My recent trip to Stockholm

I went to Stockholm (from Valencia) on Thursday morning and came back on Sunday.

My first impressions

• So me and my family decided to see Stockholm because of the quite different weather and the wish to see the fall with yellow and red leaves, and breathe some fresh, cold air.
• It takes 4 hours to fly from Valencia, Spain to Stockholm, but it might take a loooot of time to get back if you’re unlucky (as we were).
• If your flight is at 6 am, that means you’re going to get up at 3–4 am. That’s not nice.
• The best way to get to Stockholm from Arlanda airport is to take the Arlanda Express. The train station is conveniently connected to the airport and it takes only 18 minutes to get to the city center.

• It’s quite easy to convert Swedish krona to euros. You just need to divide by 10. For example, we had to pay 460 SEK for three tickets from the airport to the central station (2 adults and 1 child). That means it cost us 46 euros.
• The air is so fresh! I must say, the proximity of the sea and lots of water spaces inside the city add up. You can breathe with a full chest.
• The metro is quite convenient and logical. It took us about 2 or 3 rides to get the essence of it, so we had no problems after that.
• I was expecting everything to be expensive, but it turned out that it wasn’t so. Maybe the inflation in Spain just made me more tolerant of higher prices.
• We stayed at the Clarion Hotel, which is nicely located near a big waterfront and a park, and it’s literally 20 steps to the Skanstull metro station.

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What to see in Stockholm if you have only a couple of days (as we did)

• See the Old Town. It’s… okay. Quite comfy and nice, but not that outstanding piece of memory for me. Remember to eat somewhere before you get to the Old Town, because it can be pricey there.
• Make some breathtaking photos around the center, including beachfronts, and pray for sunny weather. If it’s not sunny, the water looks brown.
• Visit the Vassa Museum (the 400-year-old wrecked ship that was carefully extracted from the harbour and restored).
• ABBA Museum – even if you’re not a fan, it’s one of the best and most detailed band museums in the world, with lots of attention to detail.
• Astrid Lindgren Museum – if you have kids, that’s another gem. (All these museums are within walking distance of each other.)
• Try Swedish meatballs. Not a godly dish, but quite tasty.
• Try mead, a 10–15% alcohol drink made from honey.
• Get lost in the Skansen village, but remember to come there before 3 pm, because they can close.

• Get the SL app and use trams and buses to get around the city.
• Talk with Swedish people, they speak English quite well. I had some deep conversations with them.
• Do some shopping at local grocery stores. Again, I was expecting less variety, but I must admit I was wrong.
• Buy Swedish licorice candies.
• Take a boat ride.
• See how people live – we went to the Katarina-Sofia district and enjoyed the architecture of regular people’s houses and how organized the space around them was.
• Take a hot cup of tea at Brod&Salt.

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Getting back from Stockholm

This is the unfortunate part – there were some crazy winds in the Netherlands, so flight disruptions happened on a big scale. Our flight was delayed, and we missed the connecting flight to Valencia. However, we got to see Zaandam – a nice city near Amsterdam – because we had to spend the night in the Netherlands to wait for the next flight.

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Claiming hotel expenses from KLM

We had to fight with their website – we just couldn’t send the claim due to the “Oops. Something went wrong” error (without telling us exactly what went wrong).

The trick that worked: we had to convert our JPEG scans into one PDF file. Then it allowed us to send the request and provided us with a claim number. If someone gets into the same situation, I hope this helps!