Malmo Nov 2015

Last year there was a European roller derby tournament in Malmo Sweden so we decided to go up for a long weekend. We arrived later in the evening, maybe 9 or 10pm and had to get from the train station to our hotel. Should be no problem as there are buses. So I think that we are pretty good with the public transportations. We usually don't have a problem. We can find where we need to go, where we are and how to get there. Pay the fare or buy a ticket and no problem. It's fairly easy. Only Malmo was not at all user friendly and it was sooo frustrating! 
So there are ticket machines at the train station to get a bus ticket (you cannot buy a ticket on the bus). So you put in where you are going from and to. Should be no problem. So we put in Malmo Central (main train station) and then try to find where we want to get off, only the stop we want is not listed. Lots of other towns and such that are nearby are listed as options, but not any of the stops we can find near where we want in Malmo. Most of the shops right there were closing up and we just could not figure this out. What do we put in the to field? Raymond was trying to look it up online, but I was just like I will go ask that last shop that is still open cause I don't want them to close and be stuck. So I asked the lady in there and she was just like yeah go to the ticket machine and you put in you want to go from Malmo Central to wherever you are going. I was just like yeah, but I just want to go within Malmo and I couldn't find any other stops listed. She was just like oh, you just put from Malmo Central to Malmo Central. Yeah we never would have gotten that. After that it was easy enough to get to where we needed.




It was very grey while we were there, which was fine since we spent most of the day watching roller derby. So the next morning we woke up and I had read that you can get a 72 hour bus pass which would be perfect for us since we were going to use it the three days of the tournament to go get food quickly. Plus there are not ticket machines at a lot of the stops we would be using so I didn't quite know how we would buy tickets otherwise. So then it becomes the challenge of finding where we can buy these tickets. We walked to the train station closest to our hotel (the photos are from that walk) and tried on the ticket machines, but there were no options on there. Luckily there was a ticket office right across the street so we went to talk to them and that is where you have to get any passes. Great so we paid for the 72 hour tickets, which were actually just small receipt papers that they put in little plastic card holders so they wouldn't just be destroyed immediately. Kind of odd, but whatever. So we used those to get around, only like none of the bus drivers knew what they were. We would show our tickets and they would just be like what is that? And we don't know Swedish so we were just like it is our ticket? And the bus drivers would finally just be like whatever, just get on. So yeah.

That first day of the tournament we went to go get some lunch quickly and we caught the one bus by the event to the main bus station area in downtown where we had to transfer to another bus. Should be easy enough. We knew we needed to find bus stop M, or whatever letter it was, and we knew the bus numbers we needed. Only we couldn't find stop M. We were wandering around forever looking for the stupid thing (we never did find it, we saw another bus number that we could take so we jumped on that one). One of the main problems in trying to find the right stop was that the signs for the bus stop, the letter of the stop, was a white letter on light yellow background. So basically you couldn't see what it was unless you walked to the stop. No looking across the street and seeing what is over there. I was just like who decided white on light yellow was a good idea??? Really we had such issues with the transportation there. It just didn't make much sense to us, or was difficult to find the right info. Oh well, we did figure it out eventually.


The tournament was pretty fun. Lots of good roller derby to watch and lots of good foods to eat in Malmo. There were a lot of pizza places with vegan pizza and one of my favorite things about eating pizza there? The pizzas all come with pizza salad! Cabbage salad that is so so delicious! I wish you could get pizza salad everywhere.


The tournament was over on Sunday night, but we did not fly back to Berlin until Monday night. Originally we were thinking of going into Copenhagen on Monday, but we decided to just wander around Malmo since we hadn't seen much of it due to the roller derby. It is not that big of a city and very easy to walk around if you have the time.








A dog agility course at the park on the water


I don't know what these were, but there were a few of them in the park


And the turning torso tower - lots of photos of that as it is the only thing in the area that tall.



From far away I was just eh on it, but standing at the base of it it did look pretty cool





Right by the tower is a really nice area of town. Like really nice new buildings and fancy parks and it just looked much more upscale than the rest of the city. We hung out by the water until it got dark and it was time for us to catch out train to the airport. It was a pretty fun trip even if it was cold and grey the whole time and the transportation took forever to figure out.