I’d like to say I was “up early” to see the sunrise over Stockholm, but actually I was “out late”.
It all started early-ish on Sunday evening when I thought it might be fun to end the weekend with a dance at the Stockholm nightclub, Patricia. Patricia, by the way, is boat moored near Slussen. They have a restaurant, several bars, and a few dance floors. Every Sunday night they have a “gay night” where they play lots of terrific dance tunes. I’ve been several times before, and have always enjoyed it very much.
The other times I’ve been, though, have been in the summer when it’s often standing room only. In contrast, when I arrived, it was reasonably quiet. On the upstairs bar, there were maybe twenty or thirty people, while downstairs it was even quieter.
A couple of people recognised me from the preview of the ABBA Museum the other day and from the ABBA Day in Roosendaal a few weeks earlier. I ended up spending the night chatting, dancing, and drinking with a couple of guys. One was English; the other was French. We spent most of the night in one of the smaller bars.
In stark contrast to the “main” dance bar where there was, for a while, literally no one on the dance floor, in the smaller bar we were packed in like sardines. The attraction? For quite some time the bar was only playing ABBA. As I listened around, the crowd was fairly international. Predominantly it was Swedish, but there were also quite a few Brits, a few French speakers, and a large number of Americans.
The Americans loved ABBA. But when the winner of last year’s Eurovision Song Content came on, Sweden’s Loreen, the blank look on their faces became evident. Aside from ABBA, European pop music remains a bit of a mystery for many Americans, it seems.
For one of the English guys I chatted to, it was his first visit to Stockholm, and so I offered him a few visitor tips. “Quick, let’s go outside”, he said at one point. “It’s pretty spectacular”, I said, as we watched the sun start to rise over the city. Having set only a few hours earlier, it was terrific to watch the sun come back up again.
Best of all? I’m staying in Medborgarplatsen at the moment, so it was only one stop on the subway and a brief walk to get home.
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