I realized a bit the other day that no matter how much I write about beautiful places and interesting travel destinations, I never manage to get around to writing any posts about Stockholm. The city that has been my hometown for 20 years. For so long that I have a hard time saying what my "hometown" really is. Is it where you were born, or is it where you have lived the longest? I am a northerner at heart, but home for me is where I feel at home. And that's where I am now. So a Norlander in Stockholm or a Stockholmer from Norrland? I'll vote for the latter :)
Today, Stockholm offered one of the hottest evenings of the summer and where do you spend 32-degree summer heat in a big city, if not at an outdoor restaurant with nice company.
We started at a wine bar in Söder that I had never been to before, Beverage Wine bar at Mariatorget. Here we found a wonderfully cramped little outdoor restaurant with small tables and benches on Swedenborgsgatan. Pride week in honor beautifully decorated in all the colors of the rainbow. The wine menu had many exciting wines by the glass and it felt very unpretentious and so wonderfully Söderskönt that you just have to love. But what is an evening on the town without at least two wine bars? But first – a little mini-stop at your favorite ice cream parlor Sticky Nikki at Mariatorget (completely vegan ice cream – so good and hooray for all egg-allergic and lactose-intolerant people!). Today it was peanut butter ice cream, absolutely unbeatable in the heat!
We ended up on The Animal/Tweed/The Burgundy's summer restaurant The pig. By the way, The Burgundy is one of my absolute favorite restaurants/wine bars in Stockholm - so cosy, so affordable and soooo good! The pig is located in the previously mentioned restaurant's courtyard, upstairs. No view, but a nice courtyard with just the right number of tables and some greenery. The menu has its roots in Spain and includes all the classic favorites such as Pan con tomate and Pimientos de Padron. However, I myself cut into a perfect pink burger with manchego and triple fried fries. So, triple fried fries... Can you live on triple fried fries alone? If they had fried them one more time, they probably would have disintegrated into atoms. But those would have been VERY crunchy atoms!
When I then got home, I picked up a long-awaited package with my new holiday companion - Bed. I'm generally an unrepentant paperback lover. I love being able to sit with my book in the pool without having to worry about my book getting wet and ruined. Because what does that do with a paperback? They are as if made to be taken everywhere and consumed. But this summer, my love of paperbacks was put on the line.
I had brought four lovely crime novels with me which felt like the perfect amount for the time I planned to take it easy. But when the weather turned out to be much hotter than we expected and no one in the family (apart from me) could go on as many excursions as we had planned - then you had to lie under a parasol and read instead. So I read. And read. Until the books ran out and I had nothing to read anymore. Perhaps you can understand the quiet panic that unfolds inside me as I realize that the only thing I could do now was JUST LYING STILL. Or take a bath. But I'm not a big swimmer. And lie still, that's not my thing. I actually don't remember how I solved this landfall problem, I must have repressed this nightmare. But I realized then and there that I needed a Letto. So now here it is, my very own reading tablet which works just as well to read with in the sun as in the dark and into which I can always download another book, should the books run out against the odds. It will be very exciting to test this new little technical gadget. My husband is a die-hard Kindle lover, so I get to evaluate it against his e-reader simply. May the best reading tablet win! Review coming later! Now I should probably go to sleep soon, this heat makes me sleep far too badly at night. But first I'll probably do some reading...
