På Söndag

I’m not normally one for shopping. In fact, I really hate shopping. I’m not one of those people who enjoys walking around endlessly and aimlessly looking in shop windows. I like know roughly what I want, go into a shop, make the purchase and get out. As an example, I can pretty much do my Christmas shopping in a couple of hours. But today I went shopping with two specific purchases in mind: a USB to micro-USB cable (I left mine at home) and a new pair of jeans.

Yesterday I’d walked past a clothing store on Sodermalm which was having a clearance sale on jeans. “Excellent”, I thought to myself, “a chance to pick up a new pair of jeans in addition to the ones I’m currently wearing which have started to develop a couple of holes”. All very good until I started looking at the sizes. The sizes started at 25 and ended at 31.

“Surely that can’t be right”, I thought to myself. “Can you explain the sizes to me”, I asked one of the assistants. “They’re inches”, he told me. And when I told him what I was looking for, something in the range of 34 to 36, he walked me over to the “grandpa jeans range” as I instantly noted from the styles before me. Honestly, I thought to myself, how on earth could an adult male have a waist size of 25? For all of the cliches about the big Nordic men, there’s an awful lot of them who are also slim and girly, it would appear.

And that’s definitely the case on the gay scene in Stockholm. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe it’s a cultural thing, but many Swedish gay men appear to be a little more effeminate than in Australia, for example. Lots of hair product, that kind of thing. I spent a couple of hours at Torget late this afternoon/early this evening having a couple of glasses of wine, and it’s something I definitely noted.

Having a glass of chardy – I suspect it was Australian wine, since Jacob’s Creek seems to be the house wine of choice in many Stockholm bars – was the perfect way to end the day which had included a fair bit of walking.

I also did one of my favourite things to do in Stockholm: I caught the Djurgården ferry. I really is quite brilliant, especially on a bright sunny day.

Sunday over, and it’s time to look to Monday. Although rain is forecast, I’m looking forward to the Stockholm roof-top tour which I have booked into for tomorrow afternoon.