I read something shortly before leaving for Sweden about the subway system, the Tunnelbana. Just about every one of their 100 stations was treated as an art gallery. It's something Stockholm touts as the worlds longest art gallery. This is a bit of a misrepresentation---selling themselves short in a way. Not every station is an art gallery. In fact, many stations are the canvas itself, forcing you to walk through the work of art. I imagine it's much like waking up to a beautiful mountain view every morning in that eventually, the majority of people no longer see it. I've never quite been normal---I still look up at the moon at night, find myself momentarily awed at the brief glimpse of mountains off in the distance on my way into work. Still, in the rush of trying to get from point A to B I can understand becoming oblivious to the art. It just slows you down. Despite that, I decided to spend the day checking out Stockholm's subway system.
Not all stations are created equal. One above ground station is more cutie pop-culture reference than grand statement. Covered in small square tiles it becomes an 8-bit video game landscape that cries out Super Mario without ever, as far as I saw, actually crossing into overt copyright violation. Another station looks like it could've been transplanted out of any major American city with it's central platform covered in traditional white subway tile and abstract lines and squiggles of of neon lighting mounted on the ceiling. There are some stations where the artist took the project literally and covered the walls of the station in panels of art to liven up the place.
The underground stations in general are carved into the bedrock below Stockholm and left rough-hewn and natural. This alone creates an impressive juxtaposition of nature and technology, but turn that into a canvas and it transcends gallery altogether. One station, T-Centralen (the heart of the system where all T lines meet), is covered in blue and white, with contrasting vines of some sort of fern or ivy sprawling on the walls and ceiling and the silhouettes of scaffolding and workers building the whole thing. Kungstradgarden is abstractly painted in slightly muted greens and reds in a style that could be a collaboration between Mondrian and Miro, but is also sprinkled with actual artifacts from the old palace (on loan from one of the museums) and presented as an archaeology dig. Solan Centrum is a painted a stark black and vibrant, 70s-horror-movie-fake-blood red.
I spent the entire day in the metro and only saw a fraction of the stations, mostly those of the red and blue line and only one or two on the green line. Ok...I didn't spend the entire day in the metro. I also used to metro as a tool to visit small sections of a large swath of the city. At most stations I would get off and go top side to see what life was like above ground. One trip took me out of the city and into one of the suburbs where there seemed to be nothing but high-rise apartment buildings and highways. Another took me into the heart of the downtown where the beginnings of a Christmas market were going up and an ice skating rink had been setup in one of the squares as the statue of some old Swede looked down at kids and adults sliding around on little blades of metal. Nearly every stop was within a block of some beautiful old church. Many stations exited into shopping malls full of grocery stores and clothing retailers.
Sitting around the malls and watching people do something as mundane as shopping for food was an interesting glimpse into what the average Stockholmian's life is like. But watching them travel through the subway lets you see what they are not. And what they are not is helpful or terribly friendly. They're not outwardly rude, but they aren't approachable or prone to simple acts of kindness. Holding doors and giving way to rushed travelers with more important destinations than me earned me odd, sometimes confused looks, and seemed to out me as a foreigner even more than being fat and carrying a camera. While standing in T-Centralen taking pictures there was a frustrated young woman that looked on the verge of tears. I had seen her stop a few people asking for help only to be rebuffed or ignored completely. She came up to me, but when I replied in English she looked disappointed, said something along the lines of "You wouldn't know" and walked off. A minute later she came back, more frustrated and apologized for asking me something she knew I wouldn't know...but didn't I know how to get to the train station. Not the T-bana or the light rail trains...the trains out of Stockholm. And surprising to both of us, I actually did know.
T-Centralen is the beating heart of the T-bana, but above it's also the beating heart of just about everything in Stockholm that travels on rails. Top-most in this hierarchy is Centralstation where trains to and from Stockholm branch out all over Sweden. In my exploring the station and the above ground area immediately around the station I had been through Centralstation and a brief section of the network on tunnels leading to the trains. I knew how to get to where she was going, but I had no idea how to tell her---so I showed her. At most this took 5 minutes of my time, but on several occasions she thanked me, commented on how a Swede would never do this, and even laughed when I was polite to people. At one point she said "Don't ever change." And then like that we both smiled, I wished her luck, and we went our separate ways. Now this was an extraordinary example of people not being helpful, but on several occasions I found myself in possession of knowledge of the T-bana that people from outside of Stockholm didn't have, and someone that had only been in the city 48 hours was helping direct lifelong Swedes. And at least half the time they made comment about how no one else would help or would feign ignorance.
I'm not saying Swedish people or Stockholmians (I really have no idea if that's a word) are bad, just that they're different. There have been many studies on happiness, the biggest being the World Happiness Report. Year after year, the Scandinavian countries are consistently the top countries---trading places with each other from year to year, but always making up the top ten. In fact, most years if the list was only a top 5 it was just be the Scandinavian Happiness Report. There have been many attempts to understand and interpreted this phenomenon and something interesting typically surfaces. Contrary to what you might think, the Scandinavian people are actually some of the most selfish individuals in the world. The key here is "individuals." As a people, they are rather united and have made sacrifices for the better of the whole and the end result is free healthcare, higher education, a low unemployment rate, economic stability. All of this has given them the freedom to be selfish. They don't need the kindness of strangers, so they don't offer it. It's just...different. And after my initial disappointment I realized it's actually critical to the Scandinavian identity. The people wouldn't be who they are without that. Random aside---the Kiwis typically rate as the most generous in the world.
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