aggienaut: (Numbat)
Aggienaut ([personal profile] aggienaut) wrote2015-08-20 10:20 pm

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!

[identity profile] lenine2.livejournal.com 2015-08-21 03:38 pm (UTC)(link)
I love your friend's mirror and dresser! She also has a cool pirate hat. Too bad she doesn't wear it all the time.

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 03:20 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah she makes such cool stuff. She also made a cool circular mirror that was bordered by a snake eating its tail, which she sold. I've been telling her there's shops in San Francisco that would totally sell her stuff like hotcakes.

[identity profile] pundigrion.livejournal.com 2015-08-21 04:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Haha, meanwhile I am off to my next adventure while still posting the last one usually! No adventures for a while, so perhaps I will catch up again someday...posting again in general is probably the first step.

I love the pencil as marker! Such a random choice!

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 03:47 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah my regular posting has really gotten far too infrequent ):

I've been trying to make a point to update the www.worldbeedev.org blog once a week, though it suffers some problems, in that the blog doesn't seem to have a nice clean link (ie the url to get there always has a bunch of jibberish after it and I don't know how to fix that) and for some reason just loading it up to update the blog really bogs down my poor old steam powered computer. /:
iddewes: (Default)

[personal profile] iddewes 2015-08-21 04:23 pm (UTC)(link)
German towns and cities often have former villages that have been made officially part of the larger town, and the train station would then have the village name and the town name, eg round here Darmstadt-Wixhausen. Or it could have been an actual suburb, that would also show up with the name, eg Frankfurt-Bornheim. You'd want the Hauptbahnhof ;)
The UK also often has more than one train station in a city, eg in Cardiff where I used to live there was Cardiff Central (which would be the one you'd want for changing trains!), Cathays, Queen Street, Cardiff Bay etc.
At least you could see the sign at all. That's not always the case...I went to visit my friend in Bavaria a couple of years ago, arrived at night and couldn't see a sign at all, I just guessed as it was about the right time for the train to arrive at her town and asked one of the boys getting off if it was the right town. And it was.
Edited 2015-08-21 16:26 (UTC)

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 03:51 am (UTC)(link)
I forget if it said something before or after Hamburg but I don't think it did, because otherwise I wouldn't have been so confused. I looked at my watch and it was within three minutes of my scheduled arrival in Hamburg so that didn't help. The only thing that helped was some young lad sitting nearby also jumped up, looked really confused, conversed with someone in German, and sat down again. ;D
iddewes: (tattoo cat)

[personal profile] iddewes 2015-08-22 09:16 am (UTC)(link)
Wow, that is weird! I've never been to Hamburg so I don't know what the signage is like there. Usually there *is* some other information on the sign though. So that is really odd :(

[identity profile] anyonesghost.livejournal.com 2015-08-21 05:06 pm (UTC)(link)
We were watching House Hunters the other day, and it was set in Malmö. I admit, I wondered if you'd been there yet. I didn't see you in the actual episode, though ... alas.

Here's hoping for safe and uneventful travels on the next leg of your journey. :-)

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 03:52 am (UTC)(link)
Haha I'm sure I was just off camera ;D

[identity profile] gaeln.livejournal.com 2015-08-21 11:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Safe trip to Guinea on Monday!!

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 04:10 am (UTC)(link)
Thanks (:

[identity profile] adoptedwriter.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 02:13 am (UTC)(link)
How do you get to travel so much? Input trips are amazing!
AW

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 04:11 am (UTC)(link)
Teaching beekeeping (: (:

I really feel so lucky that I happened to have almost accidentally ended up with skills that people want to fly me around the world for (: (:

[identity profile] serendipity17.livejournal.com 2015-08-22 05:19 pm (UTC)(link)
My summer class took the ferry from Landskrona to Hven, via Malmö. Did you get to try the potato-meringue cake that is a Malmö specialty? It would have been the ivory expanded-foam-looking thing in cellophane wrappers.

[identity profile] emo-snal.livejournal.com 2015-08-23 04:03 pm (UTC)(link)
I did not! Next time! (:

[identity profile] serendipity17.livejournal.com 2015-08-24 08:33 pm (UTC)(link)
http://birdandmoon.com/comic/bee-club/

[identity profile] speaksoftlylove.livejournal.com 2015-08-25 10:13 pm (UTC)(link)
that dresser is really cool!

Great pictures!