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Let's take the usual moan about the vicissitudes of air travel as read; we touched down at Arlanda in the afternoon. I don't think we ever before experienced such a long walk from a plane to the baggage carousels: the airport seems to sprawl over a vast area. In the arrivals hall we sought an ATM and got a stock of SEK. Beside the ATM was a machine which allowed us purchase bus tickets by credit card and, even though we now had cash, I decided to use it. The instructions were in Swedish but by dint of trial and error I persuaded it to dispense a ticket. But no way could I get a second one. I think the message in Swedish told us that one could get only one ticket on a particular card. Herself didn't fancy staying in the airport, so she tried her card, and got her own ticket.

From the bus we saw leafless birches, conifers, brown grass, and rocks, all lit by a low sun which left residual ice in those places where its rays did not reach. Spring in Sweden.

The bus left us at the city terminal where we picked up a map of the city, bought 72-hour passes for the public transport system (180SEK each -- those who want to get an impression of price levels might note that the rate is about 9SEK to the euro) and found the subway. Through my ineptitude, we first took a train in the wrong direction and had to get off and find one going the other way. We finally got to Rådmansgatan which, according to our travel company, was 200m from our hotel. Asking passers-by for directions initially caused us some concern, as the first two did not know either the hotel or the street we sought, but the third one gave us good directions and we found the Hotel Birger Jarl. First impressions were good: the reception area was visually-pleasing, clean and comfortable; our room was on the small side, but seemed newly refurbished and had all we needed; as is increasingly common, there were facilities for making tea or coffee, but the complimentary soft drinks and chocolate bars were a nice extra touch.

By the time we had settled in and freshened up it was early evening, and we were hungry. We decided to have a look around our immediate neighbourhood in order to get our bearings and in the hope of finding somewhere to eat. On previous visits to Scandinavian countries we had found dining to be very expensive, more so than in other countries we have visited. There were several restaurants near enough the hotel, most of them offering Asian cuisine. More or less at random we elected a place which offered an oriental buffet -- not fine dining, but acceptable fuel food and palatable enough. With a half-carafe of reasonably good house wine, our meal cost under SEK300, far less than I had supposed we might have to pay.

We noticed that the pavements were covered with grit and fine pebbles, something which might make them hazardous if one wished to run. The reason, we presumed, was they had been gritted during the winter.

Back to the hotel, an expensive beer in the bar, and so to bed.