Random Walk

If one looks at the map of all entries on this blog near Stockholm, one could be forgiven for thinking that I believe people outside a small region centered on the inner city and Husby carry some kind of disease. I sure tend to stay away from those places when blogging.

The problem is really one of habit and laziness. I live right smack in the center of Stockholm, and when I feel the urge to go out of a photo walk, I end up starting and ending the walk at home. The result is truly embarassing: Despite having lived around thirty years in Stockholm, I know my own city less than most tourists; and probably less than most people who've read the Wikipedia page on Stockholm[a].

To cure this I decided to start one of those artsy projects. I would pick a subway stop at random and go there. There are 100 subway stops one can go to​[1], and I figured one should be able to find something interesting at every spot. The result would be a guide to what the brilliant Mats Areskoug refer to as un-attractions[b]. (Mats was the one who got me to check out Krutbanan.)

I grabbed a list of subway stations and wrote a single line script in Firefox's scratchpad to pick a station. The script proved its worth by not just choosing correctly, but choosing right:

Yes, the one-in-a-hundred starting point for this project was to be back home in Husby. Since I've been there multiple times and already have a fairly long list of entries from Husby, I re-ran the script: Gamla Stan. Been there. Rådhuset. That's, like, next door (been there, too). Fittja. Been there. Abrahamsberg. Not today, maybe some other time. Sätra.

Haven't been there.

I packed a pair of lenses and went there. The photos will be up here, soon. If anyone else want to find a spot in Stockholm to tube it to, here's the script:

Press the button to pick a subway station[c]

Click on the link above to find the subway station on Google maps

Footnotes