However, unlike when we’d visited Hamburg and taken the shuttle bus out of convenience but not because we’d planned to, with this cruise port stop at Gothenburg the shuttle bus for some free time exploration was a necessity as the actual port for ships was nearly nine kilometres away from the city centre as the crow flies, and considerably more by road.

The morning view from our balcony in the morning was a cool, overcast, but dry one.

Our shuttle bus for this visit to Gothenburg dropped us off at Gustav Adolfs Torg, a town square distinguished by a statue to Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden between 1611 and 1632. Gustavus became highly respected for his military leadership during the Thirty Years War, allying Sweden with the Protestants trying to defend themselves from Catholic forces looking to expand the Holy Roman Empire into the Baltic. His use of deploying well-trained mobile and infantry units to complement one another helped win decisive victories and the tactics were soon copied by other armies. Gustavus is credited with turning Sweden into a major European power during this period and for centuries after.

We’d come to Gothenburg on Island Princess with a couple of places we’d decided might be worth walking to, so headed off in the direction of the first, eastwards. This took us over the main canal of the city, then through Brunnsparken, a small spot where trams passed by frequently, a fountain flowed, and people sat at the bars and cafés dotted around.

A brief introduction to Gothenburg, this. In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be looking around a nineteenth century park, the Garden Society of Gothenburg and the Palm House in it.

One small word of warning or advice, though: Gothenburg has two notable gardens pandering to the likes of those with botanical leanings and the Garden Society is the smaller of the two and the closer to the city centre (and therefore more easily-walkable-to which is why we headed there). The Gothenburg Botanical Garden is significantly larger but a little further south in Gothenburg. If you’re super-keen about flowers and plants then you’ll likely want to visit both.

Our walk through and look around the Garden Society of Gothenburg wasn’t born from a love of flora but rather it was something that was clearly other than just streets roughly on the way to another destination in the city we had in mind to visit. My personal knowledge of plant-life is small enough to write on the petal of a daisy and wouldn’t extend to much more than “I think this is the petal of a daisy” but parks and gardens are pleasing to wander around no matter what.

If you visit the Garden Society of Gothenburg you’ll find it impossible to miss the Palm House. Dating from 1878 and inspired by London’s Crystal Palace but to a slightly less grand scale, it still remains a gorgeous sight and is clearly a product of the industrial revolution, utilising large frames of iron and thousands of panes of glass.

The interior of the Palm House is split into five sections, each with different climates, but tropical heat and humidity is what greets you first. And in addition to greeting you it greets your camera which has been outside in the cool air of the Swedish city, and so your camera lens keeps misting up. Which means you keep having to wipe the lens and take a photo and hope that you’ve wiped without smearing too much and not given the lens surface enough time to fog over again.

Obviously, yes, you could simply be patient and wait until your equipment warms to the same as the ambient temperature in the greenhouse. But who has time for that? Anyway, that’s why some of the photos look a little smudgy. In fact I had better pictures from my phone in here (although I used it less often) simply because the phone was already effectively warmed up by being in my pocket.

There were some nice, exotic flowers on display but other than recognising pitcher plants, I couldn’t tell you what anything was.

In the largest section of the Palm House it was possible to climb steps to an upper platform where some tables and chairs were set out and locals were sitting around with food and drinks, chatting, and generally appreciating being inside.

Back outside, we continued our walk through the Garden Society of Gothenburg towards its south western exit because it was roughly to the south that we wanted to head next.

There’s not a lot to do in the Garden Society of Gothenburg other than enjoy the gardens and plants and flowers, but if enjoying gardens and plants and flowers is something you like then with its close proximity to the main part of Gothenburg it’s a free activity that’s clearly going to be worth your while.

In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll visit the Universeum in Gothenburg because we’d seen it combined science, zoo, and aquarium all in one place, and we like all those things.

After our walk through the The Garden Society Of Gothenburg And The Palm House we continued in a roughly southerly direction. Architecture in Gothenburg was fairly mixed so elements stood out as a result. Immediately outside the park we spotted a nineteenth century theatre, then one road over something that could have had a history as a church or fire station but was now a table tennis facility.

As we approached the Universeum there was a lot of building work taking place; excavations, demolitions, and construction were in evidence in every direction. With plenty of boards up to protect the roads and passers-by from any debris or to prevent trespassing there were also a lot of canvasses on which street artists could work. Actually getting any photos of any of it was incredibly difficult, though, as the pedestrianised areas to walk along were very narrow, squeezed between the busy main roads and hoardings. We thought we might be able to find more advantageous photography positions after our visit to the museum but that would not prove to be possible.

The Universeum itself was a very impressive building with a multistorey jungle setting inside one side accessed along bridges and up and down steps, but also capable of being visited by elevators on each level. Airlock-style entrances prevented any of the wildlife from escaping because some of the birds were free-flying. It was a great environment but warm, busy, and with lots of ups and downs requiring a fair bit of exertion – and we’re no spring chickens – that we soon realised that our tactic of entering at the lowest level was a mistake.

We abandoned our look low down and took the elevator to the top with the intention to explore from there downwards instead. Happily, we also saw that it was possible to head out onto a balcony area so it gave us a chance to get some fresh air and see Gothenburg from high altitude. The metallic-looking towers we immediately saw belonged to a hotel. The nearby dinosaur sculpture looked like it might have emerged from the excavation work taking place in all directions.

While one side of the Universeum held the tropical zoo-like environment, on the other side on each of the floors there were other rooms and that gave us the chance to look around the aquarium. Clean, large tanks, lots of varieties of fish and coral and sea urchins, and we’re rarely if ever disappointed with just stopping for a moment or two to watch fish swim effortlessly around.

Back to the other animals then before we decided to leave, and that took us past numerous reptiles, and, like the fish, they’re creatures that just make me relax. A lovely variety of snakes and lizards to admire curled up in various desert or jungle settings, and exotic flowers to ooh and aah over as well.

We spent less time in the Universeum than we’d expected, despite its large size and arguably good attractions that should have suited us perfectly. In truth, this was more a place for families with kids, so if you’re visiting Gothenburg with children then there’s a lot to recommend here, especially given the large amusements area next to the Universeum that we weren’t interested in checking out.

We mostly enjoyed the building and things in the Universeum although we encountered some behaviour from locals – visitors and staff – that we wouldn’t quite describe as rude, but would definitely put down as just over the border there in Unfriendlyland. It affected the experience. You know the stereotype about Londoners on tube trains being sullen and unapproachable? This was like that, but colder. We’d interacted with a couple of people while walking around the Palm House before this, too, with similar results; holding a door open for someone and smiling but being met with an icy stare and not even a nod of acknowledgement; that sort of thing. Something about the people of Gothenburg did not endear us to their city.

And that’s part of the reason that we decided that we’d cut short our walk around the city at this point. There was another area we’d considered taking a look at on this day in Gothenburg: Haga, the old town. This would have meant the almost-circular route we’d planned before returning to the shuttle bus pick-up point, but the general downbeat feeling at this point coupled with light rain that had started helped us to decide to head back early instead. In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll do just that when we say goodbye to Gothenburg.

“You can’t really appreciate a country and its people and its culture until you’ve been begging for money to get the bus out of the isolated village where everyone pees in the street and the dogs won’t leave you alone,” is the sort of thing I imagine they might say. Or: “Two weeks on a cruise ship can’t possibly compare with really getting to know everything there is to know about this tree and the bush nearby I’ve been sleeping rough in.”

We like to see things differently. Cruising for us allows us to quickly get a feel for historical aspects and architectural aspects, and enjoy local food and drink, all admittedly within a reasonable distance of the coast of a country. That short visit that coincides with a hefty injection of money into the local economy (sly dig!) gives us a chance to decide if we do want to see more of the place. Call me cynical, but I suspect the only reason a lot of “real” travellers return to a place time after time isn’t to learn more about it and see new things but because it’s cheap and they’re seeking revenge on the guy who stole their wallet last time.

Hey, we’ve all got our prejudices against anyone who doesn’t travel in exactly the same way as us. It’s fun to denigrate an entire class of people.

“Mark, really appreciating you telling me this, really helping me get to know you more, but what does it actually have to do with Gothenburg?”

Good point, narrative device. I’ll get to that now.

A single day, I must admit, may not be quite enough time to know everything about a place but it’s enough time to form an opinion, and sometimes you just get a strong feeling for somewhere. And we didn’t enjoy this day in Gothenburg very much.

We concluded our time in Gothenburg by making our way as quickly as possible from the Universeum to where the shuttle bus could take us back to Island Princess docked a decidedly inconvenient nine kilometres away from the city.

We may not have visited Gothenburg on its best of days. We may have picked the wrong direction and wrong things to see. The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant so that didn’t help. But the people were the thing that put us off Gothenburg the most. Aren’t the people the “real” part of a country? We didn’t meet a single happy or polite person at all. I fully accept that the common element in all this was us, but we actually get on pretty well with most people even if we’re not the most forthcoming, and I only generate an air of menace when someone upsets me.

When we travel somewhere we almost always think “Yeah, lots more to see, we could definitely come back here and explore more, maybe stay and experience more.” But after just a few hours ashore, Gothenburg left us with more of a “Well, we’ve been here now, I suppose.” Perhaps it takes the “real” travellers two weeks to get that feeling about pee-ridden villages and the mystery of their missing passport, so whose form of travelling is truly the best?

Ours, obviously. Duh. We get cocktails at the end of every night.

We headed back towards the city centre, accompanied by light drizzle in the air and grey clouds in our heads. You want to know how unimpressed we were with it all? We didn’t even try to find a bar to see if it could persuade us the city had had any saving grace.

Gothenburg still has some nice if not exactly exceptional architecture, and with a few canals here and there it certainly felt like it could look considerably more appealing on a sunny day.

The statue of King Karl IX we passed by has an interesting history attached to it. The king himself only ruled for seven years and they were spent almost entirely at war partly due to siding with the Protestants during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation conflicts, but he was seen as forming an historical bridge between his own father and that of his more respected son, Gustavus Adolphus, whose statue we’d seen when we’d been dropped off at the town square in Gothenburg. The original statue was supposed to be of the king on foot but the instigator of the plan to erect a statue raised enough funding to put up the equestrian statue of Karl IX instead.

The statue was erected in 1904 but in 1935 it became necessary to move it out of the way of increasing traffic. This wasn’t without protest by the people and some council members but the move eventually took place, shifting the statue ten metres and turning it to face west.

The king’s sword was stolen in 1977 and a new one was commissioned to replace it. In 1998 the original sword was found in someone’s house and can now be seen on display in the Museum of Gothenburg.

Continuing with our theme of grumpy Swedes, as we approached a fountain we’d passed earlier in the day we saw some people demonstrating for or against something. They were being filmed. They had a loudspeaker. Some were holding up photos of women in lingerie. Absolutely no idea what was going on, but I do know that as soon as they saw me with my camera we had their attention and whatever it was that they were declaring loudly (and in an unfriendly tone, naturally, since, you know, when in Gothenburg and all that) was directed at me now. Accusations or general statements or questions, we didn’t know. We were able to play the roles of Tourists Who Don’t Know What The Hell You’re Saying So We’re Going To Ignore You And Hope This Doesn’t Escalate so well it’s a wonder we didn’t get nominated at the Oscars.

The centre of the granite fountain near where the loud locals were congregated hosted a bronze statue of a woman, the first statue of a woman to be erected in Gothenburg. Dating from 1883 and officially known as The Sowing Woman, it’s more colloquially known as Johanna in Brunnsparken for one of two competing theories: either that was the name of the ballet dancer model who posed for the sculpture, or the statue’s opening day coincided with Johanna’s name day in Sweden.

That concluded our somewhat disappointing time in the city of Gothenburg as we made it to the square at the perfect time to board a shuttle bus and take us back to Island Princess docked at the not-so-nearby port.

Back on the ship we grabbed a snack and a drink, headed to our room, and did all the usual things such as showering, charging batteries, and backing up photos ahead of the sail away from Sweden.

Gothenburg’s port has a number of little islands dotted around and, probably like the city itself, could look very nice on a day with better weather. It was a little flat and grey for our cruise away but I still enjoyed the views of low-lying rocky land with small lighthouses, though, and as you can see, I took plenty of photographs of the departure on the ship.

Of course we’d like to go back to Gothenburg at some point, despite everything I’ve said, and give it a second chance. We are people who are prepared to change our minds in the face of new evidence or the introduction of some happy drug in the city’s water supply just before we arrive. But for this cruise, that was Sweden completed.

The evening aboard Island Princess was more of an “Ah, that’s better” time. That’s the joy of cruising, after all; no matter what happens ashore you can always get back and have a nice meal with drinks before, during, and afterwards. And that’s exactly what we did.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting Copenhagen for the second time in a year and our third visit overall. Spoiler: we like Copenhagen a lot. Not so much of a spoiler: we like Copenhagen more than Gothenburg.