Malmo!

The next few days of my trip were spent in Malmo and the surrounding areas!

Day 4:

Kirsti and I left Gothenburg early in the morning and took a train to Varberg. It is a beautiful beach town. We walked around the town and down to the harbour and found an ice cream place. I had salted caramel ice cream, it was really good! There was a lovely walking trail next to the coast. We passed four nudist beaches! (Don’t worry we didn’t see anything we didn’t want to!) We made our way up to an old fort and had lunch at the cafe there. Despite being July 2^nd, it was so cold that I wanted my mittens! After lunch we continued along the trail and came to a big beach where people were surfing! That was cool to watch. We stuck our feet in the water but it was way too cold to go swimming.

After our nice tour of Varberg we took the train to Malmo. Once in Malmo we found our hostel and got settled in. Over the few days there I really took a liking to hostels. They are so cheap (200kr or about $30 a night) and we got free wifi, cheap (all you can eat) breakfast, and there were even free laundry facilities. The only thing that I didn’t really like was that there were only 3 toilets in the whole building; I think that was a bit too few for the 50+ people staying there. I was really surprised to see people of all ages there; I thought hostels were mostly for poor students (like me)! But there were several families and even an old man with a walker staying there! I landed in a room with 7 other girls, but luckily none of them snored, and most went to bed at a decent time.

Day 5

We took a bus to Centralen (the Central Station) and spent the rest of the morning exploring the streets! We found a cheap (slightly tacky) souvenir store and we both got some things for friends and family back home! We went to an awesome thai restaurant for lunch and then we headed on to a chocolate factory!!

Malmo Chokladfabrik is the only bean-to-bar chocolate operation in Sweden. They had a museum about the history of the factory and the story of the cocoa bean. With entry to the museum we got free samples, a guided (Swedish) tour and 20% off in the store later! It was really interesting to learn how chocolate is made. The current owners searched all over the world for the best cocoa beans! After they are picked they have to be fermented and dried, then shipped. At the factory they are ground up into “nibs” and 1 of 3 things happens: 1. Sugar is added and voila, dark chocolate! 2. Sugar and milk powder are added and tada, milk chocolate! 3. The cocoa butter is squeezed out, leaving the powder and butter separate. The butter is then taken and added to sugar and yum, white chocolate! This particular store also made a lot of pralines, which just involved putting the chocolate into molds and adding filling.The samples we got to try were excellent! We also bought some fika (coffee break/snack) in the store after and got to try some pralines as well as chocolates made from different types of cocoa beans. And OF COURSE we had to buy some chocolate to take home with us!

We also visited a castle built in the 1930s and the famous Turning Torso. What a weird apartment building! For supper we went to a pizza place and I tried pizza with French fries and meat on it, and taco pizza! Both were really good!

Day 6

What a busy day! We travelled to Lund in the morning and had coffee with Hanna, a university friend of both Kirsti and I’s host moms! She took us through the botanical gardens and some of the town. We looked around a bit more and had some lunch then hopped on a train to Helsinborg! Here we got on a 20 minute ferry that took us to Helsinor, in Denmark! Here we looked at a castle that is famous because Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is about a prince that lived there! We also got some Danish supper, smorrebrod! It’s little open faced sandwiched with different toppings on special bread. Then we ran back over to Sweden on the ferry, and ran again to catch a train back to our hostel in Malmo!

Day 7

We spent the morning trying to find the beach but it didn’t work, so we stopped and had lunch at a cafe then took the bus to the train station and headed for Kalmar!! Stay tuned...