It was my first business trip! I have another to Newcastle at the end of the month. My Project Manager and I flew out to Stockholm on a Sunday afternoon expecting cooler weather than we had in London; which was baking! However the weather seemed to travel with us; it was sweltering in Stockholm the whole time we were there!
We touched down in the evening at Arland airport; which as you'd expect is very Swedish in design being open, wood panelled and square; very different to all the airports I normally pass through. We took the 20 minute express train ride to the Stockholm city centre and walked to our hotel that was nearby.
I'd skipped dinner on the plane because you had to pay and there were only sandwiches available! Unfortunately after dropping our bags off it was past 10.30pm and the restaurants had stopped serving food; we ended up eating in McDonalds who stop serving at 11pm.
The next day we took the underground train to the office. An interesting thing about the underground system in Stockholm is that all the stations look like roughy hewn cavernous passages and not the usual uniformly shaped examples on all other systems I've used; a picture would have helped here! Additionally after 9am, if the ticket office is closed, then you can effectively travel for free! In fact I don't remember seeing any ticket machines; it looked like residents buy booklets of tickets to use on the system.
The food I sampled in Sweden was very good! They eat a lot of fish over there and I had a typical grilled Mackerel salad for lunch on the first day and not as typical roast Ox (?) salad on the second; I don't normally eat a lot of salad but it is the norm for summer.
In the evening of the first day we were taken to a very nice restaurant (pictured), that effectively sits in midair, where the food was excellent. I had a veal dish with potatoes and vegetables, including asparagus, followed by a warm Winterberry and Vanilla ice cream dessert; the berries being a Swedish speciality.
After the meal we walked back to the hotel and we based a motor powered Viking boat for the tourists(pictured). The building in the background was the national gallery or museum, I don't remember which...
We took a taxi to the airport on our trip back and facing a good amount of traffic partly due to the many bridges around Stockholm being bottlenecks; the city is made up of several islands off the mainland with a network of bridges.
My PM had said that he almost always experiences delays with flights and we did this time; due to the storms around London! I usually don't have problems with flights, bar the resent experience of Singapore that I will recount at a later date...
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