a weekend in Malmo

today (sunday) we arrived home from a girls' weekend in Sweden. just a casual weekend shopping in another country. no biggie. malmo is about an hours drive away from Copenhagen via bridge.  it's quite a new bridge, it was only opened in 2013. unfortunately  my camera died during the trip and i didn't get any photos of the bridge myself but google images will do fine. acually google images will do better as the weather is much nicer in these photos than any of mine

if you look at the picture on top, you will see that the bridge actually ends in the middle of the ocean. no, this is not chitty chitty bang bang and we did not have a car that flew or sailed, but there was a tunnel that went underwater.

so we arrived on friday at around midday and hit the shops. our hotel was in the centre of the city so we had easy access to just about everything. there was a river we had to cross to get from the hotel to 

the main shopping street, and an ice-skating rink on the other side too. 

the river started off frozen as in this picture, but it actually warmed up a bit and was pretty much melted by the end of the weekend. we spent most of our time here: 

the main shopping street ran between two long, tall blocks of old buildings. it was a walking street a lot like strøget in Copenhagen. no cars allowed. shoppers only. sounds good to me!

caroline had made a deal with stine that if she didn't spend any money on clothes for ALL of january, she could have 1000 danish kroner to spend in malmo. and mormor gave her 500. so she had a lot of fun:

some of that stuff is mine actually. but everything i bought was on sale. i am a thrifty shopper! we ate at a lovely fondue restaurant last night. unfortunately, we were all pretty full from our late lunch so we didn't eat huge amounts, but it was very lovely. rather than have only cheese fondue, there was a hot pot of water with a bit of oil in it that you cooked your meat it. then we had about 8 or so different sauces that you dipped the meat into. it came with bread and a salad bar too :) one of the sauces was banana. really weird. both stine and i mistook it for cheese sauce and it was promptly put onto the windowsill next to our table to make sure no one else made the same mistake.

because all of friday and saturday were spent shopping, we had to cram in all the touristy stuff quickly this morning after we checked out of the hotel. obviously we have our priorities well sorted. we drove to an old industrial area come modern apartment hotspot, which i think was built on reclaimed land on the very edge of the waterline. it reminded me a lot of wynard quarter. a group of architects are slwoly converting the area from an industrial ghost town into a funky and environmentally friendly living space for young families. it is apparently very nice in the summer time. 

 

people jump off this bridge into the water below. even the thought of doing that on a day like today could give you hypothermia. in the background you can see the bridge! a little foggy but definitely there. 

the area is all centred around the turning torso, the building above. a bit like the leaning tower of pizza's yuonger sister with plastic surgery. 

they definitely speak a very different language in Sweden. it sounded to me like the nordic sounds that are common to all of scandinavia with a bit of an italian lilt to it. i definitely find danish easier to understand, so i guess thats a good sign! 

back to school again tomorrow, and i have a busy week ahead of me. however i am away next weekend too, going to Odense to spend the weekend with some fellow kiwis, so i will have another lengthy report next week.