Day 2 - Malmo

Hello! 

We are really now Vaxjo at the Toftastrand Hotell AND we have internet!! And we saw lots of neat things today...but first, let me share with you what we did yesterday...

We slept like logs last night!  I think we went to sleep around 9 p.m. Unfortunately, around 3 a.m. some boisterous folks were meandering (we imagine) down our street.  So that woke us up, but by at least an hour later we were both back asleep and woke up by 8 a.m. All in all, we both got a good amount of rest. 



G-ma took this phot for Emily.



 We wanted to see the Malmo Castle, so we took the bus to the central train station, exchanged enough money to hopefully take us through Sweden, and then walked over to the castle.  G-ma thought Emily would get a kick out of seeing the bike parking lot that was floating on the canal by the train station.  We also could see the Turning (Twisting??) Torso building by Santiago Calatrava in the distance.


 They also had cool things that you just don't think about like public air hoses that are located in places that you would really need them...like parks, not gas stations.  So, I took a photo. 

Isn't this a great idea?  Public air hoses *in* the park!

Back to the castle...The castle is surrounded by a moat that is *filled* with alligators!  No, really it just had a few swans and geese ducks. (bummer!) The castle was built at an unfortunate time in which medieval was “out” and renaissance wasn’t quite yet fully defined.  So, it’s just about the ugliest castle we’ve seen, but you be the judge:


Malmo Castle.  Ick.



The castle currently houses a restaurant and a bunch of different museums: art, natural history, castle stuff.  We focused on the castle history, but toured a little of the natural history part as well.  The first diorama we looked at was really an indication of the things to come.  It had 5 taxidermied foxes eating a half-eaten bird.  [see amazing photo @ right]

I don’t think this would have passed typical U.S. diorama standards as it seemed a little brutal, but so be it.  In later exhibits we found that this was pretty normal here as there were human skeletons in numerous exhibits that covered topics ranging from prison life (the castle had been used as a prison at one point) to Bronze Age graveyards.  Then there were the illustrations showing, in flip book fashion, what happens during a beheading.  Then there was the diorama representing some medieval holiday in which there were two people.  One was of a woman’s butt basically sticking out of a herring barrel.  The other was a guy who had drunk too much during the festivities.  Really?!  You have a holiday that has to have *some* sort of cultural meaning and *that* is how you choose to represent it?! Oh, we could go on, but at some point it all got to be too much for us, and we feel like sparing you all the details. 

To be fair, seeing the rooms of the castle was pretty cool. 

But those good exhibits are always offset by this exhibit's name:



The gardens of the castle were really pretty, and we saw the castle windmill. 

We ate lunch at an outdoor restaurant at Lilla Torg which is a square surrounded by really old half-timber buildings.  I got pasta with white sauce and veggies.  Mom got Swedish sausage with potatoes and salad, and cauliflower with a cream sauce.

 

 

And then we walked past a Salon called Rydberg and Company! 

 

More on what happened today later...