,700. (For the Toronto show in November, we heard that the magic number is $3K!!!) Given this, and the pumped up hotel costs, plus plane travel, Molly and Caroline had put their heads toether and figured that it would actually cost less to go to Stockholm, where excellent tickets for the upcoming shows could be had for a couple of hundred bucks. (Still a lot of money, but, whatever...)

Molly started the textthread at about 9 p.m. By 11 p.m., we had concert tickets, hotel reservations, and our flights booked. Leaving Friday night; concert Sunday night; back to Boston on Tuesday.

All four of us girlies are travel planners to some degree or another, not given to spontaneous outbursts of wanderlust. At one point, Trish texted "who are we?" Who are we, indeed.

Apparently we are the sorts of folks who ended up at Logan Friday night, waiting for Lufthansa to Frankfurt (and from there, on to Stockholm) to take off. 

We were not alone.

Maybe the other Swifties on our flight(s) had been planning their trips for a long time, or maybe they're the sponstaneous sorts (even if, as it was for us, it's only first-time or one-shot spontaneity). All I know is that there were an awful lot of folks on our flights wearing some sort of Taylor Swift gear. (We traveled chill, in mufti. 

After a couple of blessedly uneventful flights, we arrived in Stockholm late on Saturday afternoon, and cabbed into the city with a very entertaining taxi driver who was half Kurdistani and half Italian. 

Wälkommen till sverige!

Our hotel - and All-American Hilton - was in a great location, with lots of restaurants nearby. We wandered around and settled on a spectacular - wait for it - Italian place, where we got to dine out, as the evening was balmy and it stays light this time of year until after 9 p.m. 

On Sunday, we poked around town - Stockholm is very charming, full of interesting and historic (even though I know nothing about Swedish history) buildings, and was teeming with people, both locals and tourists. The weather was lovely, and we did our second outdoor dining: waterfront breakfast with yummy Swedish cinammon buns. We also - of course - popped our heads in at IKEA (which was neither the mothership, nor the largest IKEA outlet in Sweden, but was still fun.)

Lunch was authentic Swedish food. I had reindeer meatballs. Quite good.

On to the concert!

The stadium where Swift was performing is in a suburb, so we took the subway to the train, marveling at the wonderful Swedish transportation infrastructure. (In my experience, most European countries have far better transpo and other infrastructure than the US.)

We got to the stadium in plenty of time. Us and 65,000 or so other folks. I'm guessing about 90% of the crowd was women/girls. And at least one-quarter American. An enthusiastic, happy, buoyant crowd.

Taylor Swift is a brilliant performer. She goes for 3+ hours with no breaks (although there are moments during costume changes when the dancers are prominentaly featured). Our seats were great, once the American boyfriend lunkhead standing next to me got the hint  that he was bad-dancing manspreading into my space - I had to block him a few times from elbowing me in the face - and switched seats with his GF. (Their seats were on aisle, so he spent the concert bad-dancing in the aisle. Fine by me.)

Unlike most of those in attendance, including my companions, I don't know all the songs, I don't know all the words. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire performance. You definitely get your money's worth at a Taylor Swift concert, that's for sure. 

As I said, I like and admire Taylor Swift. I have a bunch - though not all - of her albums, and enjoy her music. And I admire her drive, her success, her business/marketing genius, and her connection with her audience. Watching her perform, listening to her, I felt uplifted and empowered. I can only imagine how she makes young women feel. 

God knows, I wouldn't want Taylor Swift's life. Being in the public eye; having millions of people weighing in on your every professional and personal move; having every lyric written, every word uttered, dissected for clues of something-or-other.

But Bravissima, Taylor Swift!

Getting back to the hotel was a crush. One of the upsides of having first-rate public transportation is that people use it. So there weren't a lot of folks driving to the concert. They were catching the train back into town. Fortunately, we were well-situated to get to the station - about a 15 minute walk - before all of the masses arrived there. We were able to cram onto one of the first trains to leave.

Monday - another beautiful day - we museumed it, taking the ferry to one of Stockholm's many islands for the Vasa and ABBA Museums. 

The Vasa is a 17th century warship that never quite got to war, as it capsized shortly after its maiden launch in 1628. Turns out the designers spent too much time on the elaborate decoration and too little on figuring out how much ballast the ship needed to keep from capsizing. 

The Vasa was raised in the early 1960's, and all those years under water had preserved most of the hull. The ship has been brilliantly restored, with the missing pieces authentically reconstructed. I seem to remember that I saw the Vasa in 1973, on my only other visit to Stockholm, but this was well before this amazing museum was built. Just fascinating.

As was the ABBA museum, where we got to sing and dance and gawk at all those crazy ABBA costumes. Unfortunately, I didn't get the message that the disco was a silent disco. We were just supposed to dance to whatever we were hearing through our headphones, without singing along. My nieces had to tell me to zip it. (It's truly impossible not to sing along with an ABBA song.) The only disappointment was the gift shop: not nearly enough on offer. That said, we were able to get a tacky souvenir for my sister Kath, an ABBA fan from wayback.

On Monday night, we had excellent Greek food.

Who knew that Stockholm would have such a diverse restaurant scene? If I'd had six months to research the trip, I'm sure I would have known. But we were seat-of-the pants-ing it. And it all worked out. 

And everything was easy-peasy, given that 90% of the Swedish population speaks English, and given that the sum total of my Swedish is hej (hi), skol (to your health), and tak (thank you). 

Our flights back on Tuesday were, again, blessedly uneventful. (Stockholm Airport is, by the way, a marvel.)

All in all, a great trip. 

No plans at the present, but now that I've done it once, I am open to another spontaneous trip somewhere, sometime.