Tag: restaurant

2 Museum and 3 Restaurant Recommendations in Amsterdam

ZooksLeave a comment

Tere!

I personally consider Amsterdam as a city where you can enjoy yourself as long as you have sufficient money.

In addition to the fact that Amsterdam is an expensive city, museums in Amsterdam basically charge you. In my opinion, it is hard to enjoy Amsterdam with little budgets.

But!

That was because I was a student when I visited Amsterdam twice!

Now I have a job with a good salary! Besides, I save money for a trip, so I had enough funds to enjoy myself in Amsterdam. Since I spent only two days in the Netherlands, and did some sightseeing in Amsterdam for only one day, I went to two museums and three restaurants in Amsterdam this time (2023).

Table of Contents

     1. Museums
          a. Nxt museum
          b. Torture museum
     2. Restaurants
          a. Anne&Max
          b. Pancakes Amsterdam
          c. Vlaams
     ★Summary

1. Museums

First of all, let’s talk about the museums that I went to in Amsterdam.

In Amsterdam there are a number of museums such as Madam Tassau and Van Gough museum, but this time I chose Nxt museum and the torture museum.

a. Nxt museum

Nxt museum is located in the north of Amsterdam (more north than the Amsterdam Central station), and you can go there by ferry. Once you arrive at the opposite side by ferry, it only takes 15 minutes by walk to the Nxt museum. When I went to the Next museum, although there was construction on the road, it was not difficult to get to Next museum as the route was not complicated.

I bought a ticket for the Nxt museum in advance. Depending on the entry time, the prices differ so keep in mind that. If I had been a student, I would have definitely not come because the ticket price was more than 20 EUR for one adult. So expensive. I’m not sure if it was because it’s in Amsterdam or because the Nxt museum is so special or both….

It seems the exhibition’s theme varies from time to time. When I went to the Nxt museum, it was the world of video games and something like Takashi Murakami’s art. I like contemporary art, so it was worth paying 20 EUR to the Nxt museum.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

Some artworks are visitor-engaging, and it was extraordinarily interesting.

It appears to take more time than an old-fashioned museum, and yet it took me only one hour or 1.5 hours to spend time in the Nxt museum.

b. Torture museum

If you have read my article on the Belfast trip, you may know that I like visiting a creepy museum. Therefore I went to one interesting but creepy museum in Amsterdam…. It is the “Torture museum”.

It’s a small museum in Amsterdam, where you can see torturing items that were used in the middle ages. The ticket price was 10 EUR per adult.

When showing my ticket to the torture museum, the old guy who checked cheerily said

“Enjoy yourself!”

and immediately I thought









“This museum’s atmosphere is definitely not “to enjoy”…





The way to display all those torturing items was creepy, and the door and stairs clattered…

It’s not good for a person who is chicken!

But I got relieved as I heard other visitors’ fun voices later so I had fun there. 😂

Partially there was really a creepy object, and I couldn’t spend time there. Every torturing item has an explanation which was interesting.

The last was very good. The last should be like that!

The ticket only specifies the date, so you can go to the torture museum at any time during the day.

2. Restaurants

As I like eating, I want to enjoy food as much as possible during a trip because in my daily life in Estonia, I save money and eat something very healthy.

It does not mean that I will be extravagant for food on a trip, but it means that I want to eat what I want to eat during a trip.

Since my stay in Amsterdam was very short, I visited only four restaurants in Amsterdam, three of which I will introduce here.

a. Anne&Max

Anne&Max is a chain cafe in the Netherlands. Depending on where Anne&Max is, the opening hours differ. There was Anne&Max in 15 minutes by walk from the accommodation in Amsterdam, which opens at 8.30 in the morning, I decided to have breakfast in that Anne&Max cafe.

I ordered only a scone (with clotted cream and lemon curd) and a cup of coffee.

I wondered if I should eat a bit more, but






I couldn’t give up a scone…!!

It was probably because I went to Amsterdam right after travelling to Northern Ireland. Plus, I love lemon curd! I sometimes bought a jar of lemon curd when I lived in Ireland in 2015.

Scone with clotted cream and lemon curd and coffee

Although it didn’t meet my stomach, it did meet my mind.

Besides them, there are other breakfast menus and lunch menus at Anne&Max, if you can find anything interesting on Anne&Max’s website, try and go there.

b. Pancakes Amsterdam

I found Pancakes Amsterdam on Twitter.

A twitterer said that you could have fluffy pancakes in Amsterdam!

However, when looking at Pancakes Amsterdam’s menu before going there, I changed my mind…

Pancake menu






“I want to eat this banana chilli pancake!!”

It does sound like a pancake with disgusting combinations (plus bacon)m and yet I tried.






It was actually good…




It was sweet and salty or chilli’s spiciness that matched the banana’s sweetness… I don’t know how to explain because I’m so bad at reporting how good the food is and I don’t have much vocabulary, but anyway it was surprisingly tasty…

Banana chilli pancake

Also, I thought Dutch pancakes were small takoyaki-like pancakes. However, the Dutch pancake Pancakes Amsterdam served was a thinner pancake than a crepe.

Dutch mini pancakes

What is more, I found “Dutch coffee”!

Researching “Dutch coffee”, it’s coffee with eggnog. I had this coffee too.

Dutch coffee

They served me a cup of Dutch coffee with a stroopwafel.

It wasn’t as bitter like normal coffee. Since it had eggnog and cream on it, it was more like a dessert coffee.

I didn’t know about Dutch coffee until then! I learnt one more thing on this trip.

Pancakes Amsterdam doesn’t have only odd pancakes. (Or rather this banana-chilli pancake is the only unique one, I would say.) Pancakes Amsterdam have both sweet pancakes and savoury pancakes. You can customise your own pancakes as well.

I happened to go to Pancakes Amsterdam Negen Straatjes at 12.00 pm on Monday, and I had to wait for 40 minutes. I was glad that it was already the end of March… Imagine, if it had been February … as I needed to wait outside. Since it was so busy even on Monday, I assume the weekends and holidays there may be a longer queue Pancakes Amsterdam.

Pancakes Amsterdam accepted only the card payment.

c. Vlaams

When you go to Amsterdam, you should definitely go to Vlaams!

You can eat Belgian chips!

(You may have thought why it was not Dutch chips, but honestly I think there is no big difference. Tell me if you know the differences.)

It’s actually a chips stand, and they have a lot of kinds of sauces in Vlaams!

When I went to Vlaams in 2018, I chose the hottest sauce, and I was killing my mouth. It was tasty though.

This time I chose green pepper, which is just a mayonnaise sauce with green pepper, and it was not so spicy, so even people who can’t handle spiciness should be able to have it.

Vlaam's chips

But if you wonder which sauce you should choose, order “satay sauce” (with peanuts)!

(To be honest, I’m not 100% sure if they have this in Vlaams, but they should because in the Netherlands food cultures from some Asian countries such as Indonesia are there.)

The Dutch people like this satay sauce. I know it’s good, but I want to challenge myself.

This is why I choose something odd.

The sauce costs extra, so if you simply want to have chips with salt, you don’t need to pay for the sauce.

★Summary

Earlier I wrote I went to four restaurants, and the fourth place that I didn’t include in this article was a Vietnamese restaurant. Since I went there for my own self-satisfaction, I believed there was no point to describe it.

I spent only one day in Amsterdam whilst it was very satisfactory, and I enjoyed myself in a different way than when I was a student.

You can’t buy happiness with money?

That’s a lie, you can indeed buy happiness.

Aitäh! 🙂

6 Places to Eat Food and Sweets in Wakayama

ZooksLeave a comment

Tere!

Wakayama is full of nature, and the number of options to eat out is much smaller than Osaka or Tokyo. However, there are some advantages to eating out in Wakayama.

First, it’s cheap. Simply because Wakayama is a countryside prefecture, it costs less than a metropolis. Second, the ingredients are fresh. Particularly seafood is fresh and tasty. We also have local chicken species. Since they are fresh, it doesn’t smell badly like fish you can get in Europe.

In this article, I summarise six eating places that I went to in my hometown, Wakayama.

Table of Contents

     1. French restaurant chilo
     2. Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant
     3. Izakaya Snufkin
     4. Ktype chocolate company
     5. Nigiwai ichiba (market)
     6. Wakaya
     ★Summary

1. French restaurant chilo

French restaurant chilo is located in Tanabe, and it’s near the Tanabe police station. It doesn’t look like a restaurant because it’s in the regular house building. However, there are signs in front of the restaurant, so it won’t be too difficult to find it. A car park is just a few seconds away from there.

The restaurant looks more like an old style Japanese cafe called “Kissaten”, and it’s quite small. There were only five or six tables, and the maximum capacity is probably around 15.

They offered us two types of lunch menu: type A and type B. Type A had only one main dish whilst type B had two main dishes (meat and fish). My friend and I chose type B, so we selected two different fish dishes and two different meat dishes.

Our choices for meat dishes were chicken thigh (I forgot what the sauce was), and aigamo (which is a mixed bird of duck and mallard) with pear sauce. On the other hand, one of the fish dishes was fish poêlé (I also forgot which fish), and the other one was sea bream.

Although it was a lunch menu, since it was a full course, there was soup, one appetiser, and two main dishes, and we got full. However, we tried a daily cake in the end as well, which was a Basque cheesecake. Since we were both full, we ordered only one portion, and shared it.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

I know this is not relevant to any Japanese cuisine, however, it is worth going there. In case you get sick of Japanese cuisine, you can get French cuisine in Tanabe. My friend and I went there at lunch time, and yet they offer a dinner menu too.

2. Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant

Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant is not a fancy restaurant at all. It seems to be a local chain restaurant in Tanabe, and my home village has one. Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant Misu is near the secondary school in Misu, and if you wish to visit there somehow, you definitely need a car as there is no bus around there.

I went to Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant to have some lunch. The menu was sufficient and traditional Japanese style, and you can select a meal (teishoku), bowl or noodles. You can have some pints there too.

They also have a daily menu. I kind of wanted to try, but the daily menu when I went there was “oden” which is a pot meal, having different stuff such as white radish, surimi products, boiled eggs, beef, and so on. I didn’t choose this one because I had oden at the previous day’s dinner.

So I ordered “Oroshi Tonkatsu Teishoku”. Teishoku is a plate which consists of a bowl of rice, miso soup, a main dish, and one small side dish or more. Everything but “hamburg” which is like a meat patte in a burger is Japanese. “Tonkatsu” is deep fried pork with panko (like schnitzel). If you see “oroshi” in a menu, it means “with grated white radish”.

In addition to “oroshi tonkatsu”, rice, and miso soup, there were a few side dishes: salad, macaroni salad, okla Japanese salad and pickled radish. The side dishes often change in any teishoku restaurant. In Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant, it was said to change too.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

The taste overall was quite light. Given that you prefer thicker tastes, then it may not be satisfactory. However, I prefer lighter tastes, it was all good. The portion was pretty a lot, and I got full after eating. At Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant, you can have a bigger bowl of rice for free. I had a regular size.

The point that I might have been wrongly served is that I didn’t feel that there was enough grated white radish. I thought it was in the sauce, but if so, it was very little. Usually, if the menu says “oroshi”, there is a handful of a mountain of grated white radish. That was kind of disappointing though.

Before going to Ayumi Fukushi Restaurant, I read a review on Google map that the tastes were good, but the service wasn’t. On the contrary, I didn’t feel so. The waiters and cooks were energetic as well as polite.

When paying, you shouldn’t not wait for a waiter in Japan. After ordering, they usually leave a check note, so you need to bring it to the check out. Then you pay. I was in a European mode, so I was waiting though I’m Japanese. 😂

The payment? Of course I used cash, and it cost only 700 JPY (approximately less than 5 EUR with a rate then)!

3. Izakaya Snufkin

My local friend K and I went to Izakaya Snufkin near Tanabe station. In 2019 when I visited Japan, I went there with her. The owner of Snufkin has followed my Facebook page and sometimes gives me “Likes”, so I wanted to visit there again.

You may not know what “Izakaya” is. Izakaya is a common type of restaurant in Japan. It might be similar to a gastro pub as you can drink and eat. In some izakaya restaurants, they offer you “otoshi” which is like a set of appetisers. The contents of otoshi are different depending on the izakaya or a season, etc. This is included in the check.

In the izakaya, Japanese customers often have a medium size glass of beer called “namachu”. Try to say it and order it so you can impress them 😂 They also surely have some sake. Here is a note; “sake” means alcohol in general in Japanese. We call it “nihonshu” in real life.

Friend K ordered namachu, and I had nihonshu “Kuroushi” (black bull). Kuroushi is from Wakayama, and it is super easy to drink so be careful not to get drunk too fast.

Izakaya often has a variety of food menus too.

Starting with otsukuri (a set of raw fish), we had octopus tempura, broccoli salad, fried potatoes (very thin!), deep fried tofu in soup and so on. The master gave us a bowl of “negitro”. Toro is tuna, and negi is spring onion. It’s a handful of crushed tuna with spring onion, and we ate it with soy sauce. In a sushi restaurant, you can have this with sushi rice, and that’s my favourite. The rice can be sushi rice, but at home it can go with warm rice too. Both are tasty.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

I’ve never paid by card there but only in cash, hence I’m not sure if you can use a card. Remember, when travelling in Japan, it’s never bad to bring cash. In our case, the total cost was around 9,000 JPY for the two of us.

When I visit Japan again next time, hopefully in 2024, I want to come to Sunfukin with friend K again. Therefore, I do hope Snufkin beats the difficulty of running own izakaya due to COVID.

4. Ktype chocolate company

Friend T who I went to the French restaurant with and I went to Ktype chocolate company in Shirahama. This is a quite new chocolate shop in Shirahama, and the factory is in the same place.

They basically have three different types of chocolate based on which country cacao came from. I’m not sure if they can speak English, but they explain how different those chocolates are, by letting you try pieces of those chocolates. When we went to Ktype chocolate company, they were selling chocolate with Wakayama mikan (like mandarins) peels. I didn’t buy it, and unfortunately they didn’t have any for tasting at that time.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

In Ktype chocolate company, you can get some sweets and drinks too. They have chocolate cheesecake, chocolate cookies, chocolate brownie, and some chocolate or cacao drinks. Friend T got hot chocolate with chocolate from Ghana, and I had cacao soda. Cacao soda wasn’t strongly sparkling, and it tasted a bit sour. I personally liked it, and I imagined that it would be very nice to have it in summer, walking in Shirahama under the sun along the beach or the coast.

5. Nigiwai ichiba (market)

I went to Katsuura in Wakayama with my old friends from primary and secondary school.

In Katsuura there is a seafood market called “Nigiwai ichiba”. “Ichiba” means market, and at Nigiwai ichiba there are lots of local products. You can buy especially fresh tuna chunks.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

However, we went to Nigiwai Ichiba just for lunch. There are multiple small restaurants. You can take a seat in the eating place, having different dishes from different restaurants.

To order a meal, you need to pay at the check out machine. There you can browse the entire menu. We browsed, and decided to have tuna bowls.

We were waiting for a while, but they didn’t call our numbers. Then we realised that we didn’t pass our numbers like tickets to the restaurant! Such eegits. 😂 When you go there, don’t forget to do it. If you don’t know what exactly to do, ask them.

We waited another few more minutes, and they served us a tuna bowl. Don’t imagine something like a poke bowl. This bowl consists of only rice and parts of tuna. What you need to add to taste is only add the soy sauce that is served together.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

In Nigiwai Ichiba, you can also have Wakayama (local) ramen, deep fried tuna or whale, tuna teishoku, etc.

Our tuna bowl cost 1,000 JPY (around 8 EUR). Bring cash.

6. Wakaya

In Katsuura, there are Nachi waterfalls. It’s a quite famous tourist place. While going up the mountain, you can see the waterfalls. I’m not sure if there is a bus, but probably there are buses as I saw some car parks for buses.

Wakaya is a Japanese cafe in the Nachi waterfalls area. There is a souvenir shop together with Wakaya cafe. They don’t have a huge menu, and yet they have their original Japanese sweets such as “Otaki mochi”.

Mochi is sticky rice cake, and made from rice that is not for regular meals.

We ordered a set of a drink and Otaki mochi. As for drinks, you can choose coffee, sencha tea (if I remember correctly) as well as matcha. Since I was a tourist (!), I had a cup of matcha.

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

They grill Otaki mochi in the cafe, so you can have warm mochi. Inside of Otaki mochi, there is bean jam. Matcha at Wakaya tasted quite bitter at first, but then it tasted milder because Otaki mochi is sweet, and bitter matcha matched.

This set cost 600 JPY (4 EUR) with any aforementioned drinks. I would personally recommend matcha as even in Japan, it’s not so ordinary and easy to get matcha in a cafe.

★Summary

I would say that the countryside areas don’t have many places to eat out although you can get fresh ingredients.

I stayed in Tanabae for only two weeks with only one set of weekends, but still it was enough.

Next time I visit Japan, I would go to Snufkin again with the same friend. On this trip, my favourite one was Wakaya on the other hand since I was glad to have matcha and otaki mochi, which combination is very Japanese.

Matcha latte is good, and yet I would recommend trying real bitter matcha with Japanese sweets.

Aitäh! 🙂

5 Restaurants, Cafes in Stockholm, 3 Swedish Sweets You Should Try

ZooksLeave a comment

Tere!

Even though my travel is a budget trip (as repeatedly said), I don’t always eat foods from a supermarket. Since Stockholm is still expensive, and I didn’t stay there so long, I didn’t try many restaurants and cafes in Stockholm. However I will introduce a few restaurants and cafes, including some Swedish sweets in this article, so have a look!

Table of Contents

     1. Restaurant
          a. Hawaii Poke
          b. Le Kebab Odenplan
     2. Cafe
          a. Kaffeverket
          b. Gast Café
          c. Vete-Katten
     3. Swedish sweets and tea
          a. Dammsugare
          b. Princess cake
          c. Havreboll, pärlboll, chokladboll
          d. Bilar
          e. Garant
     ★Summary

1. Restaurant

In Stockholm, I went to only two restaurants. This is because; on the first day, I went to a gig, on the third day I had a flight back to Tallinn at night, and I didn’t have anything I specifically wanted to eat. (I’m talking about meals and savouries, not sweets.)

a. Hawaii Poke

First off, Hawaii Poke is a chain poke restaurant over Stockholm. Truth to be told, as I had been on a ketogenic diet since the end of February, and while travelling in Sweden I was taking a break from the diet, I wanted to eat some rice. Also because it was warm in Stockholm, I wanted to eat some raw vegetables. Therefore, I chose Hawaii Poke.

After wandering around the islands such as Djurgården, I went to a Hawaii Poke place in the mainland but close to Skeppsholmen.

I ordered Hula Sunrise. Because the rice was warm, in terms of rice Hawaii Poke’s bowl was better than the ones available in Tallinn, but overall I personally prefer the poke with shrimps and kimchi available in Tallinn. (The restaurant is called Poke Bowl.)

This Hawaii Poke restaurant is so small, and there were only a couple of seats. Perhaps their main business is take-away. I actually had an impression that there were more takeaways.

b. Le Kebab Odenplan

Before going to Sweden this time, I had a “goal” that was “I will eat kebab in Sweden!”. In Estonia, of course you can eat kebabs but always the selections are chicken, pork and vegetables. Yes, it’s Estonianised. (I mean, although pork is often eaten in Estonia, kebab was mainly developed in Islamic culture.)

But what I want is a beef kebab!!!

Then I found a kebab restaurant called Le Kebab Odenplan. Their rate in Google map is good, and Le Kebab Odenplan restaurant was close to the hostel, so I chose there. It was a pretty fancy restaurant. (Either it didn’t look like a regular kebab place/stand or they didn’t have regular kebab menus.)

The order style was; order first, and then take a seat. I arrived there at 6.00 pm on Saturday, so it was full of people. Due to this, it was difficult to find a seat for even one person.

I ordered a kebab wrap, but there are meal menus too. (I ordered just a kebab wrap.)

Once I ate it, it was much more different than I expected, and it was disappointing. Additionally, the meat’s texture was like minced meat. To be honest, I thought kebabs available at a kebab stand on the street would be tastier. My order cost 139 SEK (around €13) though. By the way, I really liked kebabs at the kebab stand on the street in Siegen, Germany…

Le Kebab Odenplan restaurant can be an option for those who want to eat fancy kebabs, but if you really want to enjoy the tastes, I wouldn’t recommend Le Kebab Odenplan restaurant.

2. Café

Whilst I wonder “what’s the point of café-hopping?”, “the taste of coffee is almost the same everywhere unless it’s really bad?”, I do like going to cafés. In Stockholm, I visited two cafés. One of the cafés was something I decided to go to right before going there. The other one is a café that I wanted to go to for a specific purpose.

a. Kaffeverket

I went to Kaffeverket for brunch when I arrived in Stockholm. I arrived in the centre of Stockholm at past 11.30 in the morning. I found one more cafe that looked good, but since Kaffeverket seemed to close earlier than the other cafe, I chose Kaffeverket so as to prevent me from regretting when I would have felt like going to Kaffeverket later. 

In Kaffeverket, there were lots of people, but it wasn’t too crowded. Kaffeverket is a small cafe, and yet there are some more seats in the inner part of Kaffeverket.

I ordered filter coffee and a tuna sandwich because the sandwich appeared to be spicy. However, the tuna sandwich was different from what I expected:






Huge.

This tuna sandwich was like an Asian fusion sandwich, and it cost around 130 SEK. (It’s approximately 13 EUR.) As for the coffee, I wanted them to serve a hotter one to me. It was a bit lukewarm for me.

In Kaffeverket, I could not find any sockets. Their Wi-Fi seemed to require a password. (Since I hate communicating with strangers a lot, I kept roaming on my phone in Kaffeverket, so I’m not still sure whether you can get the password even if you ask the clerk there.) The Wi-Fi’s password could not be seen even in a receipt either.

As the food portion is big, if you wish to go to Kaffeverket, you should go there for the purpose of brunch or lunch rather than breakfast, in my opinion. Also, it might not be good for working or studying unless you are sure that you can get Wi-Fi.

b. Gast Café

In the morning, on the final day in Stockholm, I went to Gast Café after checking out of the hostel. This is because I had breakfast at the hostel, and just wanted to have some coffee at a café.

Maybe because it was Sunday, when I arrived at the Gast Café at past 11.30 am, it was so crowded. Hence it was pretty hard to find a seat for myself, and I had to choose a stool around which there was no space to put my backpack regardless of the size of the backpack. I really felt that the disadvantage of a solo trip is that you cannot keep a seat before ordering…

Plus, the Gast Café seems popular simply as a café. It was a lovely café, so if you want to try café-hopping in Stockholm, you may want to include Gast in your list.

c. Vete-Katten

I went to Vete-Katten for the specific purpose which was

I wanted to try princess cake!!!

I found information that Vete-Katten is highly evaluated, and surely you can have princess cake. That’s why I decided to go there in advance.

Vete-Katten was also crowded, but luckily I was able to keep a seat first. But if your accommodation is close to Vete-Katten, you may consider a take away too. (At Vete, it’s said that there are lots of pickpockets so be careful.)

I’ll write more about princess cake later in this article.

3. Swedish sweets and tea

Although it was my fourth time visiting Sweden, I was a poor student at the first visit, and I went there only for the purposes of concerts, I didn’t research almost anything about Sweden beforehand every time I went there. However, I resumed learning Swedish on my own, through the contents in the textbook, I realised there are more Sweden-specific things.

One of the Swedish things is Swedish sweets. There should be more in Sweden given that you research further, but here I’m going to talk about only three sweets. I chose something you will (never I think) be able to obtain in Estonia.

a. Dammsugare

The first Swedish sweet that I picked up is dammsugare. At a confectionery, I tried to pronounce “Dammsugare”, trying to remember the pronunciation in the textbook, the clerk didn’t understand. (Or maybe I misremembered the pronunciation.) so I said “damm…su…gare”. He understood what I wanted. 😂

If you are curious, Google “dammsugare” online. You will see a bunch of pictures of hoovers. You may think

”What???”

This is because “Dammsugare” means “a hoover” in Swedish. At the confectionery that I went to (the name is Ritorno Konditori), they sell dammsugare named “Volta” which is a hoover brand.

It’s a chocolate sweet, and although it’s small, you will get satisfied as its texture is heavy.

It’s tasty though.

As dammsugare was available at supermarkets too, I bought one for my boyfriend who said “What is something Swedish that we can’t get in Estonia lol” before going to Sweden. However, I understand his point because we can get Swedish products such as coffee. I happened to know about dammsugare this time, and yet if I didn’t research like the previous trips in Sweden, or hadn’t bought a Swedish language textbook with Swedish culture, I wouldn’t know dammsugare even now.

b. Princess cake

This is the cake that I briefly mentioned above.

Princess cake is a Swedish cake. The sponge cake has cream inside, and it’s covered with a light green marzipan. You can buy a whole princess cake or just a piece of the princess cake.

It tasted lighter than I thought. You can get the princess cake at a supermarket too, but of course it’s displayed at a cake corner, not at the counter for regular sweets.

FYI: the princess cake is suitable for black tea!

c. Havreboll, pärlboll, chokladboll

The last sweets are ball sweets. They are called havreboll, pärlboll as well as chokladboll (boll means a ball in Swedish), so I personally call them “ball sweets”. It seems there are basically those three types, and yet all those three are almost the same, containing oatmeal. Their size is like a mud ball that we used to make when we were kids at a nursery school.

Havreboll looks whitey, and contains coconuts.

Pärlboll doesn’t contain coconuts.

Chokladboll seems the most common and ordinary one among these three. In addition to oatmeal and coconuts, chokladboll’s another ingredient is cocoa powder, so it tastes literally like chocolate as in its name. Beside chokladboll is the best among these three types in my opinion…

You can for sure buy those balls at a green-coloured supermarket called Coop!

d. Bilar

Bilar means “cars (indefinite)” in Swedish, and it’s a gummy sweet. Since each gummy shape is like a car, it’s called “bilar”.

I bought a bag of bilar before going to Liseberg in case my friend and I would get a bit hungry there and could share bilar, but we didn’t eat at all, so I brought it back to Estonia and it turned into a souvenir for my workplace. 😂

Bilar

Bilar has two types: normal one and sour one.The normal one didn’t look tasty, so I bought the sour one, which was the right decision.

You can buy bilar anywhere in Sweden.

e. Garant

Garant is a Swedish food brand. As far as I know, based on my activities in Sweden, in Gothenburg, I found their tea series only in one supermarket called Hemköp.

What I bought were

  • Camomile, lemon balm and lavender
  • Mint and chocolate
  • Earl grey
  • Black tea with rhubarb and vanilla flavour

For my boyfriend as a souvenir (as a birthday gift), I bought camomile, lemon balm and lavender tea. (It’s because he sometimes works a lot to compensate for a no-work day.)

Two flavours of tea: camomile, lemon balm and lavender as well as mnt and chocolate
Upper: camomile, lemon balm and lavender
Lower: mint and chocolate

As of now, writing this chapter, it’s already summer, so I haven’t tried all the flavours but mint chocolate that I tried while staying at a hostel in Gothenburg. The mint chocolate one didn’t have strong flavours, but it was extraordinary and changed my mood.

Hemköp where you can buy Garant’s tea series in Gothenburg I know is only here:

★Summary

The restaurants and cafés above that I went to were for the purpose of something Swedish or something properly unavailable in Estonia. There are many many more in Stockholm of course. It might be fun to find one on the map too. (I personally want to try a meatball restaurant that I found in Google maps. Also I want to find a better kebab place.)

As for the chokladboll mentioned at the end of this article, you can Google some recipes so why don’t you try to make them on your own if you’re interested in them? The ingredients are nothing hard to find, and if what a Swedish YouTuber said is correct, people make it at home in Sweden.

Enjoy tasty and sweet Stockholm.

Aitäh! 🙂