Day 25: Stockholm… you beautiful, sunny su-pa-pa troop-pa-pa…

Money, money, money; Must be funny; In the rich man’s world
Money, money, money; Always sunny; In the rich man’s world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do; If I had a little money; It’s a rich man’s world…

IT CHOSE NOT to adopt the Euro, but Sweden very much remains a member state of the European Union. And do you know what? I think I have a sneaking suspicion I know where the EU’s butter mountain has gone. The wine lake and the milk lake too.

On Sweden’s hips, arse and stomach.

What happened to this nation of svelte Bjorn Borg-underpant wearing hipsters and Abba lip-syncing blondes I remember so fondly? I mean everybody looked so, well…. ENGLISH, frankly.

When our Helsinki to Stockholm ferry tipped us out at the Swedish capital this morning, I had to check that we hadn’t scooted back to Russia overnight. Or bypassed the western-European leg of our Long Trip Home and gone straight to Harwich.

Beautiful Sweden. But why don’t the people look Swedish?

Maybe it is having spent so long in Asia, and perhaps I haven’t noticed the warning signs in Europe beyond the scaremongering stat-based health stories in the Daily Mail, but Swedes seem to have ballooned since I last set foot here.

I can well understand why, mind. The food is snesational. In fact were we not having to ration ourselves to two meals shared between the five of us each mealtime due to the crippling cost of, well everything, we’d be piling on the pounds too.

The Swedes seem to be making good use of all this extra flesh, too – as a canvas for ink-work. They have become simply obsessed by tattoos. I could count on one hand today the number of people I saw with no visible sign of ink. There were Celtic arm-hoops, Asian symbols, Maori markings, Sanskrit script, olde-worlde anchors and botched DIY green ink affairs. Mums on the metro, dads in the park, teenagers with sleeves and young women with crosses on their ring fingers.

Ink-tastic…

“We’re just getting old,” Mrs S told me. It wasn’t an entirely comforting thought.

The discomfort was probably rooted in the realisation she has a point.

I felt old today. Weary. We have been on the road for 25 days with too little sleep and too little rest.

And although our travel is getting easier now, in some respects the journey is getting harder. As our surroundings get more familiar I notice we are becoming less inclined to pull together – there are fewer challenges or fears to unite us. I’ve certainly become more irascible and grumpy, and need a big last push to get over the line now. This team needs whipping back into shape – starting with yours truly.

Schisms appeared at breakfast on the ferry when the boys couldn’t agree what to have. I made the decision for them by marching them back to our room with nothing. It was only a temporary solution and soon they were bickering and fighting again – an exhausting pattern which lasted most of the day.

“Ridiculous boys, squabbling again… and that’s you too, daddy…”

 By the time they had become friends again in the evening, Mrs S and I were exhausted and disillusioned with the whole shooting party.

“This has been the worst day for me,” she said.

I sincerely hope tomorrow is a marked improvement because we are haemoraging cash on this brief leg of the trip – Sweden is without doubt the most expensive city I have been to in a long, long, long time.

We could have flown to Athens for the price of our cab-ride from the ferry to Mariatorget. I paid more for our laundry bill than I did for my first car (true story) and the price of our 24-hour metro passes would get you round London for a week.  

What a beautiful city, though, and I guess you get what you pay for. Although that may not have been the mantra in the minds of the other guests at the Rival Hotel (www.rival.se) when they ambled down to breakfast this morning to find the Shines had arrived.

Our rooms not yet ready, we had decamped in the foyer and were sifting through our nine pieces of luggage, removing dirty laundry and adding it to a large red-and-white plastic sack, the likes of which you see at Heathrow airport, generally belonging to people receiving a grilling from immigration.

 Suds up, dudes

 Put plainly, this is not why people pay good money to stay in this gorgeous boutique hotel owned by Abba legend Benny Andersson.

A very friendly but increasingly stressed bearded man (it wasn’t Benny. Or Bjorn) surveyed the scene with barely disguised horror, but we are beyond shame at this point, and really, really needed some clean clothes.

We managed to find respectable duds for everyone (even if it meant Jasper squeezing into a pair of Ben’s shorts, Freddie Mercury-style) and lugged the rest of it to the only city centre laundrette we could find some five or six Metro stops away.

In fact it was the perfect disguise and pickpocket deterrent. We looked like tourists, we were carrying a map and we clearly didn’t know where we were going, that much was true. But what kind of tourist carries an enormous bag of stinking clothes round Stockholm on a gloriously hot and sunny day, right?

You’re following this so far, yes? Infighting, crippling prices and back-breaking (and wallet-breaking) laundry loads, all in the first hour or so. I trust I am setting the tone. Added to all this is the fact that Mrs S is still aching and feeling ill, and somebody has obviously mistakenly advised Kitty that she is the boss of this family.

 
“Off to lunch, things always seem better after lunch…”

The intrepid Shines are not to be cowed, however, and we push on through, deciding to recalibrate the day at lunch.

We ask the achingly hip reception staff for a recommendation for lunch “somewhere cheap and good for kids” I think Mrs S might have said.

We are directed to somewhere called the Blå Dörren down by the waterfront, so I take another million pounds out of the ATM and we head off there.

Now, if I had been in any way unsure what sort of impression we had made on the hotel staff earlier in the day, when we arrived at our lunch venue I was in doubt no more.

They had steered us past literally dozens of bistros, cafés and neighbourhood restaurants all looking to be serving delicious Swedish fare.

The Blue Door, which coincided with the big blue cross on our tourist map, was basically a Harvester Inn.

There were some tables outside, and one of them was not yet occupied by heavily-tatooed, heavy-smoking, heavier-drinking denizens of downtown Stockholm, so we leapt in there.

The food was actually okay, but it wasn’t the rollmops and gravlax experience I had been anticipating for our introduction to Swedish cuisine.

A sea-faring nation…

 Suitably fortified by our salad-bar-and-pasta experience, we decided to jump on a ferry and visit the Vasa Museum.

We hadn’t realised we could use our 24-hour travel passes on the ferry, thus ensuring they retained their most-expensive-piece-of-plastic-we’ve-ever-had-in-our-pockets status 

The Vasa Museum offers “a unique insight into early 17^th–century Sweden” the blurb promises.

Cutting a long story short, the pride of Sweden’s military fleet, the beautifully ornate and heavily armed Vasa sunk on its maiden voyage in Stockholm Harbour due to basic errors of design. It was salvaged in 1961 after 333 years under the sea. The brackish water had preserved almost everything and it now sits in the Vasa Museum, 98 percent original.

There are displays of its weaponry, re-enactments of its sinking and films depicting life aboard the great vessel. Goblets, barrels, cannoballs and nit-combs are displayed in all their glory.

Having absorbed one such display of all the ornate carving and decoration of the vessel’s stern, Ben hit the nail squarely on the head with the pithiest of comments.

“They should have paid more attention to making it float than making it look pretty,” he announced flatly.

Very pretty, but will it float?

I couldn’t have put it better myself, and wanted to carry him from the place on top of my shoulders. He had redeemed himself from the doghouse he was in for taekwondo kicking Jasper earlier, and we left the museum in finer fettle than we’d arrived.

Old hands at the Swedish transport system by now we jumped aboard a tram to admire some more tattoos and to head back to the old town, stopping off along the way to buy Jasper some new shorts and allow him to escape Ben’s pair.

He settled on some striking green ones and loved them so much he wanted to wear them out of the shop. This meant climbing up onto the counter in front of the till and writhing around while the sales assistant clipped the tag from his trousers.

As I say, it had been one of those days…

“Hold still, we’re almost there…”

Images of Day 25:

Day 24: Saint Petersburg to Helsinki… swapping tracks for waves

A QUICK QUIZ. How do you pack enough clothes to cover temperatures from 35 degrees down to 15 degrees, containing attire suitable for Asian beaches, European capital cities and dirty trains, and yet be able to carry them all? Oh, and along with a growing plastic tat mountain?

Don’t ask me. If I knew the answer to that, Kitty wouldn’t be walking round a chilly St Petersburg in cut-off denim shorts, my wife’s jeans wouldn’t have a faint aroma of wee thanks to a burst nappy, and the locals might not be affording me such generous “personal space”.

And so instead of researching Stockholm’s Old Palace, Mrs S spent this morning researching city centre laundrettes for when we arrive in Sweden tomorrow morning. It really is getting quite desperate.

 
My editorial assistant in short shorts… 

We’ve been nowhere long enough nor warm enough to hand-wash since leaving Southeast Asia, and Europe is just too expensive to use the hotel laundries. We got away with it on the Trans-Siberian where everybody kind of stinks but our reintroduction to civilisation has thrown our cleanliness and hygiene levels into sharp focus. The burst nappy/wee incident has only exacerbated this.

Accordingly, we hummed down the stairs of the Pushka Inn as soon as we woke, ducked by the Pushka café next door to scoop up some breakfast and then  clambered straight into our taxis where we thoughtfully wound down the windows.

My taxi took a bit of a leisurely route as we discussed Chelsea, Roman Abramovich, Finnish hunting and swimming in the Neva River with our driver, before arriving at Finlandsky Station for the high-speed tilting train to Helsinki.

 
There is something fishy about this breakfast…

 Mrs S had landed kerbside 10 minutes earlier and was hyperventilating given she had 80 percent of our bags, 66 percent of our children, zero percent of our money, zero percent of our passports and zero battery on her phone.

We got there early and had an hour to kill. So while I pondered the case of the strange looking man who was punching way above his weight in the wife department, the boys obsessed about chewing gum.

I guess it was to be expected, having grown up in Singapore where gum-chewing is almost on a par with grievous bodily harm. Since learning that there are countries where you can actually buy this stuff – and chew it – the mere thought of chewing gum has them twitching and salivating.

This despite the fact Jasper had already coming to a sticky end in Vietnam when his favourite Sugi Island T-shirt was ruined by someone’s discarded gum attaching itself to his rucksack and from there onto his clothing like some rabid spearmint virus.

 They were a great match, once. I guess…

 Jasper’s affection is unwavering and Ben cannot stop discussing it. Mrs S loves Singapore for making it illegal.

“Why don’t you stay in Singapore then,” Ben asks as the chewing gum debate enters a new phase.

“I would love to,” Mrs S replies.

Ben pauses.

“Me too. But that is not available,” he says.

More than physically moving the Shine family from Singapore back to the UK, our trip has already had a profound effect on the family.

Ben has really come into his own this last three weeks (when he is not tired or hungry). He has always been a very thoughtful boy with a superb sense of humour and unmatched comic timing, but over the last 10,000km his confidence has soared.

As for Kitty, she has become much more independent. She is talking more, scolding more and asserting her personality at every opportunity. This is not always a good thing.

Jasper too has grown. He has become ever more mature and ready to distance himself from the general craziness of Ben and Kitty. Even though he is only one school year older than Ben he is charging at top speed – too fast – towards teenage behaviour. Never more so now we are in cooler climes and he is living in his Singapore Barbarians rugby hoodie.

Anyway, they got their chewing gum, Kitty squawked and had sweets instead and I made a fool of myself asking the money-changer for Finnish money (“You know… the money they use in FIN-LAND) before collecting my, ahem, Euros from her and boarding the tilter to Helsinki.

Off to Finland…

For the first time since Hong Kong, all the signs are in English and the staff understand us entirely. I can barely describe what a relief this is. The travel is less exotic, but more enjoyable now. We can communicate properly, the borders are easily navigable, there is abundant food all the family can stomach and so our bottomless picnic bag is now redundant.

We take our place in the half-empty train and, unlike Russia or China, the staff are fine about us regrouping together given the train is not full.

We fly by gorgeous Scandinavian scenery – forest, wooden houses with painted shutters and carved edging. It is similar to the Russian countryside but more picturesque and appears less functional.

I sit a little apart and tap on my MacBook Air, Mrs S gives me daggers, Kitty melts down and the boys eschew iPads for card games… And then we are there.

Peace and quiet…

Mayhem. Spot the difference…

We pull into Helsinki and head to the taxi rank. Every Scandinavian cliché is at play as first up in the rank is a young blonde cabbie who speaks perfect English and scoots us round to the South Harbour for our boat to Stockholm.

We are a couple of hours early and no Left Luggage locker can accommodate the size of our bags so we settle down in a café for coffees and sandwiches before we hit the seas.

A high school teacher from Chicago with General Custer hair and John Lennon glasses shares his unwanted views on Asian tourists with us, and advises us that our children are tired and “just need a playground”.

He doubts we could have arrived in Helsinki from St Petersburg by train (“well, you gotta have taken some sort of ferry”) before he looks it up in his guide book (“oh, okay, you *did* come by train), as though we got our kicks from duping strangers about the rail networks of Europe.

He then begins to share his feelings on the Trayvon Martin case before, mercifully, another hour of my life is spent and we can board the Silja Serenade.

Your kids need a playground!

Where to begin?

They call it the Silja Serenade, Mrs S calls it a Motorway Service Station (though do bear in mind here that my lovely wife’s nostrils involuntarily flare at any accent north of Regents Park). My view is that when Newport Pagnell’s Welcome Break features jugglers on stilts, a spa, a sauna, jacuzzis, buffets, bars and tax-free shops and casinos, all set against a Scandinavian seascape, I’ll fall into line, but until then this will have to be one of those rare occasions where we disagree.

That’s not to say I don’t see what she’s getting at, mind.

Ferry mayhem

Three-quarters trousers were the norm, and tattoos were aplenty. Plus this was a place of big appetites and even bigger back fat. And boobs.

They drank beer, they drank vodka, they drank gin, they drank cider. Their stomachs were scored with livid stretch marks like streaks of lipstick, and none of them got out of the jacuzzi once to have a pee. They staggered from port to starboard before we even left harbour. And the men were no better.

But everyone was having a fantastic time and there was no hint of menace in the air. That is where the Silja Serenade and Blackpool differed.

We toured the magical seventh floor, we walked the corridors, we hit the swimming pool and the Jacuzzi. We giggled at huge naked men in the sauna and supped pre-prandials on the sun-deck. We chit0-chatted, we un-wound and we dined well.

We then lost ba-bee.

Let me repeat that.

We. Then. Lost. Ba-bee.

Let me put this in context. On the surface ba-bee is a scrappy, smelly piece of pink rag with a lambs head attached.

Even a boil wash seems to have no discernible benefit to his appearance or smell these days. He is the soft toy equivalent of a boozer with chronic liver failure. The damage has been done and everything we do now is just careful maintenance.

To Kitty, though, Ba-bee is the world. He is pure catnip. She cannot relax without ba-bee, she cannot suck her thumb without ba-bee, she cannot even listen to stories without ba-bee. She certainly cannot sleep without ba-bee.

Me and my ba-bee…

So imagine, if you can, the panic when we discovered Ba-bee was missing.

We went though the stages of grief. Actually, I only went through the first stage – denial (did she even have ba–bee?) – before skipping straight to PANIC.

All bets were off. “Boys, you can have LITERALLY ANYTHING YOU WANT if you find Ba-bee,” I told them panic-stricken, while trying to juggle a squirming Kitty and pay a waitress dressed like a ship’s captain 99 euros for a fairly-average-but-not-too-bad-meal.

The bloodhounds were off. Both headed straight back into the Kidz Club (yes, it was with a ‘z’)  their tails up and noses down. Meanwhile, Mrs S was retracing our steps from the last three hours asking everyone she encountered in a uniform if they had found ba-bee.

The first sweep was unsuccessful but we Shines don’t give up, and again the boys went back into the play area.

The first I knew of any development was when Ben bolted over to me with good news to impart. The details were sketchy but the gist was ba-bee had been found lurking on a sofa by the on duty woman in Kidz Club. We could all breathe again, and our chances of getting a good night’s sleep had spiked.

Not for Mrs S, though. She is still really pretty ill. It may even be a variant of man-flu it is lingering so long. What it meant was her head acted as a kind of maritime baromoter/spirit level so her inner ear alerted her every time we changed course.

For the rest of us, though, it was time to quit while we were ahead – for tomorrow we face Stockholm and the laundry.

Reunited. At last…

Trains, planes and automobiles. And ferries.

After eight happy years living in Asia, we had to make our departure something special, and this is it: a 13,000 kilometre overland odyssey by rail from our Singaporean home back to the UK, and a new adventure.

Jasper, Ben, Kitty and the two of us old enough to know better set off from Woodlands railway station in Singapore on July 1st bound for London’s Waterloo.

We’ll be catching sleeper trains, bullet trains, sleek trains and rickety trains; and will travel some of the world’s most storied routes including Vietnam’s Reunification Express and the awe-inspiring Trans-Siberian Railway.

It promises to be an eye-opening affair, criss-crossing a dozen countries and, so long as we don’t miss too many trains, one which will span 32 days.

Brave or foolhardy? Probably both… we‘ll find out on the Long Trip Home.

By the time we pull into Britain’s busiest railway station my guess is none of us will be left in any doubt we’ve been halfway round the world… watch this space — and wish us luck…

Zoe, Oss, Jasper, Ben and Kitty Shine x