The Streets of Stockholm

When I was a kid, my most-favorite daycare teacher, Joni, made up a game to play as she walked us to school. Here's how it went--when no one was paying attention she'd plant herself on a random spot on the ground and would say "water, gas, or nothing!" Our job was to guess what was under her feet, a metal plate that said "water", a metal plate that said "gas", or nothing. For unknown reasons I loved that game, and as a result I learned the location of a surprising number of access points for water and gas in the city of Ottumwa, Iowa.

There's been a bit of carryover from that game into my adult life. I find myself paying attention to the metal plates in the roads of the cities I visit. I've also developed some favorite finds. My all-time favorite is to find a plate in the road with the word "water" in a foreign language. My second favorite is to find a plate with the name of the city I'm visiting. Over the years I've developed a rather extensive collection of photographs of water, gas, and other metal plates from streets around the world.

The streets of Stockholm have pleased me more than the streets of any other city I've visited. First, the water access points in Stockholm have the word water on them in Swedish, have the word Stockholm on them, and have an image of a queen for good measure.

I would have been very pleased with just water plates, but Stockholm has even more "street features" to enjoy. In the oldest part of Stockholm the buildings are very old, very tall, and separated by extremely narrow alleys. The streets and sidewalks are all brick and cobblestone. Instead of painting the brick roads to indicate parking spots for people with disabilities, they built the markings into the brick layout.

And here's my favorite find--in downtown Stockholm (and downtown Gothenburg) many of the streets have been designated as "walking streets", which simply means that cars (and all other motorized vehicles) are not allowed. The walking streets used to be regular streets, but the city designated them for pedestrians only. It makes for a very nice downtown experience (for pedestrians anyway). On some of the walking streets in Stockholm, the painted line in the center of the road as been replaced with metal words, which I'm quite certain form sentences (Swedish ones of course--so I have no idea what they say). I of course absolutely fell in love with the idea. Here's a (crooked) photo: