A trip to Malmö in the south of Sweden

A few days ago, my friend from Brazil, got in touch, out of the blue, and told me he was coming to Copenhagen and would be going to Malmö in the south of Sweden, over the day. Naturally, he was hoping I’d be able to come and see him, and I told him I wouldn’t want to miss that.

We agreed that I would come on Thursday this week. I was able to work out a trip that could work. That is, if I paid a fortune for a cab at the end of the day, after nine in the evening.

The day started typically for me, with the bus being so late I almost missed my first train and might have had to rebook on the way, that is if that would be enough. If the bus had been any later nothing would have helped.

Getting to Malmö was quite easy after that, but the train, that had left on time, was late on arrival and I have no idea why. And they seems to have changed everything in that central station since I was last there, so it was hard for me to find my way. Eventually, I was able to find my friend and we started walking around in Malmö. Our first stop was a really great Chinese Vegan restaurant that is quite famous for being so good. The food was still great but a little different from the last time I was there four years ago.

A funny thing happened in that restaurant. The Chinese lady who I think owns it, came up to welcome us and indicate a table for us. She also asked what I wanted to drink and I said water (in Swedish). Then she looked at my friend and I told her he’s Brazilian but speaks English too. She immediately asked him if he spoke Mandarin, which he does. He asked me if I’d told her but I hadn’t, so how on Earth could she guess? They said something, presumably very polite to each other, which was fun to hear.

Then, actually like the last time with my friend from Scotland (who is not Scottish, just lives there) we did some sightseeing.

For a while that worked fine, but in the end, I realized I’d been overdoing it a bit. Lazing about for at least two months has clearly ruined my stamina a bit. During the hour or so before my train left, we sat in the railway station, just talking, which was really nice.

The weather was, after a few days of snow and rain and cold, actually quite nice for this time of year. Sunny and not at all cold.

By the time I got back, to my horror, I noticed that my legs had swollen up so maybe it is quite good for me to just sit around, being lazy.

I hate that we’re always going have to take a taxi to get back to the house in the evenings. This taxi service is about three times as expensive as the one we last used and the driver was such a snob, telling me all about how long he’d lived in Russia and how he’d studied national economics and Russian and generally about how great he was. He wasn’t good looking either, like that guy working for the other service. While he was going on about how educated he was, I kept thinking – what? you only know two foreign languages? I thought of telling him about my English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Latin… Not that I’m anywhere near fluent in most of them, but still…

So that was my day. I’m really glad my Brazilian friend I had a chance to meet. It’s a sort of once in a lifetime thing and despite some difficulties, we were able to make it work.