Wandering the 'hood

Roughly speaking, Södermalm is Stockholm's equivalent of Greenwich Village, or of SoMa in San Francisco. It's also my home for at least the next six months. The neighborhood is a quirky mish-mash of old sailors' quarters and luthiers' shops, galleries and salons, open-air cafés, and music stores. Some of the cobblestone streets date back to the eighteenth century or before. Walking around tonight, my instinct to explore rewarded me with the discovery of a few places I will probably revisit many times while I'm here.

The sunset from Katarinahissen involves no hissen or booen whatsoever. In fact, it's quite lovely:


Dinner was a big bowl of asparagus and crayfish soup, with excellent black bread, at a tiny cafe high above Stadsgårdsleden, looking out across the harbor and the city. It turns out my phone has a fairly decent panorama mode, even if the user interface leaves rather much to be desired; here's the view from my table:



Dessert was a slice of choklad tårta and a cup of hot tea, at a small restaurant hidden away in the basement of a building a few hundred meters down Fjällgatan from the first place. It also gave me another chance to play with the panorama mode:


From there I walked south and then west, past cafés and shops and apartment buildings, the pale glow from a television set illuminating the occasional window. I wonder what they were watching...

Along the way, I found a single block containing what must have been half a dozen Irish Pubs, one of them displaying its motto ("Guiness is good for you") proudly in foot-high letters in the front window. Apparently Söder has a highly industrious, if localized, Irish population.

It's a very small part of the city, but it seems like a good place to be, and I'll definitely be doing more exploring as time permits.

Besides, I need to walk off that dessert somehow.