Little known facts about Stockholm Sweden & More Precisely, the University of Stockholm

There’s a lot to do in Stockholm. You can go see the Vasa Ship from 1623. You can totter around Gamla Stan, a beautifully preserved medieval part of town where Stockholm was founded in 1252. You can visit Fotografiska or head out to Drottningholm palace. 

Meanwhile, I visited the laundry room on the University of Stockholm campus:

the laundry room ("tvättstuga") for
University of Stockholm Lappis students

Eva insisted we drop in to revisit the old tvättstuga. She had met her future husband by one of the washing machines. So that mostly explains it. 

I totally forgot about the super Swedish part where you have to sign up on a sign up sheet to use a washing machine.  If you didn’t plan really far ahead, you’d be there in the middle of the night with your underwear turned inside out.  Between the hours of 1am - 6am, the trättstuga is first-come-first-served for everyone with dirty laundry and impaired calendar skills. 

After inspecting the exact place where Eva met her husband, Viktor, who now is in the dehumidifying business, gave us a lecture on the torr skåp. A torr skåp is this like cabinet you hang your clothes in while hot air blows on them. It’s like a simulated clothes line. 

torr skåp in a laundry room somewhere

More visitors to Stockholm really should hit up its laundry rooms. 

This whole episode started last Friday when I flew to Stockholm for my class reunion. At the reunion dinner, Eva suggested heading over to “Lappis,” the student housing we all lived in. We rounded up Annika and Viktor and took a bus up there. 

(Viktor wanted to drive, but I put my foot down. We were taking the bus. I had just bought a 24-hour transit ticket and sure as hell was not going to waste the opportunity to use it.)

In these modern times, there’s locks on the doors of the dormitory buildings, so we had to loiter out front, nothing to see here except four middle-aged folks acting casual. We waited until someone came out and then all subtle like caught the door and scuttled in behind them.

Eva, Annika, Viktor and I studied the mailboxes, inspected the kitchen areas, looked into the common rooms, stared out the windows. Found the laundry room.

We went back outside and exclaimed at the luxury of the “new" building that had gone up sometime in the past three decades. It even had tiny balconies. Wow. 

We walked down the embankment and under the road and across the meadow, past Frescati and the student union and headed into the main university building. As Eva and Annika lead the way to the library, I knew for a fact I’d never been in it before. Eva and Annika were incredulous. The library is in the largest building on campus they said. We were here all the time, they said. The university cafe is right here, the said.

Excerpt from the journal I kept during my year in Sweden:

Journal entry from stardate November 18.
Going to a major university that I believed had no library.

Ha. I knew I had never been in that library. Sometimes I amaze even myself.