Gothenburg for kids - best places

For anyone coming to Göteborg, here are some of my favorite things to do with kids:

Universeum
Otherwise known as our home away from home in the winter, Universeum is science discovery museum right next to Liseberg. The 3-story indoor rainforest is always a winner (especially when the monkeys are out), as is the aquarium, where you can see Hermann the shark. We spend most of our time, however, in the play area called Puls on the 2nd floor, where you can test your speed on a mini sprint track, ride on a mechanical horse, design your own digital truck, and lots more.

City Library
I just love the Stadsbibliotek, not just because it's around the corner from our house on Götaplatsen, but because it's got a cozy, warm and bright kid's room (with a potty!) with lots of English (and French, German, Norwegian, Arabic, etc.) books, some puzzles and toys. They also put on an amazing array of talks, story hours, lectures, exhibits, etc. Plus, they added a decent cafe off the main rotunda last year so you can buy a juice box on your way in or out.


Liseberg Amusement Park
Our local amusement park with a surprising number of rides for kids ages 2-6 (and of course plenty for older kids, too). I like it best during Christmas time when you can still go on a roller coaster in the snow, but also go ice skating, visit Santa, ride a reindeer-pulled sleigh, check out the Christmas crafts market and warm your hands over drums of hot coals set up around the park as you drink a mug of glögg.

Maritiman
Scramble over and through a collection of 12 or so ships that are anchored in the river close to downtown, from a destroyer to a fire boat. Then have a good cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun in the floating cafe.
Waffles and fish
At the Sjöfartsmuseet (Museum of the Sea) in the Majorna section of town, start your weekend with an all-you-can-eat waffle breakfast in the small cafe, then check out the aquarium or the new play room on the 3rd floor and let the kids burn off the whipped cream and strawberry jam toppings.

Stadsmuseet
The City Museum has a large play area for kids where they can play store, give lessons in an old school room from the 180os, or move barges around a winding model of the Göta River. Head downstairs afterwards to the super-cozy cafe that has a box of toys in the back and plenty of pillars, nooks and crannies for the kids to chase each other around.

Slottskogen
In summer, nothing beats a picnic and people-watching in this sprawling park at the top of Linnegatan. We have spent many a sunny afternoon hanging out on the lawns, playing at Plikta playground, and visiting the cute petting zoo (where pony rides are just a couple of dollars each). Also hidden in Slottskogen is a pool full of energetic penguins, a moose family and a few bored seals. My favorite place to get a glass of wine in summer is Villa Belparc, a restaurant with a huge, picturesque outdoor terrace that overlooks a small lake/pond with a big fountain. The kids love exploring the terrace, eating the yummy french fries and feeding the ducks. In summer, don't forget to buy strawberries on your way home from one of the stands around the park.


In the winter, try the Naturhistoriska Museet (Natural History Museum) that looks down over the playground. It's a bargain (a yearly pass is about $7) and the collection of stuffed animals is old-school creepy to delight boys and girls of all ages.
Swimming
In the summer, the possibilities for swimming are endless. The beaches along the coast are gorgeous and rugged, but we like the kid-friendly and sandy beaches in the Delsjön nature area, especially the beaches at Harlanda Tjärn and Delsjön itself. Both have grassy shaded areas, sand, swings, shallow water for wading and ice cream vendors (key!). An extra benefit of this beach is the cute Cafe Lyckan that is just a short walk away. They do delicious waffles, and outside they have a goat and some bunnies (that they say you can take home if you like). This is the beach at Delsjön last June.
In the winter you can do drop-in swimming at the very warm and low-key Sporthallsbadet, which is next to the large Valhalla swimming complex. This warm pool has tons of floaties and swim noodles to choose from, and a tiny slide. For older kids, Åbybadet south of town is a huge, raucous swim complex with multiple pools, a decked out kiddie wading area and 3 huge spiraling slides that elicit screams from swimmers of all ages.

Kid-friendly Cafes
Most cafes in town are generally kid-friendly (and many have changing tables), but some try harder than others. Glädjebubblan is a big cafe with a play area that's great for babies and young toddlers. And I just love Språkcafeet, the language cafe.

They have a box of toys in the back and a changing table in the bathroom, but this one gets my recommendation because you can sit outside (like the ladies above) and let the kids run around Esperantoplatsen as you eat your delicious vegetarian buffet lunch.

That's all for now, folks!

The Potato King

I went on a walk today with my Swedish class and was happy we stopped at the statue of Jonas Alströmer downtown by Lilla Torget. I have been wanting to take a better look at the statue ever since I heard Alströmer is known as the Potato King (Potatiskungen) of Sweden. Apparently he popularized potato farming (and I suppose eating) in the early 1700's, when the majority of Swedes were very poor and, presto change-o, became the Potato King. He also got everyone calling the tasty tubers "potatis" instead of "jordäpplen" (earth apples -- which is what the Germans still call them), so I figure he had a good sense of humor too, because "potatis" is just funny to say.

For the love of mid-sized cities

I met a woman recently who swears by the mid-sized city. She's an American, from Portland, married to a Swede from the only non-mid-sized city here: Stockholm. Aside from Portland, this woman, let's call her June, lived in San Francisco, Stockholm and now Gothenburg. June argued that big cities were too hard to get around in, people living there were unfriendly, and the big city's large number of cultural offerings made her feel like she was missing something all the time. Mid-sized cities, on the other hand, were friendlier, and just big enough to support a few good restaurants, a museum or two and maybe even an opera or symphony. Plus, you could get from one end to the other without too much trouble.

I was surprised that my first reaction was to agree with her. As a native San Franciscan it's perhaps heresy to do so, but so be it. I love being in a smaller city. Or perhaps I should say that I loved moving to a smaller city. It was so easy to get settled, to get around town, to get a handle on driving around town. Being in the bumping tourist chaos that is Rome regardless of the time of year, I was reminded how nice it is NOT to live in a city that is a tourist destination. Because the city's so small we run into people we know all the time, and everyone knows every cafe so meeting up is a breeze. It's a bit like living in San Francisco if San Francisco were only Noe Valley and Glen Park. Plus City Hall. And the Police Station. You get the idea.

The downside of Gothenburg is that after 8 months there's nothing new to see. Frankly there wasn't a lot of new stuff to see after a week, and in winter in particular there's not a lot to do with the kids except stroll downtown, go for coffee, go to the library or the Universeum (kid's museum) and ... go home again. Merel assures me this is not just the plight of those of us with children, but I'm suspicious. Anyway, the antidote to the absence of haute culture is of course friends. So now that the holidays are over and our friends are back from South Africa, Copenhagen, Texas, Stockholm, Jamaica, Amsterdam, Oslo and wherever else they were, we can do what generations of people living in small towns have done - make our own fun. Maybe we'll do what my mom always suggested when I was bored - play Monopoly.

Cafe Culture?

A year ago "cafe" was not the first word that came to mind when I thought of Sweden. But as it turns out Swedish cafes are just great, running the gamut from sleek-modern halls decked with flocked wallpaper to cozy little shabby chic retreats. Here's one of my favorites (of the shabby chick variety), Le Petit Cafe in Haga:

And yes, of course Ava's drinking a latte.

My other favorite at the moment is called the Språkcafeet, or the language cafe, happily located on Esperanto Platsen. They do a mean vegetarian buffet lunch for 69 SEK ($10) and there are nightly language exchanges where you can come and speak your language of choice. It's a bit crypt-like, which is perfect for escaping a grey day.

I try to avoid the American-wanna-be Espresso House (complete with odd 10-ft-tall photos of lonely paper coffee cups posed in urban locations: cup on a newspaper vending machine, cup on a wall) as much as possible. It's one of the few cafes (perhaps the only in town?) that serves decaf.

The new apartment

View from our front door:
The kids' room. Note that books are usually all over the floor because Julian's current favorite activity is pulling the books off of the white shelf one by one and creating a lovely pile to trip over later on. Well, that's probably tied for first place with climbing onto Ava's bed and jumping up and down while holding onto the railing at the foot of the bed, which gives me "agida" as they say in New Jersey:

Dining room and the little desk where I am sitting right now:
Living room with no curtains, coffee table and TV (and we're surviving -- oh the hardships of life overseas!):
Our front door:

New digs

This week we signed a contract for our new apartment. Hurray, a permanent place to perch! (Even better, we had tenants move into the Rudden house a week ago, so we're no longer in danger of needing to eat beans on toast for the forseeable future.) We'll move into our new place on July 1. It's a little pricier than we hoped, but it's huge by Swedish standards at 1500 sq. ft. and the location is pretty darned awesome. Just 2 blocks from "The Avenue," main library, art museum, amusement park, etc. Oh, and an olympic swimming pool, because then I'm REALLY going to start exercising, ha ha.

These pictures are admittedly really really horrible since they're from our 5-minute viewing of the apartment and everyone kept wanting to rush us down to the laundry room (not super nice, so ???), but they're all I have. The first is a view of the the street, Sodra Vagan, from the front of the apartment (we're on the 5th floor). The others are some interior shots from the entryway. It's called a 5-room apartment, but basically it's a 2 bd/1.5 bath with an extra work room thing off the kitchen that will be an office, guest room thing we think. We have two teeney balconies that I guess are a big deal here, though I don't know what you do with them except poke your hand out to see if it's raining or if you need a fleece or not. I'll email our new address out soon.

Summer in Sweden

If you're from the Bay Area you kind of take the weather for granted. Most of the time it's comfortable out -- maybe a little too windy or a little too foggy, but basically you can go about your day not thinking much about the atmosphere. The Swedes do not take good weather for granted. Period. The drive to make the most of a sunny day is almost palpable ... or maybe that's the smoke from one of those funny little disposable grills everyone uses? At any rate, it's been a gorgeous month (unlike last May when it rained for 6 weeks straight), and we are doing our Swede-like best to enjoy the sun.

Last weekend we went to the 700th anniversary of the Bohus Fortress. Leave it to the Swedes to have like 10 fun things for kids to do there, including try on costumes (see princess Ava photo), play with swords, make jewelry, etc. Then on Tuesday we went with a few new friends to Deljon (pronounced "Del-unpronouncable glutteral w sound-n" in case you were wondering) to a little lake. Let me say that once we GOT to the lake it was lovely and we grilled on a disposable grill and everything. The picture of naked person on beach is Ava about 35 seconds after we arrived. The trip there was one of those "why-am-I-an-expat" experiences. First we all marched from the apartment to the parking lot where our rental car is with all of our beach stuff. Then I drove us all over town in circles to get to the lake, which should be like a 5 minute drive away because driving in a new city is just NOT nice. Then I parked in the wrong lot and ended up having to march Julian, Ava and Sonja 1.5 miles in the hot sun to the lake, just in time for Julian to need a nap, and Julian only takes a nap in his crib. His crib was NOT at the beach. Then we did the whole thing in the other direction, including the driving in circles bit.

Anyway, I needed a very large glass of (insanely expensive) wine after this outing, and happily, Sandy, Traci and a very funny Dutch woman named Merel were obliging. I think this picture of Sandy and Traci was taken around 9pm -- very cool to have light so late.

And finally I have to include this picture of Ava and Sonja that they took when they went to visit the moose in Slottskogen today because they are so darned cute.

Apartment city

We are beginning to think about where to live after our temporary housing stint ends July 1. Gothenburg is full of apartment buildings -- in fact I don't think I've seen a single-family home since we've been here, which sort of boggles my mind -- so we'll likely be in an apartment. Some are 5- or 6-story, 19th Century buildings like the ones on Linnegatan behind Adrian in this picture, and many, especially a bit further out of the center of town, are newer and uglier (and perhaps bigger and more practical for a family of 4 inside?). I have to say these 1960's boxes totally depress me, so I'm crossing my fingers we can find something in the city center, though the rental market here is horrible, for various reasons that I only half understand. Something to do with the state regulating rental prices, and therefore there being little to no incentive for owners to rent out their properties. Everything has been rolling along nicely, so I'm sure we'll find something that we like.

On another note, Julian has his first ice cream cone today and it nearly blew his mind. He was covered in it and whenever I tried to take it away he started screaming like I've never heard and tears and boogers seemed to shoot out of him. He loved it so much he sort of look possessed and I swear at one point his eyes rolled back in his head. Sadly, I didn't have the camera with me, but even people sitting near us were watching in amusement/horror.