Skål

My wits recovered (well as much as ever), I was off to Hornsgatan and a coffee shop that not only features in the books but was apparently a hangout of author Steig Larsson. A little way up Hornsgatan, I noticed a bookshop across the road so darted over to see if they had a Swedish phrase book I could buy, as clearly Teach Yourself Swedish Chapter 1 (and part of 2) wasn’t getting me very far. They didn’t, but the lady behind the counter kindly wrote down a couple of survival phrases for me (including “I don’t speak Swedish”). Next door to the bookshop I couldn’t help but notice a coffee shop that appeared to be packed with men gorgeous enough to make me as dizzy as August Strindberg had. Even allowing for the fact that quite a few of them were suffering under the unfortunate predilection for moustaches that seems to afflict the men of Sweden, it was quite a startling sight. But I had no time to drool, I was on a Larsson mission! So, with difficulty I tore myself away from the Coffee Shop of the Beautiful Men and charged on down Hornsgatan. After stopping for a brief lunch in a sandwich shop owned by a man who had lived in Nigeria and Orange County, CA and now wouldn’t live anywhere but Stockholm, I arrived unexpectedly at the end of Hornsgatan. Which was when I was confronted with the uncomfortable fact that my map ended long before Södermalm did. And I was lost.

After a little bit of hopeful wandering that reminded me I’m entirely over confident with regards to my sense of direction, I was just about to admit defeat and, well panic really as there wasn’t much else to do (I was on a main road with traffic whooshing by, but very little in the way of other pedestrians to approach for directions), when a man appeared apparently out of nowhere (that’ll be another sodding Viking ghost then). Or a homeless man, asking me for a light. Pleased that I was able to respond jag pratar inte Svenska as I’d just been taught, I was a bit thrown when he – humblingly in perfect English – begged to differ as the fact that I’d said I couldn’t speak Swedish in Swedish rendered it untrue. Which was perfectly reasonable if somewhat disconcerting from a homeless man. He turned out to be extremely kind, and walked me back to where my map started, giving me a running commentary on the area as we went. Apparently Hornsgatan was all factories in the seventies. Who knew?

Another bit of frustrated wandering, turning my map this way and that in a vain attempt to find this mystical-bloody-coffee-shop that appeared not to exist, I finally rounded a corner to discover that the coffee shop I’d spent the entire afternoon looking for was… of course it was… the Coffee Shop of Beautiful Men that I’d clocked hours previously. And most of the Beautiful Men appeared to have now gone home. Sigh. A cup of tea was welcome in any case, and there was a very kind man (fairly beautiful) behind the bar who taught me to say “more water please” in Swedish and helped me translate a review of The Hurt Locker in a local newspaper. A group of men in the corner (not particularly beautiful) were having a lively debate – political I’d like to think, though let’s face it they could have been talking about broccoli for all I’d know – and I felt as though I could imagine Larsson ensconced in the corner with his laptop (did he write on a laptop? Who knows) listening to the debates and churning out his story. Course I might simply still have been hallucinating from the Strindberg blow.

One advantage to getting lost was that I, completely accidentally, stumbled across Lundagatan, where Salander lives in the first book, and Mimmi in the second. I'd imagined it'd be a reasonably, err, less than salubrious area, but it didn't seem to be, particularly. Not as picturesque as some others, it's a neighbourhood of fairly non-descript apartment buildings, but perfectly alright otherwise. That said, a drunk man did lean out of an upstairs window and shout at me, which was kind of awesome. Now I think about it, quite a few people shouted at me in Swedish. I wonder why I'm dying to go back?

Having made it also to Blomkvist's flat, I'm dying to go back and read the third (well all!) book again, as it's so steep and the cobblestoned street outside so narrow that I can't imagine how anyone could have kept it under surveillance. Fictional secret people apparently have impressive surveillance skills.

Evening was drawing in again, so I decided that I deserved the last stop on my Millennium tour: Kvarnen bar, hangout of Evil Fingers. Where it seemed rude not to sample some Swedish beer. Then I made friends with some lovely guys at the table next to me. And learned to enthusiastically shout ‘skål’ before swiftly downing a beer. And there was some more beer. And accidentally walking into the gents’ and standing for excruciatingly long seconds while I tried to remember Swedish for ‘sorry’. Then another bar… other friendly Swedes… some more beer… Anyway. Skål.