Stockholm: Middle of the Earth?

When I was in my twenties in New York, I felt like I was exactly in the place where everything was happening. To be away from there for a week was to lift my finger from the pulse and be tragically disconnected from all that was hip and new and life-affirming. But then I went back to Santa Fe and remembered that everything truly crucial could be followed on TV and the Web, and the stuff I was missing out on—mainly cultural events, media gossip and cool parties—were things that one could possibly live without, especially if one could fill those sensory empty spots with fields of wildflowers, towering mountains, dusty horses behind barbed-wire fences and the scents of pinon and roasting green chiles.

Being in Sweden, on the other hand, is a bit like being in Middle Earth. We’ve got freaky albino fairy-looking people, twisting 15th century alleyways, horses with big puffs of fur around their feet, Lappland, for god’s sake…

But seriously, Sweden is more centrally located than you think. Do you know it’s possible to drive to Africa from here? I guess my seventh grade geography class should have made that plain, but I never really thought about it until the other day when I spotted a big army-transportation-type vehicle (I don’t know what you call them—something between a Humvee and a bus) painted pink and stacked with bicycles and kayaks, cruising down the street. I figured it was taking some leaf-peeping tourists up to the north country, but as usual, Niklas set me straight. “Those things actually go to India or Africa,” he said, instantly blowing my mind. Kaboom! I tend to associate trips to India or Africa with costly plane tickets… not with romantic, danger-fraught road trips in bumpy pastel-colored four-wheel vehicles.

So, then I started plotting out a dream trip that would begin in Stockholm and go down through Denmark, across Eastern Europe, through Turkey, Syria, Jordan and that little tip of Saudi Arabia then to Egypt. From there it gets kind of hairy by land, so I’d switch to a sailboat and cruise down through the Red Sea and over to Dubai to visit Rhonda, and then possibly over to India. Looking out for pirates, of course. But seeing as this would probably take months and tens of thousands of dollars, I retreated to the costly airfare route. I had just begun researching airfares from Stockholm to Dubai when my husband called, and my wanderlustiness turned into a telephone fight. (“Are you out of your mind? We can’t go to Bali, Hawaii and Dubai all in the same six months. You’re going to put me in the poor house, woman!”)

Alrighty, then, back to reality, and the subject of how Sweden is possibly at the center of the world. I’ve got to hand it to the Swedes for seeming to really understand their relationship to other countries. Unlike big, blustering America, Sweden is primarily interested in being “international,” which translates to a healthy and robust interaction with pop culture and the global economy. You would think this would be also be the case for residents of progressive, wealthy U.S. cities like New York, but you'd be wrong. New Yorkers can be incredibly provincial, and since they think they already live in the best place on earth, many never go anywhere else. You’ve probably read this quote before, but I’ll end with a favorite that I think fits here quite well:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” —Mark Twain, 1857