Tour of Malmo

Today was a day off from hockey.  We had agreed to a tour of the city of Malmo, to get a flavour of this city in Sweden.  It is very similar to Copenhagen, just not nearly as big.  There are about 300 000 people who live here.  It is apparently the 4th largest city in the country.

We had Isabella for our tour guide again today, and by now, we are getting used to her, and she to us.  She is quite knowledgeable, but it seems that tour guides must talk most of the time.  I guess that is what one pays for, in order to learn about the places you are seeing.

We toured around the main area, where our hotel is located.  It is near Central Station, which is the main place for all the trains that are a major form of transportation in this country (as well as most European countries, I assume).  Another major form of transportation is the bicycle - everywhere, and

Twisted Torso

they seem to have the right of way, or at least think they should.  One must always look to the right when getting off the bus, especially if there is a bike path there.

We travelled to the beach and the location of the world famous Twisted Torso apartments.  This apartment building is famous because of its architecture, and the way it is designed, it is supposed to look like a twisting human spine.  It can be seen that way, with every 5th floor or so having an exercise/gym area, that looks like the cartilage between the bones of the spine.  Quite neat to look at, and according to Isabella, very expensive to live in.  The building is for sale, if one has a number of millions of Swedish Krowns laying around.  I don't think the photos I took do justice to it.  The sun was in the wrong position to get a good, clear shot.

Older looking apartments

Then we moved on to view some of the residential areas.  The regular houses are similar to ours - all/most have steep roofs, and small windows.  I suppose that is to keep the snow off and the cold out, but from our experience, there doesn't seem to be a lot of snow.  They tell us that winters are similar to ours - sometimes 2-3 weeks of cold and snow, sometimes a few days of cold and snow, and other times not even below freezing.  Perhaps this season it will come later on in the winter.

Newer apartments

There are lots of apartment buildings here - of course, we are mainly in the city, so that stands to reason.  Apartments look a lot like in Canada, except a lot of them have the old brick facade that makes them blend in with the old style buildings that can be found in older European countries.  They look nice from the outside, but it would be nice to see what they look like on the inside.

We drove out by the bridge to Denmark (Øresund Bridge) and did a short walk-about to take some photos.  It was fairly overcast, so the view wasn't too spectacular, but it is pretty impressive, just the

Øresund Bridge

same.  The bridge is 8 km long from the Swedish side, and ends at the man-made island called Pepper Island.  From there is continues the remaining 4 km to Denmark through a tunnel.  This allows the planes to safely land at Copenhagen airport, rather than worry about the towers of a bridge on one of their flight paths.

Then on to look at other pretty fancy places - some very expensive homes near the beach, some very inexpensive (but dangerous) areas that are called Freetown (people are like squatters and quite suspicious of outsiders).  We didn't drive in or through this area, just near it.  They don't own the land, but they may build houses of one sort or another, and one "never goes there without a tour that is paid for, and never ask questions or take photos".  I guess we won't go there.

Water tower

Then we went over by the new shopping centre that has recently been completed.  This is where the big arena is, where Sweden is playing their games in the tournament.  The arena there holds about 13 000 people, so if Canada gets to play any games there, it will be quite full.  Good thing we already have our tickets to any games that we would be seeing there.

The shopping centre is quite futuristic in design, and it certainly sounds like the people are proud of the design.  There is a huge water tower there that looks like a space ship.  Quite interesting.

Big Lamp sculpture

Christmas tree

Our group in the market

Finally, we went back to the main downtown area, and spent some time walking around the markets that are spread around the old area of downtown Malmo.  There are 4 markets, and we walked through the first and second markets, which are from centuries ago.  Nowadays, they have been upgraded, but apparently these were the areas where farmers and vendors sold their wares, and the townspeople did their purchasing.  This was also where families stayed and lived while waiting for their partners to get out of jail.  An interesting bit of information that Isabella told us was that if someone stole something from you, and you accused that person of it, they got thrown in jail until time for their trial.  The bad thing is that if you accused them of the crime, you were responsible to pay their room and board while at the jail, waiting for that trial.  I wonder if many of these disputes were solved in other ways?

Finally, there was an old church (one of the originals, I think) that we got to walk through and take photos.  This was a pretty spectacular sight to see.  The designs inside the church were magnificent.  We really enjoyed walking through there, and hope that the photos do justice to what we saw.

Exterior of the church

One of the locations for the priest

From the entrance to the front

Information about the church

By this time, we were quite tired of walking, and the wind was really cold.  We were only a short, 3 or 4 minute walk from the hotel, but I had no idea in which direction to go.  So, we hung around until Isabella took us back.  We got back to our hotel about 1:15, and had the rest of the day to ourselves.  We did go to the mall next door and purchased another bag.  This one was far more expensive than the other one we had looked at.  However, it is a very nice bag, and besides, it was priced at 30% off (how could we pass up a bargain like that?).  Then back to the hotel and we basically sat and read/watched TV until time for bed.  There were a few hockey games on TV.  Who cares if the announcing was in Swedish - the puck still gets passed and shot in whatever language is used.