Åke Strandberg has managed to get a fine education and a good job at the bank, but he wants more. He wants to get rich no matter what. After holidays with his girl Rita, he comes back to Helsinki completely broke and meets up with his buddy Jussi in a bar. For months they embezzle money from the bank, but eventually do realize they have to cover the missing amount by orchestrating and committing a robbery which will then rouse the interest of the police. A hide and seek follows as they try to make their way abroad.
Three Finnish girls travel to Stockholm to look for work. But soon they notice that the big city is not such a great place as they thought. Most of the foreign men who they meet there are crooks and liars.
The Troubadour sits at a rock beside his summerhouse Sjösala in the Stockholm archipelago. He is composing a new ballad, when his son Sven Bertil interrupts him, telling him that an angry man is knocking at their door. It is the creditor Andersson, coming with a new unpaid bill to be put on the top of all the other. The Troubadour is tired of all economical problems. It disturbs the peace he needs to be able to write new songs, and without new songs he cannot earn the money he needs to pay the bills. To get peace and inspiration for his writing, he makes a quick decision to go to Buenos Aires. By phone he persuades his publisher to prepay 7000 kronor for some future book. On the little ferry from the islands in the sea to Stockholm city the Troubadour is carried away by his imagination into the fictitious world of his main character Fritiof Andersson. Colorful scenes from various songs are enacted before his dreaming eyes. In Stockholm he spends the night at the inn Gyldene Freden. ...
"Strange Harbor " - A Swedish cargo ship is in the winter of 1938 at the dock in Gdynia in Poland, waiting to depart with coal to Sweden. In a tavern in the port a Polish dockworkers tries to tell something to the Swedish sailors, but is rudely turned away by the tavern owner. Later in the evening the port worker is found dead. That same evening one of the Swedish sailors, meets a Jewish woman who has fled Nazi Germany.
The north of Sweden in 1902. A team of railroad men are building a rail road from Luleå at the Bay of Bothnia to Narvik at the Norwegian Sea. One of the newest workers, Valfrid from the south of Sweden, is not accepted by neither Stora Ballong, the informal leader of the workers, nor the others. They refuse to talk to him but instead Valfrid gets help from the sworn enemy of the railroad workers: the greedy drugstore owner Blom.
