Earlier this week, we had a micro-vacation and went to Stockholm for a day. As it has probably been like 10 years since I last visited Stockholm properly, I was looking forward to the short visit. (note: click on the thumbnails for the full photo)
Stockholm as a city is not bad; it’s actually even pretty cool. The city is a nice, of compact size, quite clean, the old city is charming, there are plenty of good stores & restaurants to choose from and all that. To top it off, the weather was also benevolent so the day there was quite pleasant. Even fun.
Now that we’ve established that Stockholm is a cool city, we can turn our attention to how we got to Stockholm. As people know, many cruise ships run between Stockholm and Helsinki. We had a gift card for Viking Line for one of the better cabins (i.e. above car deck, with a window etc). These ships are advertised as “luxurious”, but tourists be forewarned: at least the Viking Line ships are far from luxurious.
Everyone knows the inconveniences that hoards of drunken Finns – and there’s no shortage of those on these ships – cause. But once you realize that there’s little else to do on the ship than to get drunk, you sort of start to understand them on some level. To me, the most exciting part of the cruise was watching Finland beat USA in hockey – and everyone who knows me understands perfectly how dire the situation has been when a sports event tops the list as a most exciting event. Nevertheless, the drunks were expected and manageable.
Unlike what started to materialize around 1am when our toilet drain thought some variety is the spice of life and instead of downwards movement, started gushing god-knows-what stuff upwards into our bathroom. Unsurprisingly, we weren’t entirely happy with our toilet being in this condition:
No problem, we got a new cabin. Though judging from the bathroom floor of the other cabin, a similar phenomenon had taken place there also not too long ago. By that time we were too tired to do anything about it, but needless to say one doesn’t come home feeling particularly clean after such experiences. And that’s when the poor condition of the cabins really hit me, too – not only did the sewer system apparently not work, the bed linen was dirty and torn, paint was missing here and there, switches broken…
Luxury my @ss. It was the newest ship in Viking Line’s fleet and it was sorely in need of a total overhaul, starting from the 80′s color world to the infrastructure on the brink.
I’m so flying next time. And probably to somewhere like Paris – Stockholm’s nice but not that nice that I’d be filled with unstoppable desire to visit it more than once a decade. In normal situations, I would file a complaint with Viking Line, but they would most likely offer a free cruise as compensation which, well, … let’s just say I don’t want one.
PS. Octoshape is now officially cool – it delivered the Eurovision song contest perfectly over the Internet with practically SD-TV quality. Very nice. I can hear the death bells ringing for traditional TV.
