All Roads Lead to ABBA

Stockholm is sort of an odd duck, culturally speaking.

To me, this is one of its major selling points.

As I mentioned last week, the city seemed to me to have a vaguely 1970s socialist aesthetic —not so much in the architecture, which is universally lovely — but in eyeglasses, clothing, fonts, and graphic design in general.

To be fair, this poster from the Swedish Postal Museum is actually from the 1970s. But most of the advertising we saw was very much along the same lines:

Stockholm also takes great pride in its most famous export: ABBA.

Anyone out there need a refresher on ABBA?

Yeah, okay; I didn't think so.

As a side note, you may be interested to hear that according to the Internet, ABBA is often referred to as "Sweden's greatest gift to the world."

You know, if I were a Viking and I read that? I would be seriously pissed off.

One of the highlights of our trip last weekend was a visit to Stockholm's music museum, where we played all kinds of crazy instruments made out of keys and tubes and springs and ping pong paddles.

We also walked through an interactive hall containing 800 years of music history, starting with Gregorian chant and moving to primitive instruments and then chamber groups, then progressing (in a sense) to polka bands and then big bands and then jazz bands.

All of this important cultural development culminated in (you guessed it!) Sweden's greatest gift to the world.

We were also amused to find ABBA's drum set standing in a place of honor in an exhibit on world percussion.

And, if you wanted to try drumming along to music on an interactive drum pad, your two background track choices were Duke Ellington and ABBA.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for ABBA.

I just wonder if their critical role in the development of music wasn't a little...overstated.

I have to admit that we also really enjoyed shopping in Stockholm.

I like to think that I'm not one of those people who consider shopping to be a fun leisure activity, and certainly not while on vacation.

But I also think that 18 months in the Netherlands has starved the core American part of me that likes to look for and buy things.

Between the limited selection, high prices, surly shopkeepers, and communist-era store hours, shopping in the Netherlands is just a grim business.

Even the flea markets and rummage sales are sort of depressing.

So when we find ourselves in another country, shopping suddenly seems like an extremely fun thing to do.

Luckily for John (if not for our savings account), Stockholm has what might be the most amazing science fiction bookstore we have ever seen, with four stories of books, movies, t-shirts, cards and games.

Does it go without saying that we visited twice?

We also visited a British food store, where I found a box of PG Tips, my favorite tea. This box is large enough to last me through the Apocalypse. And then some.

It just so happened that the British food store had a handful of American products.

This made it even more fun, although it was a little disconcerting to see a very American product like Bac-Os right next to a very British product like Marmite.

In the interest of avoiding an international incident, we resisted the urge to smuggle a giant bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup back into the Netherlands.

Speaking of culinary delights, we found that the food in Stockholm was much better than we expected.

To be fair: we did not have very high expectations.

In some cases, this was not without basis:

But in other cases, we were pleasantly surprised.

We were staying in a great hotel on Skeppsholmen, a quiet, lovely island in the middle of the city. A former Royal Marine base, it's home to a few museums, a couple of restaurants, a hotel, and not much else.

As a side note, our favorite museum on Skeppsholmen was the Moderna Museet, where we saw a great exhibition by the American artist Ed Ruscha.

Unfortunately, we arrived only 45 minutes before the museum closed, as I misread what our tourist brochure said (in English) about the hours.

We would have gone earlier anyway, except that while taking a quick break at the hotel, we were transfixed by a televised competition that can only be described as Swedish synchronized horse acrobatics.

With play-by-play announcers. And complicated scoring. And a horse on a tether. And a team of six ladies wearing electric blue leotards and elaborate braids.

We wanted to stop watching and go to the museum, but we were not physically able to turn away from the television.

A week later, the fact that I cannot find this sporting activity — anywhere! — on the Internet only enhances my suspicion that there was some kind of Swedish peyote circulating in the hotel's ventilation system.

In any case: after our lovely but brief visit to the art museum, we wandered over to the other side of the island to a small outdoor restaurant overlooking the water.

It also overlooks a bunch of quasi-houseboats, most of which confirmed my theory that people who live a certain distance north of the equator don't really care what other people think.

Note that I was perfectly happily taking homestead-y boat photos until John said something like, "I just want to point out that there's a guy in that hammock."

Eeek!

But back to the restaurant:

We were not totally convinced that we wanted to eat full-on Swedish food, but the whole atmosphere — the water, the sunset, people having a drink while wrapped up in wool blankets — was so great, we couldn't pass it up.

As it turned out, it was one of the best meals I've had in a long time.

Salty homemade bread. French onion soup to take the edge off the chilly evening air. Whole smoked trout with sour cream, red onions, dill and hard boiled eggs. Spanish wine. To top it all off, a dessert of sour cream pudding with strawberries and ice cream and crunchy things that can only be described as sweet croutons.

It was pretty much total bliss.

Speaking of odd ducks...

One upside of coming back to our regular lives in the Netherlands is that I've learned two new handy expressions in Dutch.

One is krenten uit de pap. This translates to "raisins out of the porridge", and it refers to a situation in which all of the special things are gone.

I don't know about you, but there are a lot of objects in this world that represent something special to me.

Raisins are not one of them.

The other is vreemde eend in de bijt.

For anyone not up on Dutch water terminology, a bijt is a "hole in the ice".

Vreemd means foreign or strange, and an eend is a duck, so a vreemde eend is a duck who doesn't belong with the other ducks in said hole.

Leaving aside for the moment the hilarious fact that the Dutch have a dedicated word that means "hole in the ice", this turns out to be a very handy concept.

In the interest of not getting fired, I generally err on the side of not writing about my job here.

But let's put it this way: there are moments at work pretty much every day in which, one way or another, I feel like a vreemde eend.

The other reason that I love this expression is that I feel like it must be the source of the otherwise totally inexplicable English phrase "odd duck".

John, for the record, is having none of this.

"Who on earth says 'odd duck'?" he asks.

Me, for one.

Also my grandmother.

And lots of other people, all of whom are possibly over the age of 70.