City Visit (Operatic interlude) – Gothenburg

“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser“
(“Love is a rebellious bird
That none can tame“)
Carmen

In September 2023, on my EuropeExplored trip to Finland and Sweden, I went to see Nabucco at Gothenburg Opera House, the first time I had ever been to an opera. I enjoyed the experience so much that I thought that I would go to see other operas, should the opportunity arise. The Royal Opera House in London is notoriously expensive, with centre seats in the Dress Circle (equivalent to where I had sat in Gothenburg) typically costing £290 (and the majority of other seats still over £200). This April, I received an email from the Gothenburg Opera advertising their 2024/25 season of performances. Carmen was among the many tempting operas. For some performances, there were pensioner discount tickets, which only cost £35 for the best seats in the house (including the centre of the dress circle, where I had sat before). A quick check told me that there were cheap flights to Gothenburg and a reasonably-priced hotel (which was rather more upmarket than where I had stayed on my previous visit) a few minutes walk from the Opera House . Doing the sums, I realised that it would be cheaper to see Carmen in Gothenburg than at the Royal Opera House in May. (As it turned out, the Royal Opera House’s production received poor reviews – the updated setting and the introduction of a new character were deemed by the critics to have been a failure.) So I decided to pay a return visit to Gothenburg immediately after the August Bank Holiday weekend, to take advantage of one of the performances offering pensioners’ discounted tickets.

Day 1 – Tuesday 27th August 2024 – London to Gothenburg
I had been playing in a chess tournament in Maidenhead for the three days prior to my departure. Chess non-players don’t appreciate quite how exhausting tournament play can be, especially when combined with a lengthy journey to and from the venue each day. So I was grateful that my flight to Gothenburg was not until 2pm, meaning that I could have a lie in that morning.

As usual, I was travelling from Stansted Airport and the later start meant that my Freedom Pass was valid to cover the parts of the journey to the airport within London. I had received an email the day before warning of staff shortages at security at Stansted and advising arriving three hours before departure. I was glad that I ignored the advice. While the airport was busier than usual (I don’t normally travel in summer), the time to get through security was minimal. I had plenty of time to buy a sandwich for lunch, but was shocked by how much was now being charged. I usually don’t eat at those foreign airports that charge rip-off prices – previously Stansted had been immune to this trend, but now seems to have joined in, trying to extract as much money as possible from its captive passengers.

The incoming plane to take me to Gothenburg arrived on time, but only had a short 25 minutes scheduled before it was due to depart again. This was never going to be enough, but unusually for a Ryanair flight, it was only about 60% full, so the last passengers were on board only a couple of minutes after the scheduled departure time and we were moving within a few minutes of the last passenger sitting down. There was broken cloud most of the way, with good views of Harwich and Felixstowe as we left England, and of Aalborg and North Jutland in Denmark (where I had been in June).

The plane touched down at Landvetter airport at 16:50. Amazingly, I was at the bus stop waiting for the next bus to the city centre (Landvetter being about a 40 minute drive from the centre of Gothenburg) less than ten minutes after the plane first touched the runway. The buses depart every 20 minutes and I was in plenty of time for the 17:10 departure. I had bought my ticket in advance on-line, to get the cheapest price.

The bus deposited me at the main bus terminal, adjacent to Gothenburg Central railway station. From there, I just had to cross the road to find the hotel that I had booked. Once I had settled in, I set off to find dinner. Being the first night in Sweden, I fancied something traditional, so dined on salmon tatare followed by meatballs served with mashed potatoes, lingonberries and cucumber salad. I drank local Eriksberg beer to accompany my meal.

After dinner, it was still just about light enough to go for a walk to reacquaint myself with the main sights in Gothenburg. I walked past the City Hall to the harbour-front (next to the Opera House). Nearby is moored a sailing ship, the Barken Viking, which is now used as a floating hotel.

Day 2 – Wednesday 28th August 2024 – Gothenburg
I contemplated what I should do during this day in Gothenburg, in particular whether I should seek out new attractions to see or just revisit the four museums I had been to on my previous visit. In the end I decided to do the latter, as most of the museums had some new exhibitions that had opened recently.

My first challenge of the day was trying to work out how the shower in my hotel worked. The bathroom had a bath and a shower fixed over it, controlled by one set of taps. Usually, there is lever or button somewhere to switch between filling the bath and operating the shower. After considerable trying, I gave up and decided to have a bath instead. I concluded that it was probably supposed to be controlled by pulling out the tap used to turn on the water supply as this did move in and out, but was rather loose. I was going to report it to the hotel’s reception, but there was always a large queue of people waiting there, so I didn’t bother.

It was a lovely sunny day in Gothenburg, so after breakfast I set off to walk to my first destination, the city Maritime Museum, but I took a circuitous route via the city’s parks and following one of the canals for a while. I made a slight detour to visit a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, and who himself disappeared at the end of the World War II (and is now believed to have been murdered by the Soviets). The memorial is in small park behind the Haga Church, which I had walked past the previous year without realising the memorial was nearby.

Gothenburg does a very good value Museums Card which lets you visit four of the city museums for a year at a cost of under £9 if you are over 63 years of age. However, the subscription is per calendar year, so although it was less than a year since I originally acquired my Museums Card, I still had to top it up before it would be valid again. I did this at my first point of call, the Maritime Museum, where I had timed my walk to arrive when it opened. I initially went to the basement, where the aquarium is situated. Although there was a new exhibition due to open later in 2024, there was nothing new compared when I had visited it previously. That said, the main exhibition is excellent, with so much information, that I still found it interesting on a second viewing. After about 90 minutes in the Maritime Museum, I left and caught a tram to the city centre.

Next stop was Gothenburg’s City Museum. After initially viewing the exhibitions devoted to prehistoric and Viking history that I recalled from last time, I moved on to a new area describing the foundation of the city in the early 1600s. There were further rooms bringing you from then to the present day. Here, I learnt that Hasselblad cameras, manufactured in Gothenburg, were used by NASA at the time of the moon landings, and that several had been left behind on the moon (to save weight when the lunar module took off from the moon’s surface).

I then caught a tram to the south of the city to visit the main art gallery. This has a reasonable number of paintings by French Impressionists, although the Van Gogh I remembered from last time no longer appeared to be on display. There was a special exhibition, spread over a number of rooms, devoted to Ilon Wiklands, a Swedish illustrator of children’s books.

Finally, I went to the Röhsska Museum, Gothenburg’s museum of design and craft. This also was in the process of preparing a new exhibition. As last time, this museum was the least interesting to me personally and so I spent less time there than in the others.

By the time I had walked back to my hotel it was about 3:30pm. The hotel had a sauna and a small swimming pool and I thought that this would be the best time to use them. The sauna didn’t seem as hot as the one I used in Finland, despite boosting the temperature and adding water to the coals to create more steam, so I didn’t feel the long lasting glow for the rest of the evening that I had experienced in Finland. Rather disconcertingly the sauna was glass fronted, looking out over the rooftops. Normally, this would be fine, but there were workmen working on a roof a couple of blocks away, who I could clearly see and so presumably could see me sitting naked in the sauna. After the sauna I went for a short swim in the pool.

As Carmen is a relatively long opera, the performance including intervals was scheduled to last from 6:30pm to 10:30pm, with attendees advised to arrive no later than 6pm. This necessitated an early dinner. So soon after I had finished in the pool I headed out to a pizza restaurant, where I had an interesting parma ham and pear pizza.

I then made my way to Gothenburg Opera House on the harbour front, arriving at 6pm, which just gave me time to have a drink from the bar before the performance started. I thought that the Gothenburg Opera’s production of Carmen was brilliant – it was based on the 2002 Glyndebourne Carmen, and appeared to use similar sets and costumes. I hadn’t realised quite how raunchy an opera Carmen was, with Katarina Giotas being a wonderfully lascivious Carmen. In the intervals I chatted to a Gothenburg resident who was proud of the city’s opera, explaining that heavy subsidies allowed it to maintain a high standard. Nonetheless, he was amazed that I had made a special trip to Gothenburg just to see it.

Day 3 – Thursday 29th August 2024 – Gothenburg to London
As I was catching a lunchtime flight back to London, I did not have time to do much in Gothenburg before I departed. As the weather was still good, I went for a walk in the Trädgårdsföreningen, the extensive gardens in the heart of the city run by the Garden Society of Gothenburg. I called in at the Palm House, which first opened in 1878 and was modelled on London’s Crystal Palace.

I then just had time to walk through some of the other bits of central Gothenburg, including the indoor market, before making my way to the bus terminal to catch the 11:20 departure back to Landvetter airport. The airport was pleasantly uncrowded and my flight was on time, enabling to be home before tea time.