Northern Frangistan
Since 3 destinations were fun last year, let's try 4 this year!
Last summer we went on a 23 day trip with the kids to 3 countries: 10 of those days were spent in Toronto & then we spent 4 days each in Paris, London & Edinburgh - we lost a day to flying across the Atlantic. Since that worked out really well, we thought we’d push our luck a bit & visit 4 new countries this summer: Germany, Norway, Sweden & Belgium.
Visiting Berlin has long been on our bucket list so that was the primary driver to visit Northern Frangistan. But I also had friends living in the capitals of both Norway & Sweden, the last 2 Nordic countries we hadn’t visited yet, so those also made the list. I’d read that Brussels, the HQ of the EU, was supposed to be nice so we rounded out the list with it.
Berlin
Flying into terminal 1 of the Berlin airport was a great experience and the S-Bahn connection to the city center dropped us off walking distance from the apartment we’d rented out. In general, getting around the city via the S-Bahn & U-Bahn or on foot was pretty easy, except for the lack of AC on the trains and the somewhat annoying payment system they used. At least both kids could ride free!
Good food was easy to find in Berlin, both at food courts & standalone restaurants. Better yet, the supermarkets were delightfully cheap! Getting water, on the other hand, was noticeably harder than it is in NYC - restaurants often refused to serve us tap water!
Berlin had painted statues of bears all over the city but not much in the way of outdoor sculpture beyond that. However, it more than made up for this with a large collection of murals, mostly on the remnants of the infamous wall. Moreover, Berlin’s architecture blew me away; I’ve seen many cities with a few great buildings but only in Berlin did it feel like the baseline for architecture was very high - even government buildings look amazing in Berlin!
There were quite a few museums, which were generally easy to reach. But what really impressed us were the omnipresent play spaces for kids; it felt like you could barely go anywhere in Berlin without seeing a little playground!
Overall, I liked Berlin a lot aside from the bees everywhere. My only major disappointment came at the very end of our time there, when we flew out of terminal 2, which is a miserable experience that stands in stark contrast to terminal 1.
Oslo
While we were delighted to learn that kids ride free on all mass transit in Oslo, I was mildly disappointed that the metro, which turned out to be commuter rail, didn’t go anywhere useful to us. But the streetcars easily took us to most places we needed and the payment app worked nicely. The major exception to this was the shoreline, which is very walkable (like most places we visited) but had absolutely no transit access.
We didn’t want to try buying groceries in Oslo but, similarly to Berlin, there were multiple good food courts & standalone restaurants. Unlike Berlin, we were pleasantly surprised to find that restaurants were more than happy to give us tap water.
In stark contrast to Berlin, there are virtually no murals in Oslo but instead there are outdoor sculptures seemingly everywhere, including large collections in multiple parks. The architecture is also quite good although not quite to Berlin’s extraordinary standard.
Oslo had a decent number of playgrounds, including an unusual outdoor play space along the waterfront. It also has several good museums but they’re all isolated on a designated island that can only be accessed by a single bus line.
The most striking aspect of Oslo for me was the utter lack of poverty or homelessness: it’s only only 1 of the 4 cities in which I didn’t spot a single homeless person. In retrospect, this makes sense given the very low levels of inequality in a particularly wealthy country.
On our way out of Oslo, we discovered that there is basically no good food to be found anywhere at the airport!
Stockholm
I didn’t know this before the trip but Stockholm is about thrice the size (population) of the other Scandinavian capitals! After learning this I had perhaps unrealistically high expectations because I was mildly disappointed by the city. But first, let’s cover the good parts.
Both metro & trams worked well, including the excellent payment system - kids also ride free here. The transit system even covers the impressive collection of museums, which are confined to their own area of the city like in Oslo. Similarly to NYC & London, there are multiple airports; we flew into ARN, which is large & has an excellent train connection to the city center, and out of BMA, which is tiny but still has a streetcar connection & surprisingly good food options.
On the other hand, there were no decent food courts anywhere and not as many good restaurants or playgrounds as we’d expected, although the 2 playgrounds we did find were pretty good. But there was barely anything in the way of public visual art to be found & even the architecture failed to impress.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Stockholm, given its reputation for low income inequality, was the plethora of homeless panhandlers we encountered; not as bad as NYC but much worse than we’d expected from Scandinavia.
Brussels
There’s an express train from the airport to the city, which worked very well on the way in but the payment system was down on our way out, delaying us substantially. Also, while kids can ride free on the transit system, we had to waste hours on our first day getting a special ID card for our 8 YO so she could take advantage of the free travel. Other than that, the metro & streetcars worked well - NFC-powered payment system was similar to Stockholm, London & NYC.
The most striking feature of Brussels is that cars & buses reliably stop to let pedestrians cross the street at every one of the numerous crosswalks. Having grown accustomed to the entitled attitudes of drivers in NYC, this was a (very pleasant) shock for us.
Aside from that, the city was largely unremarkable: it had only 1 decent food court but plenty of good restaurants, decent architecture & a reasonable amount of outdoor sculpture. Weirdly, there were many amazing murals but only along the walls of the streetcar tunnels that were inaccessible without endangering oneself!
There were few playgrounds but we happened to be staying close to the best one in the city, which was quite impressive. The museum situation wasn’t bad either: they were a handful of good ones clustered together around a metro station on the edge of the city.
Overall, Brussels felt comparable to DC or Ottawa rather than NYC, London or Paris but that’s hardly surprising given its size.