2012 Europe Trip - Day 15: Hallå Sweden

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Thursday, September 13, 2012

2012 Europe Trip - Day 15: Hallå Sweden

Travel journal entries from my trip to Europe from May 12-28, 2012. Maybe subscribe to the RSS feed.

Sunday would be my last full day in Europe. I had to make it count. How about two museums and an international side trip?

I started the day with a Danish and a chocolate milk at a chain-type bakery along the Strøget. The bakery was pretty remarkable, though. Every kind of bread and pastry along the back and side walls. They were moving through about five customers per minute, too. Quite an operation.

First museum of the day was the national museum. It has all kinds of historical items and stories about how Denmark was settled. The museum even has some thousand-year-old mummified human remains, along with some other artifacts like ancient coffins and animal skeletons. I skipped some of the sections about later Danish history so I could move on to my next stop, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

The Glyptotek is an art museum whose works were mostly donated by the founder of the Carlsberg brewery, J.C. Jacobsen. There are tons of works from the 19th century. Lots of Rodin sculptures and several paintings by Monet, Manet, and Van Gogh. It was also definitely worth a visit, especially considering it was free on Sundays.

With museums "out of the way," so to speak, it was almost time for lunch. But first, a train to Sweden. Before I visited Copenhagen, I didn't realized the city is on the eastern edge of Denmark, on the island of Zealand. In the past, Denmark controlled the southern part of Sweden, so Copenhagen was somewhat centrally-located. Anyway, construction was completed in 2000 on a project to link Copenhagen to Malmö, Sweden, via an about 10-mile-long combination of tunnel, artificial island, and bridge. The toll to drive across is crazy high (around $100 US if I remember correctly), but luckily, the train ticket is very reasonably-priced.

Malmö was a nice town. My first goal was lunch. I wasn't overtly interested in specifically sampling Swedish food, so I found a cheap Chinese to-go place. Since Malmö is such an easy trip from Copenhagen, many shops and restaurants accept Danish money. I had to smile when I realized that I was in Sweden, buying food from Chinese people, speaking English, and paying with Danish money. I took that food over to a little park in the square. It wasn't quite up to west-coast-US Chinese food standards, but hey, it was filling.

After lunch, I explored the town squares a little more before settling down at a coffee shop. The shop's outdoor seating was good for an hour or so of reading and writing. The clouds in the sky worried me that my perfect-weather streak might be coming to an end, but the clouds held off, and the weather wasn't so bad.

Next up was a walk to see some "sights." Though Malmö was a pleasant city, it's not big on sights. First was Malmöhus, which was, during Danish years, a mint. Now it's sort of a museum, and not really much to see. From there, I walked up toward the beach. Though it wasn't really beach weather, a bunch of people were there, walking dogs or just sort of enjoying the outdoors. Or maybe that's as close to "beach weather" as Sweden gets. The beach also provided some great views of the Øresund Bridge (or Öresund Bridge, if you're Swedish) and "the turning torso," a giant skyscraper of a residential building that's more than three times as tall as the second-tallest building in Malmö. On top of all that, there were a ton of birds near the beach: swans, ducks, baby swans, baby ducks, seagulls, and more. I can think of a few animal-loving friends who could have probably spent a whole afternoon there.

But alas, Copenhagen called me back. After a quick rest at the "B & B," I went back to one of my favorite spots, Nyhavn, for another outdoor dinner. I actually ended up getting a hot dog and a beer at the adjacent Kongens Nytorv (King's New Square). I relaxed for one last bit of sunset people-watching and thought about how the Metro construction at that square reminded me of the construction on a light rail station in my Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill. I wonder if we can learn some lessons from the Danes.

[Note: You can click on any of the photos below to zoom in.]