1095 moments...: Stockholm I.

286. With four out of six being first-timers in Stockholm, where do we have lunch? A Swedish restaurant with pickled herring, meatballs, salmon, and princess cakes? Alas, no.

A Scandinavian restaurant, at least? Nope.

Surely a European restaurant? Still wrong.

Take another moment to think about it.

Hard Rock's Café.

Earlier, while Geluck, Claire and Anna were filling out check-in forms at the hotel, I was idly browsing through brochures. As Anna and I always share a room when traveling for work, I had no paperwork to do. On the city map with strange and lengthy labels, a familiar name stood out. Remembering Anna's slight obsession with Hard Rock's Café in New York, I showed her the location of the ubiquitous restaurant on the map, amused. Anna, on the other hand, was more than amused. "Let's go there!" she exclaimed. Hungry and not familiar with the city, we decided why not.

It's 3 pm and the huge restaurant is largely empty. A tattooed waitress is taking our orders (minus the speech "Hello! My name is Blah Blah Blah and I'll be your waitress for today..."), prompting my Melbourne boss to nickname her the girl with the dragon tattoo. Studying the internationally uniform menu, Claire wants to know if there is some Swedish juice. "Like, normal juice?" asks the waitress. "No, when I was in Denmark, they had this Danish juice..."

"Well, you are not in Denmark..." just like the heroine in the Swedish Millennium trilogy, our girl with the dragon tattoo is pretty good with logic.

"In fact, we are not even in Sweden. We are in the least Swedish place possible in the entire Stockholm," Geluck observes. "Just water then," Claire gives up. Turning to me, the waitress asks, "and you?" "Can I please have some flat water?" I stick with the basic.

"Do you want to make it Swedish?"

287. At the supermarket with Claire, being excited about random things and cracking each other up with very, very silly conversations.