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.