Gothenburg Travel Guide – Best Behaviour

Gothenburg Travel Guide. Gothenburg is Sweden’s second biggest city after Stockholm. I think it may suffer from ‘second-city syndrome’, like Birmingham does with London. The poor relation that just happens to have a lot of people living there but doesn’t have the pizazz of the bigger boy, and probably never will.

Not that I’ve ever been to Stockholm, apart from a two-hour stopover in its airport. I did have a very tasty sandwich there though. I’m just assuming it is more fun than Gothenburg. There’s an ABBA museum in Stockholm. What more could you want?

Admittedly it rained constantly on my visit to Gothenburg, which possibly put the city in a bad light. It may have also put the people of Gothenburg in a bad light too. It is true they weren’t all miserable; those that worked in transport, retail and tourism were polite enough. Still, they were being paid to be nice.

Maybe I was just unlucky on my trip, but most of the others I bumped into were sporting faces like slapped arses*.

*This is a colloquialism from the UK, meaning to be of a miserable or displeased disposition. ‘A face like a wet weekend’ is another, meaning the same thing. Given the climatic joys of Gothenburg, this might be more appropriate.

The sour demeanour of the residents manifested in me getting told-off by them quite a few times. They seemed very keen to point out the error of my ways. Sometimes they even formed a queue to do it. I’m generally not badly behaved, but any slight transgression of the rules in Gothenburg seems to bring out the inner policeman in its people.

For instance, the trivial crime of walking in a cycle lane. In the UK, I do my best to get in the way of Lycra-clad nuisances. I view it as payback for the times they nearly crashed into me when they were riding on pavements, or jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings.

In Gothenburg they take it very seriously. Cycle-lane incursion is an offence that will get you verbally tasered. It wouldn’t surprise me if they carried real tasers, just in case they ever come across a stroppy Englishman who wanted to argue the point.

You may be thinking I have started out quite negatively about Gothenburg, but I do have one positive about the city. It has a very good art gallery. As well as providing shelter from the rain, it contains a superb art collection. Before going, I didn’t know of its existence. The city should shout about it more. However, shouting isn’t allowed. Neither is talking in anything above an inaudible whisper. As the stewards in the gallery told me, several times

They do like everyone to adhere to the rules, and they let you know it.

In a strange contradiction to this officiousness regarding conformity, the Gothenburgers also get quite defensive about their individual liberties. Which makes me think they are all just a bunch of miserable sods looking for an excuse to have a go at anyone.

For instance, in my country, a domestic argument between a man and his wife, that spills out onto the streets, is an entertainment to be relished. If you have your phone handy, it is also one to be filmed and the experience shared with the rest of the world on YouTube.

Not in Sweden apparently, they protect their freedoms. “We don’t do that in our country”, the man behind me at the bus-stop said, pointing to my phone. He had a big dog with him, so I wasn’t going to argue.

Another example of individual liberties being exerted in my direction was the man with the very large arse at Gothenburg’s Uwelli Stadium.

I’d gone to watch a Speedway Grand Prix, this being my excuse for a visit to the city. A wide-berthed fellow arrived late and edged his ample frame along the row until he reached the empty seat next to me. Fair play to him, he did manage to squeeze most of his bulk onto his own seat. Apart from the buttock that sat on my left leg for the rest of the evening.

As it turned out, the evening didn’t last long anyway. The rain was relentless and the event was called off halfway through. As you can gather, my trip to Gothenburg wasn’t going well.

The city couldn’t help the weather, but the people had a lot to do with it. I might have caught them on a bad weekend. Maybe the IKEA sale had just finished. This disastrous scenario might explain something else I’d noticed. A good proportion of the remaining residents of Gothenburg, i.e. those that weren’t sitting on me, or telling me off, appeared to be very, very inebriated.

I’ve never seen such a huge number of smartly dressed middle-aged men hanging onto lamp posts and bus stops in the middle of the day. There was even a drunkard slouched next to me on a tram. He was so arseholed that he couldn’t understand any of my globally-recognised English swearwords when he started throwing up in my lap.

To see that many drunks in Sweden was quite surprising. It is a country that has a well-known puritanical zealotry for temperance. You can still only buy wine, spirits and stronger beers for home consumption from a state-run off-licence called ‘Systembolaget’. Their shops close very early and you’ve got sod-all chance of getting any hair of the dog on a Sunday.

As part of this state monopoly’s mission, they also preach about the dangers of alcohol. Until fairly recently, they actually rationed how much you could buy. Their stores are akin to the old Soviet supermarkets with no product advertising and plain walls. They don’t sell any chilled wine or cold beer either. This is just to ensure you have some thinking-time whilst waiting on your own fridge or freezer before diving into the demon drink.

If you want to avoid the off-putting stores, Systembolaget now has a website which is very popular in Sweden. They claim to be able to source any booze you want, from anywhere in the world. This sounds like a bit of a contradiction to their moral high ground on drinking.

I was keen to test the claims of the Systembolaget website. I wanted to set it the task of getting hold of a bottle of Peruvian Llama-Sperm Gin. I’d made this drink up just to make it harder, but I’d have settled for any gin with animal sperm in it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even access the site without providing some Swedish proof of being over the age of twenty. At least I assume that is what the pop-up message said. My Swedish didn’t really extend beyond “vilket javla cykelfalt”, which means “what sodding cycle lane?”. I’d looked this up before I went to Gothenburg, you never know when it might come in handy.

It could be that the website’s pop-up had said something totally different to an age-check requirement. It could have translated as, “Not available to the likes of you”. Maybe the website’s analytics had clocked my IP address as being that of a troublemaker. One who is currently writing less than complimentary things about his visit to Sweden.

With this nanny-state control on the sale of takeaway booze, getting mullered in the privacy of your own home has always been made very difficult. This means the bars and pubs in Sweden are very popular. If for nothing else than allowing you to grab a cold beer when you actually want one.

I know the UK is no saint when it comes to binge-drinking, but the Swedes excel at it. This may explain the number of older, and seemingly respectable people stumbling around the streets of Gothenburg in the middle of the afternoon. In the UK they’d have gotten pissed watching daytime TV in their own home and fallen asleep in their armchair. Then only to be woken up by the firemen barging their front door down as a result of their dropped ciggy.

The bizarre and excessive drinking by the folks of Gothenburg could be a reaction to the government’s control of alcohol. It could also be that even they get fed up with feeling obliged to follow the rules all the time. Protesting by getting legless is probably a safer option than sticking two fingers up to the status quo by sitting stark-bollock naked in the middle of a cycle lane.

Perhaps the over-consumption of alcohol is a quieter and more internalised protest. Except when it externalises over me on a tram.

It could also be that the climate drives them to drink. We were there in May. Therefore, you would think there might have been a few glimpses of blue sky between the clouds. They were few and far between.

We did have a ten-minute break in the rain when we visited the Liseberg Amusement Park. This is just outside the centre of Gothenburg and it is Sweden’s most popular paid tourist attraction.

The park is famous for a ride called ‘Balder’. This is a huge wooden roller-coaster and quite well-known amongst devotees of such rides. It was twice nominated as the ‘Best Wooden Roller-Coaster in the World’.

I bet you didn’t know that award existed. Although, it is perhaps not quite as obscure as the ‘Allergen of The Year’ award. Both gold and aluminium have won that honour in the past, but I don’t think wood has ever made it to the shortlist.

Incidentally, if you are allergic to wood, you should avoid touching or inhaling the Balder. There isn’t any signage to this effect on the ride. A bit of an oversight in a country with more rules than you can shake a big stick at, but please bear it in mind. Oh, and if you are going to shake a big stick, please ask if anyone is allergic to wood before doing so.

We had a ride on the Balder, and cute though its woodiness was, it did feel disturbingly rickety. I wondered if it had come from IKEA in a flat-pack. With other rides at the park being called Flygis, Hissningen and Fisketuren, they all sound like they should. You might want to check the IKEA website for click and collect options near you.

Also to be found at Liseberg are the cement handprints of the members of ABBA. This may not have the status of Stockholm’s ABBA Museum, but it makes the park a Mecca for some of their more obsessive fans. It allows you to feel the joy of putting your hands where theirs have been.

I’ve just reread that, something about it sounds unsavoury.

ABBA did actually play concerts at the park, but this was way back when they were a real music act and not just a lucrative computer-generated sideshow. One of their early concerts at Liseberg was in June 1973. At that time, they had the rather snappy band name of ‘Björn and Benny, Agnetha and Frida’. I’m surprised nobody came up with a more digestible acronym sooner. If they’d stuck with that name, it would have been BABAAF.

This sounds like something else in the IKEA catalogue, or the noise made by the puking drunk on the tram.

That’s the third time I’ve mentioned this nauseating incident. It’s quite funny how some things just stick in your mind as your most vivid memory of a place.

In what was a grey and overcast city, it was a little splash of colour.