I have been living in Stockholm for the best part of three years now.
Inspired by my friend Thomas Wilkinson’s “The 10 best things about living in Thailand” on his blog Earthoria, I thought it would only be fair for me to share my thoughts on the ten best and worst things about life in Stockholm, Sweden.
I am deliberately avoiding generalising about life in Sweden as a whole because I believe that I have not yet reached that level of knowledge about the country in its entirety to allow me to post a helpful review. What I do know is that life in Stockholm and a handful of other “big” cities here, is significantly different to that of the rest of the country and generalising will probably not be just.
1. Water, water, water!
Stockholm, a city in water
They don’t call it “Venice of the North” for no reason. Stockholm is not one city. It’s a collection of thousands of islands and islets (around 24,000 to be more precise!), some large but most small, forming the Stockholm Archipelago (or Skärgården as it’s known here), one of the biggest of the Baltic Sea.
There’s access to water everywhere here! You feel like you never live too far from a canal, a river, a lake or the sea. The distances between the islands are generally small, small enough to be able to canoe between groups of them, peg your tent and call it home for an evening.
The islands are beautiful, the water is swimmable (at least during the warmer summer months anyway!) and with so many around, chances are that you will never have to worry about privacy or overcrowding.
