Return of the Return to Sweden!
As seems to be becoming a tradition, the last entry on my last adventure waits until days before my next adventure. On Monday I'm off to Guinea! So time to wrap up Europe Adventure 2015!
Monday, June 1st - After an exhaustive investigation of flight and train options I determined that it would be exorbitantly expensive to fly back from Frankfurt to Copenhagen - it had been I tihnk around $60 to fly from Copenhagen to Amsterdam but would be like $300 to fly from Frankfurt back to Copenhagen. So I decided to go with the overnight train, leaving Frankfurt just after midnight.
The noteworthy thing about this train ride is despite it being a long distance overnight train in which everyone was trying to sleep... they never dimmed the lights! I found that rather irritating.
Moment of panic as we approached Hamburg, where I was supposed to change trains, because the train stopped first at a tiny station with a "Hamburg" sign and I didn't know whether or not to get off because clearly I was supposed to get off at Hamburg, but it didn't look right at all. Fortunately I didn't get off and shortly later we arrived at the major central station in Hamburg. This was all at 5am mind you. So glad I didn't strand myself somewhere outside Hamburg at 5am.
From there onward into Denmark to Copenhagen. At Copenhagen (by now mid-morning) I very easily bought a ticket for Malmö in Sweden at the now-familiar main train station in Denmark. Train to Sweden was in fact the same train that serves the airport. Just stay on it and about ten minutes later it enters a tunnel to go under The Sound between Sweden and Denmark. Altogether about half an hour later (ish? my memory is surprisingly fuzzy on details being as it was only three months ago) I was arriving in Malmö where my friend Alex was waiting to meet me.
(file footage. She wasn't wearing a pirate hat at the time, though I did meet her when I was volunteering about the Swedish Ship Gothenburg)
"So what's there to see in Malmö I asked as we exited the train station.
"Malmö is actually kind of boring." She admitted frankly. Glad I came! Mostly I think we met there because it was halfway between Landskrona and Copenhagen so it enabled her to meet me halfway.
We strolled about though and it was nice to see another town in Sweden I'd heard of. We did see a neat little sculpture exhibit. After toodling about there a bit we proceeded on to Landskrona (affectionately known as LA to locals, apparently).
Now I don't remember what happened what day so I'm just going to lump it all together. Landskrona appears to be a cute little town and my friend Alex lives right in the middle of it, just a five minute stroll to the old castle and the old cannons guarding the coast.
But speaking of the middle, the "mittpunkt" (midpoint) of Europe is apparently like thirty feet from Alex's apartment!! This seems very counter-intuitive but I guess if you use spitsbergen way way up north as the northernmost point and the edge of Portugal as the West.... well it's not listed on the wikipedia article on midpoint of Europe but hey it's hard to argue with a giant pencil in the ground.
Unfortunately despite being June the weather was cold and blustery so that seriously curtailed our going out. Very unfortunate because it looked like a lovely place to walk about. I'll have to go there next year closer to midsummer (:
Despite being a small town, Landskrona had a nice little museum with a variety of different exhibits in it. There was some stuff on stone age graves that had been excavated nearby, a really good section on the city in the early modern era, and an interesting exhibit on clothes from different eras turned inside out.
Also of note, Alex is a really good artist! Check out her dresser:
And she made this really cool guillotine mirror, which I then took an absolutely awful picture of by not bothering to turn on any lights in the room.
Anyway, I was there for like three days, and then I left! Getting back to the Copenhagen airport from there was possibly the easiest airport commute I've ever had -- just get on the train and it goes straight from Landskrona to the Copenhagen airport itself! The end!
[Originally posted 2015/08/20]