Malmö, the... Not So Interesting City

Lilla TorgCentral Square

My friend from German class popped over from Amsterdam (where he’s working for a stock-trading company) this weekend to see Copenhagen. His friend suggested that he pop over to Malmö, Sweden (note the umlaut— that’s Swedish spelling!) while he was here, as it’s only about a 40-minute train ride from the center of the city. Having also heard good things about Malmö, I endorsed the idea. And so bright and early Saturday morning, we met at Nørreport Station to make our way to the land of Ikea and H&M.

The train system in Europe makes it incredibly easy to get around, unlike in the US, where a ride with Amtrak will either take longer than driving or end in some horrible crash. We bought our round-trip ticket (it was cheaper if we bought one jointly than if we each bought one separately) at the automated kiosk for DKK 256—about $25 each—and then hopped aboard the next train (they came every twenty minutes), and made our way over the Øresunds Bridge, where we could see the wind turbines in the Sound.

We arrived in Malmö a little after 10, and found that much to our surprise, the city was pretty much dead. Well, I suppose neither of us really should have been that surprised, as the Europeans like to lie low on the weekends. Stores in general open at 10 and close at 5 on Saturdays, and don’t reopen until Monday mornings. We figured the locals were probably sleeping in, so we picked the time-honored tradition of wandering aimlessly. Eventually, I pulled out my pathetic little map—it was a side note on the Copenhagen city map I’d been given— because we hadn’t run into anything particularly interesting, and were getting stared at by the locals for taking pictures of mundane things, like the ivy-covered police station.

Now armed with the knowledge of where to find something interesting, we made our way to a park on the map that held a medieval castle and museum. Only to find that the castle was the last thing anyone would think of hearing the words “medieval” and “castle” together in a sentence (it was boxy and made of red brick), and that is possessed the most bizarre castle courtyard either of us had ever seen; all it contained were a well, a tree, and a piece of abstract sculpture that vaguely resembled one arm of a starfish. Intrigued, but undeterred, we made our way inside. And promptly came back out. Apparently, it wasn’t really a museum dedicated to the history of the castle, but Malmö’s general museum. The large fake-and/or-badly stuffed giraffe in the lobby told us that much. Along with a sign labeled “Jätte gamla grejer”— inexplicably translated as “Really Old Stuff”. I have no idea how accurate that translation was.

There was one upside, though—we managed to snag a more detailed map of the city. And it came labeled with attractions! We simultaneously picked the Chocolate Museum as our next stop, as he had missed out on a previous chance to see a chocolate museum, and I… well, who’d say no to a chocolate museum? What we found though, was a pathetic little café that just happened to contain glass-cases full of Swedish chocolate from past decades. It was sad.

We made our way back to the city center and started looking for lunch, marveling at the fact that between our aimless wandering and our half-hour trek to the so-called Chocolate Museum, we’d actually managed to see most of the city. We’d seen almost everything there was to see, with the exception of the church (which we’d somehow completely missed, despite it being right next to the central station). Pretty much demoralized and thoroughly tired, we ended up sitting at the lunch café for quite awhile, before making our way to the church— only to find that someone was getting married, and we couldn’t go inside quite yet. We wandered around aimlessly for another hour or so, walking out to the harbor and staring at the jellyfish in the harbor, before finally coming back to the church. We did our thing, and then gratefully hopped aboard the train back to Copenhagen. Needless to say, if you indeed plan on going to Malmö, a half-day should do it. More than that and you’ll run out of things to do.

However, there was one bright spot— we couldn’t resist buying two cartons of raspberries from the vendor in the town square. And they were hands down, some of the best raspberries either of us had ever had.

Café Night

Our last act as a Survival Danish class was a mandatory “Café Culture Night”, the point of which was… well, I’m not sure entirely. I assumed that it would be some kind of test— that we wouldn’t be fed unless we could order our food in Danish, but as that didn’t happen, I’m left to wonder. I should point out that it has been a week since our last Survival Danish class, and at this point, those of us taking Danish have been dispersed into our regular class sections. For me, it doesn’t matter either way; my Survival Danish teacher is also my section teacher, Charlotte (pronounced shar-lot-eh). Charlotte is a tall, trim woman of indeterminate age (her face looks rather young, but her hair is graying slightly), whose accent makes her sound vaguely Australian.

The café we were assigned to (each group was assigned to a different café) was on Landskronagade in Østerbro, the eastern part of Copenhagen, about a ten minute train ride from the station closest to the DIS center. Because the weather is still moderately nice in Denmark (i.e., not raining), my friend from studio and I decided to walk to the café in order to see the city better. Google Maps said that such a journey would take a little over an hour, and so we left DIS at 5:30 in order to be at the restaurant by 7:00.

Østerbro can be considered Copenhagen’s “ethnic” area. I say this lightly, because although there are a fair number of immigrants in the city, their numbers are few when compared to New York, or even Boston, both of which have areas that are filled with nothing but immigrants from a certain area. Østerbro by comparison has a mix of different people from all over— we saw Mexican food, Chinese food, Japanese food, Thai food (the Turkish food is out west in Vesterbro)— the biggest compilation of foreign food either of us had seen since coming to Denmark. And it all smelled delicious!

By the time we arrived at the restaurant, we were both starving… and it was only 6:34. The entire journey, even with stopping for photos of swans gliding through the canal, had only taken an hour and four minutes— just as Google Maps had said it would. We sat down in the side street, feeling it would be sketchy to walk into the café half-an-hour early.

At about a quarter-til, other people from our group started showing up. Feeling that there was safety on numbers, we all ventured hesitantly into the restaurant, only to find that the proprietor happened to be a British ex-pat. We sat down, six to a table, and started chatting, waiting for the stragglers and our teacher to show up. As it neared seven, a one more boy entered the café.


“I thought she would be here early,” said the girl across from me, referring to Charlotte, “so we would know if we found the right place or not. And I mean, aren’t Danish people anal about being punctual?”

“Yeah, but that just means they show up exactly at that time— not earlier, not later,” explained another.

“Here she comes,” said a girl from another table. Sure enough, Charlotte could be seen with her white coat and backpack striding down the street toward the restaurant.

“Is it exactly seven?” quipped a guy. There was an uproar of laughter from the tables. The Danes in the café looked up curiously.

“Way to stereotype,” laughed the girl, as Charlotte stepped into room.

I looked down at my watch; it was seven on the dot.