Me and Stockholm

As my readers know, just before Christmas I traveled to first Stockholm and then Riga in Latvia. It’s not the trip in itself that I’m going to discuss in this post. It’s just my visit to Stockholm.

Funnily enough I feel a little bit at home there, even though I’ve never lived there myself. My dad was from there. He was born and grew up there and didn’t leave until he was grownup and got a job somewhere else and later on married my mom.

In any case, Stockholm is one of the places I can trace my ancestry to. My dad, my aunt and my grandfather lived there (though my grandfather was really from a peninsula nearby).

Each time I go to Stockholm and particularly when we’re traveling through her part of the city, I think about her and when we visited her but also all those years she lived there before I was born. Sometimes we get close to where dad grew up and then I think of him, obviously. Everything was different then, of course and I know I wouldn’t be able to live there myself. But it’s still so much fun and exciting to remember what dad and my aunt told me about their respective childhoods and youth growing up in these areas. I’ve also visited the peninsula where my grandfather grew up but I realize that things have changed even more there (it’s a very upper class place now, or at least nouveau riche). Besides, I’ve never met my grandfather, because he passed away when my dad was seventeen, so I have no memories of hearing him tell me stories about his life. My grandfather wasn’t part of the upper classes, he came from a shoemaker’s cottage.

It also makes me quite happy that people are relatively polite and nice to me in central Stockholm, even though visitors are always talking about how rude the people of Stockholm can be. Somehow, maybe they can tell that even if I’m not actually from there myself, I do have ancestors from the city. Particularly since I’m always treated so badly here in the west of Sweden where I was born and grew up. Ok, that’s not quite true. I’ve recently moved to the inland and people are usually very nice here too.