Stockholm subway and tram network

This is a map of the Stockholm subway and tramway network. The red, green, and blue lines are subway lines.

The public transportation in Stockholm is actually quite good. If you stay for a month, the one month free pass is also pretty cheap, considering the huge area you can visit. If you are in Stockholm for only a few days, it is pretty expensive, though.

The trains are surprisingly non-punctual (in Sweden, being on time is considered very important and being late is rude, so you might expect trains and buses to be on time but they are very often not) and in winter the public transportation companies are always surprised that there is snow and the whole system usually breaks down. But apart from that it works quite well. There is service throughout the night too, which is nice (in Japan the only option after midnight is taxis).

Kuchisake Onna does magic at Halloween party at Cafe An Be

My magician friend an colleague Tsubasa has a senpai who runs a cafe. They were having a Halloween party on October 31st, and Tsubasa had been asked to do some magic there. Since he has done magic there many times and was running out of new material, he asked me if we could do a show together. This year I wanted to do something for Halloween that was not a zombie but that was more Japanese. So I became the Japanese yokai (legendary creatures) kuchisake onna.

I met Tsubasa at the Cafe An Be, and we hung around there drinking and eating before it was time for us to go on stage. Before us, there was a very nice band that played catchy cover versions of famous songs.

When Tsubasa first told me about this party, he had the impression that it would be late at night and mainly for grownups. In fact, it turned out to be mostly families with children there. That meant that my scary makeup was not that great. Most kids ran away from me when I approached them, and no one wanted to help me on stage with cute rabbit tricks (normally lots of kids volunteer for that), so I ended up getting two parents on stage instead, haha. Tsubasa had prepared lots of below the belt type funny magic tricks, which he also mostly scrapped after seeing what the audience was like.

In the end, we had lots of fun, and the audience seemed to have fun too. They laughed at the right times, and they were astounded by strange things we did.

Me and Tsubasa running into one of my friends in the subway

We took the subway back to the city center together, and when changing subway lines at Odori station a woman came up to me and said: "Jonas?" She is one of the people I have known the longest in Sapporo and she said she recognized me immediately. She also recognized what I was supposed to be, which lots of young Japanese did not (people under 30 apparently do not know of the kuchisake onna). She thought it was weird of me to ride the subway dressed the way I was.

Riding the subway

Direct access to the subway

Below these grates you could see the subway trains running.

Crowded subway

I tried to ride the subway on Christmas Eve, but ended up having to skip the first two trains to arrive since they were so full that not everyone could get on. I wonder where everyone was going? Maybe a concert. When going home, it was not as crowded but still pretty bad. The photo is from the return trip, when there was less people.