If there is one meal that summarizes most of the eating Martha and I did in Sweden, it would have to be the one we ate at Rolf’s Kök (pronounced “shook”), just north of central Stockholm. No fancy restaurant, Rolf’s was one of many restaurants downtown focusing on husmanskost, everyday Swedish cooking. Husmanskost restaurants generally have a set menu of one or two choices that varies depending on the day of the week (and varies seasonally), as well as a few à la carte items. In our (brief) experience, the two choices were both “meat” (including fish) and “potatoes”. I’ve heard the American Midwest described as a meat and potatoes culture, but the Swedes take this to a whole new level.

We went to Rolf’s Kök on a Monday in late August, giving us the choice between “Lukewarm Poached Salmon with Cucumber, Fennel and Dill Mayonnaise” or “Isterband (Fermented Lard Sausage — post forthcoming), Mustard Creamed Potatoes and Beetroot”, preceded in either case by a bowl of Cauliflower Soup. I ordered the salmon, Martha the isterband.

After our menus were taken away our server delivered a tower of crisp rolls of bread impaled on a spike. I’m pretty sure this arrangement would have been met with many a personal injury lawsuit if it were attempted in the U.S.A., but Sweden is a less litigious place and anyway Martha and I somehow managed to remove our rolls without receiving the stigmata. The bread was accompanied by twin whipped butters and a third container full of tiny ziggurats of sea salt.

The rolls looked so good that they practically demanded to be eaten right away, but Martha and I somehow managed to resist long enough for the cauliflower soup to come to the table — a good thing, too, since bread was the perfect implement to sop up every last bite of cauliflower cream. Europeans have a better developed art of vegetable purée than we do in the United States. Give a European a vegetable — just about any vegetable — and they’ll serve it back to you as a creamy-textured soup that tastes like the vegetable in question, but with subtle flavors that suggest greater artifice than simply tossing cream, broth and cauliflower into a blender.

I’ve said that our meal at Rolf’s was a typical example of the kind of food we were eating in Sweden, and indeed salmon with potatoes and dill mayonnaise is something you can get just about any-where and time) throughout the country. But to call the salmon brought to me at Rolf’s Kök average really doesn’t give the restaurant enough credit: this was a really exceptional example of the Swedish favorite. Lukewarm (exactly the word our waitress used to describe the dish in her impeccable English) is not a word that carries positive connotations for me, especially when used to describe food, but it was just right for this fish — you can’t really taste anything when it’s piping hot.

The sausage Martha ordered was described as ‘tangy’ which indeed it was. At the time we assumed this was from lemon zest or some acidic ingredient but later found out that the tangy sourness of isterband  is caused by Lactobacillus, active during the four or more days when the sausage is aged at just below room temperature. Isterband is not cured; it is moist like a fresh sausage. It’s just not quite fresh. This was one of the most interesting things we ate in Sweden.

That’s how it was with Rolf’s Kök: typical but especially well-executed Swedish food. The restaurant also stood out for us in a way unrelated to the food: this meal was the first time, after three days in Stockholm dining out twice per day, that we experienced real table service, where our order was actually taken while we were sitting at a table, looking at a menu book. Up to that point, the norm had been counter ordering, with our food either picked up at a central point our brought out by a server announcing the name in inscrutable-to-us Swedish or, better, our order number, which our two semesters of Swedish classes at the American Swedish Institute a few years ago barely allowed us to parse. Of course, the level of service we encountered  might have had something to do with the types of restaurants we were eating at — Martha and I try to be frugal within reason when traveling. But it’s not like we were eating exclusively at coffee shops, which is about the only place, in Minneapolis at least, where you have to put up with counter based ordering. It seemed to be a cultural preference for the Swedes, and it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint: one central place to post the menu, take the orders, handle the cash. But I always feel a little on the spot when ordering at a counter: trying to read a giant chalkboard menu, a line of hungry and decided diners behind me — and being next-to-clueless about the language the menu is written in only exacerbates my anxiety issues. In light of this and the other stresses of travel, being seated and handed a menu at Rolf’s Kök was a relief.

And it’s not like we had to pay a premium for the convenience, either. The prices at Rolf’s were comparable to the other places we had been dining. Our lunch cost 274 Swedish crowns, which the good people at Visa tell me is $47.51. This seems like a lot, but it was pretty hard to find a meal in Stockholm that cost much less. If they could all have been as good as Rolf’s Kök, we would have been well pleased.

On Saturday (August 27 for those following dates), our first full day in Stockholm, Tom and I secured two three-day City Bikes memberships at the front desk of our hotel and headed out for a loop around Södermalm. The mission? To kill time before the shops along Götgatan opened around 10 a.m.

City Bikes are similar to Minneapolis’ Nice Ride bikes. With a membership card the size of any credit card, one can approach a bike station, hold the card up to the built-in reader, and in seconds receive a bike assignment. Like a Nice Ride, City Bikes are three-speeds with front luggage space, heavy fenders, bells, and easily adjustable seats. Different were the wheels (tiny in front!), the coaster brakes on the City Bike, subscription lengths, and time limits. The three-day pass is the shortest term available for purchase (165 SEK) and breaks down to about $8 a day—much cheaper than any other form of bike rental in Stockholm, if a little more expensive than Nice Ride. And, in Stockholm it is possible to have a City Bike for three hours at a time without penalty, compared to the 30-minute limit on a Nice Ride. Later in the day, on Djurgården, we saw many people lounging around in the grass with a pile of black and white City Bikes around them. With the fear of Nice Ride trip fees deeply ingrained in our brains, most of our own rides were kept short, though. Arriving on Götgatan Saturday morning, we were happy to find several bike stations nearby, ride in a roomy bike lane, and learn that the main shopping area is conveniently restricted to pedestrians and cyclists only.

Also convenient is that every City Bike has space for a bag, as I was in scando-design heaven in Ordning & Reda, DesignTorget, and 10 Swedish Designers. Tip: DesignTorget opens first and is a convenient place to stop in shop while waiting for O&R and Tiogruppen to open. Tom and I each found a few souvenirs: small matching notebooks from Ordning & Reda that would become our journals for the trip (Tom’s lined, mine not), postcards and an oil-cloth bag for me from 10 Swedish Designers, and a mushroom knife and other treasures from DesignTorget. I’m sorry to say we were a little too excited about bikes (!!) and shopping (!) to take many pictures in the morning. With plans for a longer ride and more sights to see, we decided to drop our bags back at the Clarion and head out once more for lunch at Blå Porten on Djurgården.

After dropping our bikes at Djurgården’s only City Bikes station, we set out to find Blå Porten and locate the Vasa Museum, where we’d be getting our Viking on later that afternoon. While the restaurant isn’t far from where we left our bikes behind, we made some mistaken assumptions about its location and took a rather circuitous route there. We walked just long enough for me to become really hungry and slightly desperate before spotting Blå Porten’s unmistakeable blue doorway.

Tom had lamb burger meatballs with potatoes and a yellow bean salad and I had boiled salmon with potato salad, carrots and a generous dollop of dill mayonnaise (these are items 1 and 2 on the menu above). I really liked my salmon, but Tom found himself wishing he’d ordered the chanterelle soup. Full of potatoes for what would be the first of many times, we sat on the patio washing it all down with a couple of beers and a lemon strawberry tart while writing postcards and making first entries in our journals:

So far, Sweden, Stockholm at least, really is everything I’d hoped for. The shops are amazing, the weather is fine, and the people are very nice…. It feels good to sit in the sun with a little wind, eat, and rest our feet. I am so thankful for City Bikes. We’re able to get around with ease while seeing the city and enjoying the air. I’m glad to be here at the end of August. The weather is ideal…. I look forward to more exploring in Stockholm and to what is yet to come…. It’s fun to be in a place where it feels like I know both nothing about it and have a certain familiarity.

As we were finishing up, a French couple asked if we were Swedish; they needed to know how to say “France” in order to address their own postcards. We may not be Swedish, but we did have a Swedish dictionary iPhone app and Tom was happy to assist. They wrote Frankrike in big letters on each card. We had the advantage of writing “USA” on all of our postcards instead of the longer, and seemingly less-often used, Förenta staterna.

We said goodbye to our franska vänner and walked to the Vasa Museum. It is nothing short of impressive—I found it hard to take a picture that did justice to the ship’s size. The museum itself has something like six levels from which to observe the ship and does an excellent job of fleshing out the historical context in which it was built as well as documenting the process of salvaging the ship.

There is a scale model on display that shows how the Vasa would have been painted on its maiden (and only) voyage and many full-sized decorative pieces recreated to match the original paint. The ring shown here is the only piece of gold found on the Vasa. It was displayed on a big velvet pillow in a vitrine with other recovered treasures. I wish I had more pictures of the artifacts on exhibit—there were cooking pots and other vessels, mittens and boots, and a game of backgammon. It is, however, very dark in there! The whole museum is cold and dark to help preserve this incredible hulk.

Back in the sun again after leaving the Vasa, we wandered in to the Nordic Museum‘s shop just before closing time to refuel on postcards and frimärken. We returned to the central city via Djugårdsfärjan and finding no available bikes at the Slussen station we decided to walk to Mariatorget for a drink and a snack at the Hotel Rival’s café. Despite the busy time of day, the Mariatorget bike station welcomed us with several bikes for hire, and we made our way back to south Södermalm for an unremarkable vegetarian dinner (should have had meat and potatoes, I suppose!).

In the days leading up to our trip to Sweden—we left August 25 and returned Labor Day—I started to panic that I had built up Swedishness a little too much in my head. I worked at the American Swedish Institute for a year when Tom and I first moved to Minneapolis, so I know my fair share of Minnesota-Swedophiles. I might be one. This wasn’t just going to be a trip to Ingebretsen’s or the annual Marimekko sale at Finnstyle, though. Swedish classes over the 2008–09 winter term at ASI gave us enough of the language to ask questions but not understand the answers. How would we fare? Tom and I had never been to Northern Europe before — and this would be 10 full days in Sweden (with one day in Helsinki, Finland in the middle).

When we arrived in Stockholm on our first Friday there, my worries went away. Getting around was effortless. We got off the airplane, walked through the terminal (already admiring the design of even the airport eateries), and purchased tickets for the Arlanda Express, a high-speed train that would take us to Stockholm City in just 20 minutes. Arriving in Stockholm Central we switched to the Tunnelbana, taking the green line to Skanstull, the closest stop to the Hotel Clarion, our home for the next four days. Exiting the train, we were greeted with arrows pointing us toward… you guessed it… the Hotel Clarion. Around the corner, through a short tunnel to get us across the intersection above, then up one set of stairs the arrows pointed. Emerging from the Tunnelbana system onto the streets of south Södermalm, we saw the Clarion not 100 yards away. We arrived at the Clarion a couple hours early for check-in at 3 p.m., so we walked bleary-eyed down Ringvägen toward Renstiernas Gata, a street I’d noted for a tiny Japanese boutique and organic grocery store. On the way we stopped at Lilla Caféet (translation: the small café) to orient and share a fika of kanelbullar and and kaffe (pictured above and again below).

Refreshed by coffee and sweets, I led Tom on a walk up Renstiernas Gata and back to the hotel. We stopped at Kiki to admire handmade Japanese paper books, ceramics, and textiles (very similar to contemporary Swedish pattern designs). Next we walked what seemed to a tired-Tom like a very long way to Cajsa Warg, a beautifully styled grocery store with plenty of designy food packaging and culinary treats to eyeball. The perfect place to outfit a picnic.

Having reached Cajsa Warg we turned back and made it to the Clarion for check-in. After all the necessary details of settling in to the hotel, we ventured out again for a light dinner at Reggev Hummus & Espressobar where we ordered hummus merguez and a jar of lemonana to drink.

That night we had a not-so-quiet walk along Hammarby Slussväg and Anna Lindhagens väg near the water while Stockholm music fans on a budget covered the area’s hills and pathways to be in range of Popaganda, a two-day music festival with Arcade Fire headlining Friday (though we were in bed by the time they played). This first night’s walk was nice to take in after a long day of travel. I liked seeing the boats, the bright colors of the little cottages, the gardens and the people going by on foot and by bike. A highlight was this sign for cyclists:

Du som cyklar tänk på oss… You who bike, think of us!

These photos date from July 11, 2009, so I’m a bit off in my date matching (today being the 18th). Early that morning Eduardo, my cousin Natasha’s husband, led us up their neighborhood “hill.” Tom, Ed, and the dogs made it up easily… I huffed and puffed and really wished I hadn’t been wearing hot and sticky blue jeans. This week in Minneapolis that’s a pretty familiar feeling.

July 7, 2009. This would be our last full day in Cali before heading to Bogotá the following afternoon. We lunched on chicharrón alongside beans, rice, and patacones. In the morning I poked around the house a bit more, taking pictures of favorite details. My uncle Pedro “Perucho,” his wife Marta, and my cousin David came for a late dinner; Tom made grilled pizza (not pictured) on the patio with some difficulty due to varying protein contents in the local flour. Our days in Cali were relaxed; hours filled mostly with people and conversation rather than a need to go anywhere. As I look through the photos from this day and others, I miss being in the family house in Cali: walls hung with artwork from floor to ceiling, dim evening light, a lean out the (screenless) window over a wide sill, the air. The past few mornings in Minneapolis (now July 2011) have had an air that’s left me thinking of Colombia, too.