But this is a beer blog, not a history blog. So back to the fizzy stuff. The plan was to take the ferry from Gammy Stan (I wonder who Stan was? Must have been important if they named the centre of town after him.) I live in Amsterdam, so I know all about tourist overload. But Vasterlangatan was still a shock. Lexie was happy, though. He bought himself a Swedish flag. He has a thing about flags. I wonder where that DDR flag is? I hope Dolores didn't throw it away like the portrait of Erich Honecker.It was hot. Very hot. And 11:15. Time for a beer. I would have gone into Zum Franziskaner. But they don't open until 11:30. I wasn't going to wait 15 minutes for a beer. I'm not made of steel. Luckily there was an O'Leary's at hand.
"A Carnegie Porter, please." "A what?" Unlike the O'Leary's built into our hotel, they didn't sell Carnegie Porter. The draught beer selection was totally thrabbly. Falcon, Carlsberg, Guinness, Kilkenny. Multinational shit. The nice waitress brought me a menu so I could give the bottled options a look over. The choice wasn't much better. I did something I usually try to avoid. Ordered a non-local beer. A Spaten. I know, Spaten is part of a multinational concern. But it's better than Carlsberg.
The nice waitress brought us some popcorn. For free. That's lunch for the kids sorted out. Possibly dinner, too.Almost forgot to mention. I almost fell over the Glenfiddich Warehouse No. 68. I was attracted by the German inscriptions on the first floor. It was a while before I noticed it was one of my target pubs. What luck. And only 5 hours to go before it opened. "Dolores, do you mind waiting here a little?"
We didn't take the ferry to the Vasa museum after all. There was a queue several hundred yards long. We took the rather more prosaic option of the bus. I would relate our experiences inside the museum. But I'm hot and typing ties up my drinking arm.
Since you live in Amsterdam, here's another inscription on a historic Stockholm façade which you should be able to decipher quite easily:
ReplyDeleteGaet het wel
Men heeft veel Vrinden
Kert het Lück
Wie kan se vinden
Österlånggatan 37, Gamla Stan
Gamla Stan = Old Town. Simple as that ;)
ReplyDeleteI would prefer if a wealthy industrialist would decide to pay you to travel with your family 365 days a year so we could have more of these posts. Can that be arranged?
ReplyDeletePeter, that Dutch spelling is almost as bad as mine. I would ask why they had would have Dutch inscription in Stockholm, but I saw the name of one of the shipbuilders in the Vasa museum. Arendt as a first name was a bit of a giveaway.
ReplyDeleteJonte, I'm afraid that was another of my bad multilingual puns.
ReplyDeleteAlan, you don't happen to know a suitable industrialist, do you? I'd be quite happy to travel constantly, given the right financial backing.
ReplyDeleteIf your Dutch spelling resembles the one on the inscription, you might actually have a hidden talent as an expert on 18th-century orthography. You do read a lot of really old stuff, don't you? So that makes sense.
ReplyDelete