Scandinavian devotees might very well froth at the mouth over Stockholm’s Clarion Sign hotel — at least if the NYT is to be believed. Declared Stockholm’s biggest hotel, with “550-odd rooms,” the hotel also won Times-er Frank Bruni’s declaration that it’s “quite possibly” the most Scandinavian (based on Bruni’s travels in Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and “Ikea stores in several continents,” that is) — “a sort of overblown diorama of the Scandinavian sensibility.”
But what does that actually mean? Mod Arne Jacobsen chairs and four kinds of pickled herring at the free breakfast buffet, apparently.
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While we waited ever so patiently for Nov. 4th to pass, we hardly noticed it was, uh, November. In fact, it’s sorta-kinda almost Thanksgiving, which means the holiday season is about to infiltrate every last cranny of your life (much like Sarah Palin did the last two months, but with fewer Tina Fey impersonations).
In other words: It’s time to shop. And what better way to celebrate our new “socialist” government than with a holiday to Sweden? (We joke!) If you agree--and we think you should--consider the Grand Hôtel Stockholm (AKA the “official Nobel Prize hotel” since 1901).
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Would you pay $200 or more to stay at a 228-year hotel that once was a brewery, then headquarters for Stockholm's guards (a.k.a., "sausages," earning the building the enviable moniker of "a sausage pot"); next as a jail of sorts, housing thieves and beggars; and later as a temporary hospital during the city's cholera epidemic in 1834, before finally becoming a hotel with no room service and very few individual bathrooms in 1976? The New York Times thinks you should. ]]>