Low-cost midlife crisis

Interrailing for oldies

Day 8 – interrail done right

An interrail ticket allows you to roam Europe, visiting far flung places, and getting far from home. But, as some of the days of this trip have shown, it’s not necessarily as easy as it might be. However, there are other ways you can use the ticket – once you get somewhere.

The 8th day of our holiday was a good example ( since day 1 started at 9pm, this was effectively the end of the first week. I have to tell you that it feels like we’ve been away a lot longer than a week. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?). Rather than lug our backpacks off to a new destination, dealing with finding new accommodation and so on, we went on a day trip from our current base in Copenhagen. No need for luggage, just hop on a train, any train and go.

Fans of Saga Noren and Martin Rohde may already have guessed where we’d go

Denied Stockholm, and the chance to visit my mate Aidan, by the rigid “you must have a seat” edicts of Swedish railways, we still had the chance to go to Sweden, even if it was not exactly as far as we’d wanted. After nearly a week of north/westward travel it felt good to not be planning the next move or worrying about whether we needed reservations, or thinking about accommodation. It’s all been enjoyable so far, and the day in Berlin especially was excellent, but I’m beginning to think this day-trips-from-a-hub approach is more my thing. Though obviously if you’re starting from deepest Transylvania, you do need to put the miles in, before you get somewhere with decent railways…

Lund

We started off in Lund. Lund is noted for (a) some kind of religious significance that, to be honest, made me fall asleep when trying to understand that bit of the Wikipedia page; (b) being the home of a very old and very famous University ; and (c) being the home of tetrapak, one of those Swedish companies that are rapidly taking over the world (see also Spotify, IKEA, H&M, Electrolux, etc). Tetrapak is, coincidentally, who my older daughter indirectly works for. Anyway, it seemed like a nice small town. Apologies for the lukewarm and uninformative review

In Lund, Jesus and his disciples not only look white, but they look like Swedes

Off to Malmö. Much bigger than Lund. Apparently Malmö has a bit of a bad reputation among Swedes and Danes. And is one of those places that out-and-out fascist scum like Farage cite as proof that immigration doesn’t work – though as it turns out, Malmö has one of the most vibrant and innovative economies in the world. So, in your face Farage, you vile racist bag of shit.

Malmö

It felt like a really vibrant and cool place. It has that buzz and energy that is tangible. And we were only there for a few hours. I’d be happy to go back.

More Malmö

Malmö, we also discovered, is the home of the “Disgusting Foods Museum” which we visited. There was a lot of cheese in the Disgusting Foods Museum. And meat. I’m just saying. I think the most disgusting by far, even outdisgusting the schnapps made from beaver urine and the little auks stitched into sealskin and left to rot, were the ortolans. A small bird, fed until practically bursting and then drowned in brandy and eaten whole, a method of production that is so evidently cruel that people eat them with a napkin over their heads so God doesn’t see them doing so. You could just NOT EAT THEM, French people. Then you wouldn’t have to hide from God.