Flashback: "Salanderland, July 2010!

On the 13th of November, I went into the 7-Eleven shop on Chan Man Street in Sai Kung and bought three 0,5 liter bottles of water, three cans of "ICE" beer and a packet of chewing gum.

On Monday the 10th of January, Lisbeth Salander went into the 7-Eleven Shop on Götgatan on the island of Södermalm in Stockholm, where she bought shampoo, toothpaste, soap, yoghurt, milk, eggs, cheese, bread, frozen cinnamon rolls, coffee, Lipton teabags, pickles, apples, a large package of Billy’s Pan Pizza and a carton of Marlboro Lights.
No I’m not sure which year this was, but who cares; it is just fiction anyway.


Like travelling around with a tourist-map in a foreign city, to look for great architecture and important historic places, so the visitors can now travel through Stockholm, equipped with the “Millennium-map”. This map you can purchase in the local tourist office, and then you can find and visit all the important places, which played important roles in the story about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomquist, in Stieg Larssons “Millennium Trilogy”.

As mentioned somewhere before: these books were the main reason, we started our Europe tour in Stockholm this summer. And by saying this I want to be honest; yes, we also bought this map and found as many of the places described, as we found interesting.
It was a good way to embrace and see the city in another way than by staggering around to the most common tourist places, and it lead us to areas of Stockholm, we would never have located otherwise.
But it also was a bit awkward, to chase around from place to place where some fictive persons from an authors mind, should have experienced this or that.
In fact it all started before we even got there, as I booked us into “Freys Hotel”, where one of the baddies from the books also prefer to stay when he visit Stockholm, not that it was that much an important location in the story, but mainly because it was only about three hundred meters from the main train station, and so we could just walk the distance after arriving with the Arlanda Express.
But back to the 7-Eleven shop at Götgatan; no we did not go in that shop, there were already to many others with the same idea, but we did go to “Kvarnan” on Tjärhovsgatan, where Lisbeth Salander meets with the „Evil Fingers every Tuesday.
This should be one of the oldest pubs in Stockholm, and it was a nice place, but surprised me in that way, that it wasn’t that dark and Gothic, as I had imagined the place to be from the story.
It was more or less kind of ordinary restaurant at the first view. We were having some drinks at the bar and around us at the tables; decent citizens were sitting having their dinner.
Judging by the plates of food the waiters were carrying out from the kitchen, it could be a good option for a real nice dinner.
Time and time again a group of people entered the place, looked around, took some photos and disappeared down some stairs to the basement. After a while they came back up, talking and making gestures to a person among them, who seemed to be a guide, then they would have a look around yet again, take some more photos, before wandering of through the exit again, without buying a single drink.
That must have been joining the guided „Millennium Tour“ which you could also chose to attend, if you were not so used to read a map. At that time I found that a bit odd, I mean to walk around with a guide, who told about and showed these places where fictive people has done lot of different things, but as I think about this now: I cannot see any difference from when I visited New Zealand last year, and were travelling on the back of a horse, to different places where they had been shooting some scenes for the movie; “The Lord of the rings”. That is also fiction. Or what about a visit to “Disneyland”?
But maybe this is what Stockholm will be called in some years: “Salanderland”.