09:20 Leaving Stockholm Station: The train is pulling out from Central Station Stockholm. I know because I looked up and saw the station receding. Really, these things are smooth. Plenty of legroom too, enough for my seatmate to stretch out her long Swedish gams distractingly. EJ’s in the seat behind me so that we both get a window view. Or we would except that my seat is by a really big pillar and all I can see is beige carpet. It’s ok, not only do I know what Sweden tastes like at this point, I know what it looks like, which is Vermont with fewer cows or mountains.

The walk from the hotel reminded me never to travel without a smartphone with local access to Google maps as we kept vectoring into the city and away from the train station through a series of slight errors in reckoning. At some point the errors added up enough that I knew we were off course and decided to dead reckon our way back, which got us within a few blocks. Why not ask directions? Because real men don’t? Not so much. Because the streets of Stockholm are pretty empty at 0800. Fortunately, my logistician had factored in time for mishap and we arrived, sweaty but on time with half an hour before our train to Malmut, the city on the Swedish side of the bridge to Denmark. I think the strike is still on, and we’ll be taking the bus back to hook up with the Copenhagen metro, then on to the Backpacker’s Hostel, as EJ takes me up on my assertion that I’d just as soon stay in a youth hostel as a five star hotel.

I scored another continental breakfast at the station, coffee in a paper cup and a stale cinnamon bun. I’ve decided that Swedes think bread is supposed to be stale because they only bake it once a year and sore it through the long winter. We learned that at the museum village thing, where we chatted with re-enactors baking crisp Swedish flatbread. How long does it keep? Well, up to 27 year. Oh, that would explain my cinnamon rolls.

At the station we saw several people traveling with very well-behaved dogs, which would sit quietly by their owners as they waited for the train. Cities aren’t Rover’s thing, and he’d be pretty much panicked by a train station, so leaving him at Doggy Play Care was the right choice. Not that you can just bring a dog through customs anyway. Others with reasonably well-behaved children.

Returning to the US will undoubtedly be a culture shock.

…many adventures later…

18:20 Copenhagen Backpacker’s Hostel – Things are looking up. We’ve checked into a very funky little backpacker’s hostel. Blues playing in the common room/café, coffee at the bar. OK, sharing a room with six others isn’t perfect, but at least one of them is EJ and they all have heavy vinyl flaps to seal you in. I like it.

So far this trip, The Admiral Hotel (great), the Radison Blu Strand (not as great as they think they are), and the Backpacker’s Hostel (awesome). Shout out to Jonathon McClure and Dimitri Klimenko…this is exactly the sort of place you’d expect me to wind up in. Too bad I have to leave in the morning.

Did I mention the blues playing in the main room?

We did our five hour train ride to the end of the line in Sweden, where we had to get off and deal with the “labor dispute” metro-bus-metro handshake to get over the bridge to Copenhagen. Except we didn’t quite do it that way.

Now the truth can be told.

There was only one thing I really wanted to do in Copenhagen. Visit the Museum of Design and see the Wegner chair exhibit. That, no doubt, sounds like a weird thing to do, but well, design is sort of my thing these days, there’s something interesting about chairs, and Wegner, well…if it’s a chair from the last century and it has curves in it, you can pretty much thank Wegner. Or Eames, but mostly Wegner.

But when we marched up to the gate last Monday, the museum was, as museums often are on Mondays, closed. Yeah, we’re really smart people.

Coming back from Stockholm there was a small window of time in which we could see the exhibit. If things went just right. Train to metro. Bus to Central station. Taxi to museum. Spend an hour at the exhibit.

Only the bus dropped us at the airport, which is about 45 minutes from downtown. EJ, ever focused on the mission, hailed a cab. I’m not asking what it cost.  At the end of our sprint across town in Friday rush-hour traffic, we had one of those classic encounters where the driver said, sure, I take your credit card, then tried really hard to convince us that his machine couldn’t deal with it. EJ set him straight.

Wegner turned out a lifetime of chair designs, many influenced by classic chairs like the Windsor or the stretched leather Spanish chair, but pared down to their absolute essentials and realized in gracefully curved wood.  If you’re sitting in a chair with almost flat arms that have a gentle curve carved into them to make them comfortable as well as graceful, thank Wegner.

21:00 Apre dinner – For our last dinner we’d gotten reservations at what was touted in the Rick Steves’ guidebook as a brilliant restaurant, especially if you like interesting food, and especially if you like fish. Oddly, the menu that they slid in front of us bore no real resemblance to the one we’d seen online when we booked.

That was when we should have run screaming out the door.

Unfortunately, I”d already turned my reasonableness filter off, since I was in “whatever makes EJ happy” mode and figured she knew what she was doing. And she was determined to give me a great restaurant experience for my last night in Copenhagen. So we ordered what can only be considered notional food on tiny plates and NASA style prices.

Well, they were really well-thought-out tiny plates. I had a dry martini (can’t get olives in your martini in Scandinavia, evidently; only citrus peels), Danish oysters, and King Crab with a bunch of froth and a few leaves of green stuff. There was a total symphony of delicate flavors going on between the sharp citrus in the froth and the smoky flavors in the crab. Brilliant stuff…but not actually a meal. More like a collection of petite bouchée. This is how the beautiful people stay beautiful.

Instead of trying to put enough of the tiny plates together to actually make a meal, I held back, secure in the knowledge that I’d seen a place called Pizza Central on the way in.  When we’d extricated ourselves from Kobhyens Fisekebar’s finny clutches, I headed right to the pizza place and asked for a slice.

Oddly, they don’t sell slices. I’m not completely sure they sell pizza.

Instead he offered me Schwarma. Schwarma, the mysterious food that the Avengers chowed down on at the end of the movie. I didn’t know what it was, but suddenly I wanted some too.

That was my undoing. I made the mistake of enjoying the hell out of my dirt-cheap mystery-meat pita while EJ was still in economic  recovery from the shock-n-awe that Fisekebar delivered. Oops. My bad. I probably should have snuck out after taps and done that.

But seriously, I’ve had my taste buds gritted for the entire trip. Going to Scandinavia is not about the food for me. This is a place where fish comes pickled, and I’d have to be pickled to think that was a good idea. My culinary highpoint was Swedish meatballs (sorry, Rudolph), and I’m deeply grateful that they have hot dog carts every few hundred feet.

I told her that if you spread the cost over the next year it won’t seem so bad, but I’m not sure she believes me. Maybe if I old her to compare it to the national deficit.

And it’s not all her fault. I’d been ignoring hints that she’d be happy to stop at any of the little places we were walking by on the way to the fishy restaurant, or even grab something at one of the ubiquitous 7-11’s and take it back to the hostel. I figured she was just trying to give me an out so I didn’t have to go to a fishy restaurant. I didn’t realize that she was having qualms about the whole thing.

Have to do better at that.

Anyway, we’re heading home to the land of cheap everything and our dog Rover. That’ll be good.