Business Or First Class, Lydmar Hotel, Art Explosion

I arrived in Stockholm yesterday listless and bedraggled. My SAS flight that connected in Chicago was having refueling problems forcing us to stay another couple hours on the tarmac. Those unforeseen delays is one reason I insist on traveling business or first class, imagine being scrunched up in a legroom-less seat in the back of plane? Well, I don’t have to imagine it, I’ve done it, I simply don’t like that area of the plane that I call route 66.

In Stockholm, I landed at the lovely Lydmar Hotel, a spot that my Swedish duchess client says is her favorite hotel in the city. That’s quite an endorsement. Art populates the entire hotel. Photography line the walls, sculptures are all over the hallway, and Swedish design furniture is everywhere. There’s nothing better than a well-designed luxury hotel to soothe the soul upon arriving in a city. After a quick nap, I wanted to smell the Stockholm air, so I hightailed to Sodermalm, the area I spent most of the time on my last trip a few years ago. Much has changed. New ones have replaced many of the stores, there’s an Acne and Nudie Jeans store that weren’t there before among a few other new storefronts I didn’t recognize. I need to do a proper spin around the city tomorrow to get re-acquainted and to update our clearly outdated City Guide I wrote about five years ago.