If it's Tuesday, this must be Gothenburg

I arrived at Gothenburg station and headed straight for my pre-booked accommodation. It wasn't too hard to find, being the tallest thing around that area.

Yep, I was sleeping on the "Barken Viking" - a retired 100 year old cargo ship. She is a four-masted barque - of which only 345 were ever built (with only 10 of those still existing today). My little single room was tucked up in the prow of the ship. It had two port holes and the floor was tilted from the front to the back!

I ate dinner up on the deck, where I had a 360 degree view of the sunset - I could see the sun dropping in the sky while I watched the colours across the sky change (it was about 10pm that the sun went below the horizon) while the seagulls flew around the masts.

I had a great nights sleep - the boat felt very steady - and in the morning I breakfasted in the saloon.

I then headed into town and visited the "Goteborgs Stads Museet". This is housed in a building that is 250 years old and it has been a museum for 150 years. I started with the viking exhibit, which showed viking relics such as nails, runes carved into stones, combs and ornaments, engravings and the remains of a boat. It was very interesting (and fortunately, the info cards were translated into English).

Each display in the museum represented a period of history of Gothenburg - from viking up to the modern age. Not all displays had an English translation, but most of the time I could tell what I was looking at.

Up on the top floor was a temporary exhibition celebrating the combined anniversaries of the Gothenburg theaters and opera. This was a display of costumes, scale models of stage sets, photos and sketches from plays, musicals and operas - with some costumes as old as 150 years! This unfortunately was not in English, but I could pick out some bits like "William Shakespeare", "Madame Butterfly", "Hamlet" etc and others that were easy translations like "en midsommar nätter dröm" - but the rest I was in the dark. However - it didn't matter as they were amazing! No photos from inside the museum unfortunately (and the gift shop didn't even have any postcards of the displays!)

In the afternoon I went for a ride on the Gothenburg "Circle of Excellence" (aka ferris wheel). From here I was able to look out over the town, and also get the photo of the ship which was at the start of this entry.

I thought it would be a short ride, but it turned out to be such good value that I went round and round so many times that I just missed my train (I had time to get my bags out of the lock up, but not enough to get the ticket and on the train). So I went back to town and looked at a few more things until the next train to Stockholm left.

Monday in Malmo

After farewelling Dr M in Copenhagen I caught the train to Malmo. Previously this trip would have been taken on a ferry, but a long road and rail bridge now joins Denmark and Sweden. From the bridge you can see quite a few of the wind turbines that are mounted out in the channel. This week the bridge celebrates being open 10 years.

I arrived in Malmo without any plans of where to go for the night and wandered around the railway station but could only see hotels that looked beyond my budget. So it was back into the station to use the computers to find somewhere to go - and found that while the regular price of the "Elite Hotel Savoy" was probably above budget, the online, last minute, discount rate for the standard single was under $100 (inc breakfast & internet) and quite acceptable. It got even more acceptable when the man at reception gave me a double upgrade (from standard, past superior to deluxe). He said it was because he liked Australia, but I think it was because I told him that I liked Sweden better than Denmark.   

 I started Monday with a Canal tour of Malmo. This took in the old section of town as well as the industrial part of the docks. Malmo used to be a very busy port prior to the bridge being built - now shipping has practically disappeared and new industries are starting - to the left: wind turbine components in front of a very old warehouse. In the rear left you can just see the famous building "turning torso".

Malmo is sometimes called the city of parks. I went wandering through a few of them after the canal tour. I personally would call it the city of fountains as they are everywhere! There were quite a few within the parks (usually featuring a naked body or several) and there were many throughout the city areas. One square - Gustav Aldofs Torg (about the size of Martin Place?) had no less than 7 fountains.   

After the park wandering I headed to a chocolate cafe / factory /museum called  "Malmo Chokladfabrik" which has been in operation for 120 years. This is the only chocolatier in Sweden making chocolate from the cocoa bean stage. It was small, but filled with history about the chocolate company - including chocolate molds, chocolate tools and packaging from through out the years. There was even a chocolate violin that was over 50 years old (now looking a bit sad - what a waste!). Unfortunately, they don't make chocolates in the middle of summer, so I couldn't see the factory in action, but I did indulge in a delicious local version of an iced chocolate and sample some of the chocolates (including several single origin  samples, cardamon flavour, and salt liquorice flavour - not good this last one).  

Then it was goodbye to Malmo as I boarded the train for Gothenburg.

Copenhagen

Saturday evening we arrived at Copenhagen train station at about 8.30pm - very tired (and more than a little stinky) after our day at Legoland. It was a pretty good train ride - we got spots in the 'quiet zone' in nice comfy seats and it was good to see some of the Danish countryside flash past. It is a little unfortunate that I underestimated the distance to the hotel as we might have got a taxi instead of walking....

Yesterday morning we headed out to see the sights of Copenhagen by taking a canal tour. The historical buildings were interesting, as was some of masonry work on the bridges. The modern buildings were dramatic and very unusual.

 We then spent some time with the stories of Hans Christian Anderson at a small display.

In the afternoon we wandered towards the Royal Residences, and found that we could have a look at the nearly completed renovations for Mary & Fred's new digs. We were able to walk through many of the rooms in the beautiful rococo style palace which dates from 1749. The renovations involved restoring some of the older finishes (re-gilding etc), new murals (on quite a few walls) from modern Danish artists and updating some of the fixtures (such as the 70s style serving kitchen!). It is unfortunate that no photos were permitted inside - some parts were quite, quite beautiful, and once the renovations are completed there may be no opportunity for an ordinary person to see inside the walls.

At the end of the day Dr M headed for the airport while I (on the train) headed for the land bridge that joins Denmark to Sweden to take a few extra days traveling back to Stockholm from the south.

Legoland!

Friday afternoon we flew from Stockholm to Billund, Denmark - the home of Lego!

 Yesterday we joined the queue of little and big kids at the Legoland gates.

We roamed the park, looking at the models and riding on the attractions. It was a warm day (30 degrees?) - and the park was quiet (as every Scandinavian is off at their holiday house).

My favorite ride was one with pirate ships and water cannons - there were cannons on the boats and also around the outside of the ride - so everyone got to shoot people.Great fun on a hot day!

Dr M's favourite ride was the 'Power Builder' - where you programed the moves that your seat (mounted on the end of a robotic arm) would do. We thought we were being conservative with our selection, but we were upside down within 5 seconds of the ride beginning!  

Legoland balances out the tiny buildings by serving huge food & beverage options. Left is Dr M at our lunch at 'the knights table' - see my (clear) drink - that's 800ml!

For afternoon tea we each had a 'legoland vaffle' ice cream - 4 flavours of scoop ice cream, topped with soft serve, with some pink marshmallow fluff on top, some strawberry jam, and a choc covered coconut marshmallow. Quite ridiculous.

After a fun filled day we were clever enough to figure out how to catch a local bus 30km to the nearest train station, so that we could rail to Copenhagen.

Underground

Yesterday I visited Dr M's workplace to see what he has been up to. First we were taken on a tour of the visitor's area then we visited the part of the mine that they have been practicing blowing things up.

The visitor's area was extensive with info boards, equipment - and it was all within the mine! They even have a full lecture theatre (seats 80) plus entertaining area (available for external hire) carved out of the tunnels.  The visitors area is mainly for customers of atlas copco, as this is where they would come to see demonstrations of equipment, commission sold bits of mining gear and conduct training.
Swedish miner Per showed us around his domain, including a full demo of the drilling machine which drills the holes where the charges are to be placed.

We then went down to the work area of the mine where Dr M explained how they place the detonators. The work he is doing here is towards improving tunneling.

The mine in general is where they practice drilling holes, each wall looks like that face to the right with lots of little holes.

I've been riding on the railroads (and terrorising tourists, again)

I started yesterday with a bike ride - with the intention of extending out from yesterday's walking route. It didn't go quite to plan as I had difficultly reading the road signs - so I didn't make it out to the next island along. I did manage to ride along a few new areas of Swedish suburbia and coped quite well (especially for my first solo bike ride in Sweden). I am not used to riding with traffic, traffic lights or on that side of the road, so occasionally it was a bit of a challenge. I had decided that about 2 hours was the limit, so I headed for home - and I managed to further damage the American relations. I hit one of them with the bike. He was in the wrong place (ie the road) and I gave him fair warning (shouting "hey, hey, hey" - and braking sharply) but he didn't pay attention so I ran into him (not hard as I had almost stopped at the time I hit him, no one fell over). He apologised (American accent) and I took it like a Swede (didn't say anything, just rode on - to the pedestrian crossing 5m away where I think his fellow travelers were crossing). I think that the man knew that he was in the wrong place (threading his way through traffic) and I couldn't have done any further measures to avoid hitting him (no room to swerve due to parked cars and traffic).

After that incident I thought it best that I spend the rest of the day on public transport and decided to ride the trains to check out the art that is Stockholm train stations.

All stations are different, and a number of them are decorated quite elaborately. Some have murals, some are painted and some have sculptures throughout. To the left is one of the tiled murals decorating Akalla station - huge, about 7ft tall and quite wide - one of several depicting "life" (or something like that).  

Several of the underground stations are cavernous - massive cavelike tunnels. One of these was painted all in red and green - red skies and green fields - with scenes of foresty industry (trucks, loggers, people) plus some animals. The artist might have been making a statement about deforestation, or maybe they thought looked pretty!

Every part of the walls and roof were in the red/green - which with the size of the place the end result to me looked a little like a bloodbath in a cave. Or like a science fiction film where the characters have been swallowed by a giant monster.

Massive yes? (that's a triple set of escalators over there) So much red paint. You can't say it's boring.

Several of these stations have little scenes or similar in display windows (one of the stations was nautical themed and had a row boat in a window - others had little houses or tractors or three dimensional art). Worth a few hours of train hopping (and the longest you ever have to wait for a train is 10 minutes) although those big caves are pretty cold.

Waterfront Wanderings

Yesterday I explored some new territory with a loop walk that included the waterfront of several of the Stockholm islands. It was a little overcast, which was a change from the blistering blue skies that I have been experiencing so far.

I love those apartment blocks across the water. I walked along in front of them - it is all parklike with the occasional floating restaurant.

In all I walked on 4 of the islands - one of them (Langholmen) is almost completely park - it had kids playgrounds, an ampitheatre, pathways and bench seats - and it was almost completely deserted. The only people I saw were these German tourists on a segue-way tour. One person on a segue-way looks funny - a whole group looks perfectly ridiculous.

I think that I have been on about 7 of the Stockholm Islands so far - which is about half of them. I'll try to add another one to the list today.

A short post today - the computer is running a bit slow.