Slottsträdgården, Canal Tour, and More

This morning, I left you in Malmö, Sweden, at lunch at a nice cafe beside Slottsträdgården. But I hadn’t yet gone into Slottsträdgården. After I answered the call of my belly with a plate of crumbled, cured salmon, a poached egg and some arugula, along with some lemonade, I did indeed visit Slottsträdgården.

After that, I walked over to take a canal tour and did a little more walking as well.

Slottsträdgården

As I mentioned this morning, Google Translate says that “Slottsträdgården” is “The Palace Garden” in English. But if you ask it to translate just “slott” rather than the compound word, it gives you “castle.” Considering its location almost right next to the Malmö Castle, and the fact that it’s located where the castle garden used to be, I assume The Castle Garden, not The Palace Garden, is the correct translation of Slottsträdgården, at least in this case.

A sign near one of the entrances to Slottsträdgården that generously provided both Swedish and English told me that “Slottsträdgården is an organic garden that is open all year round, 24 hours a day. The Garden started as a citizens’ initiative in 1994 and was officially opened in 1998. Here you can follow the changing seasons and enjoy both the still winter days and an abundance of flowering plants from spring to autumn.”

This made me curious. I looked up the climate in Malmö. What I found said that it can get down to -20°C, and sometimes even colder in the winter. To me, that’s not a time to go for a walk in a garden.

Slottsträdgården grows both flowering plants and vegetables. I was pleased to learn that they grew organic vegetables. Who wants to eat inorganic vegetables? What are they made of? Hydrocarbons?

The sign went on to tell me that Slottsträdgården covers 12,000 square metres, which is a fair size but well short of officially huge. It makes up for its lack of hugeness by packing pretty much as many plants as possible into that space.

There are some moderately wide paths through it. But it’s mostly made up of several small plots with very narrow paths between them and plants planted as densely as possible within those plots.

There’s also an arched pergola perpendicular to two parallel main paths.

I don’t know if the above came off sounding somewhat negative in spots. I didn’t intend it to be. Slottsträdgården is beautiful. And it appears quite real and down-to-earth rather than grandly staged for tourists.

Oh, and just outside of Slottsträdgården, there’s a charming, old-school windmill that adds to the scene.

I’ve included here a collage of just a small sampling of the flowers. I also posted separate pictures of the pergola and of the windmill.

Walk to Water

After I left Slottsträdgården, I decided to take a boat tour through Malmö’s canals that I’d seen floating along on my walk by the canal through Kungsparken and Slottsparken this morning. I found it on the worldly interwebs thingy. Its departure point is located less than a fifteen-minute walk from Slottsträdgården.

When I got to the ticket office, the next tour, at 2:00 p.m., was sold out. I bought a ticket for the one after that, at 3:30. That left me with some time to fill.

Malmö is located beside the body of water that separates Sweden and Denmark. Apple Maps labels that straight as just “The Sound.” Some interwebby searching told me that boring name is indeed the English moniker for it. The Danish and Swedish names for it are Øresund and Öresund, respectively.

I could walk pretty much to the mouth of one of the canals as it meets The Sound, and have some time left over before I needed to get back for the canal tour. I decided to do that.

The walk took me past the old Malmö harbour. It was quite pleasant.

And, at the farthest end of it, there it was. The Sound. A large body of water that I couldn’t see across. But Denmark is there somewhere.

There’s a bridge, which I couldn’t see from where I was, that crosses the sound and goes toward Copenhagen, which isn’t far inland from the coast. The bridge has both road and rail sides.

In truth, it’s not a bridge the whole way. It starts as a tunnel on the Denmark side. The tunnel emerges on an island. The route then continues the bulk of the way as a bridge.

I read somewhere that the reason for the tunnel portion is to allow for ship navigation. If they built the bridge high enough for that, it would have interfered with the flight paths to and from the nearby airports.

On this trip, I could have easily hopped a train here in Malmö and gone on a day trip to Copenhagen. I’m not going to. There’s a reason for that. As I’ve mentioned a few times on this trip, about a decade or so ago, long before I started this journal, I took a trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm. On that trip, I travelled between those two cities on a train that went over that bridge. But I didn’t go farther afield in either Denmark or Sweden.

I really loved Stockholm. That was my inspiration for this trip. But this time, I wanted to see more of Sweden.

However, I also loved Copenhagen. I’m thinking that at some point I might do a trip there similar to the one I’m doing now in Sweden: Fly into Copenhagen, but in addition to seeing that city, do a circle somewhere within Denmark. We’ll see if that happens. I hope so.

After staring out at the sea for long enough to trigger the immediately preceding thoughts, it was time to stroll back to the canal tour embarkation point, way too early because I fret incessantly about these sorts of things—and about a great many other things as well, but never mind that.

Canal Tour

The canal excursion was a 50-minute tour in an open-top boat that starts near the train station, goes down the canal that goes out to The Sound—where I’d walked, but not on water, before the tour—turns back, and then goes around a circle canal that passes near the Malmö Castle, by Kungsparken and Slottsparken, past the main shopping district and some of the old part of Malmö, and then back to the starting point.

The captain of the boat (I didn’t catch his name, but he said he was the captain, so that’s what I’ll call him) provided a running commentary over a speaker system.

The boat’s steering wheel, and therefore the captain’s position, was at the front of the boat. For most of the time during his commentary, he stood up facing the customers, only occasionally turning around and looking at where he was going.

In addition, at the start of the trip, he told us that we had to remain seated because we were going under a lot of low bridges and we’d hit our heads if we stood up. He, on the other hand, remained standing for most of the way, sitting for only the lowest of the bridges. But for some of the other bridges, it looked to me like the top of his head was only a couple of millimetres below the bridge. I wonder how many times he bonked his head before he became more familiar with his route.

Oh, and another thing about usually not looking where he was going. The canal is not terribly narrow, but narrow enough that it wouldn’t have taken too much to steer into the sides. He never did.

And there were several pedal boats out on the circular canal. He managed not to hit any of them.

By the way, as part of his commentary, the captain said that in the olden days, the canal was much narrower. But the canals were also used to dispose of raw sewage. I don’t think he was around then, so I’m not sure where he got this information, but he said the stench was unbearable. So they widened the canal to diffuse the sewage more.

They have also started to clean up the canal and not dump raw sewage in it. The captain said that the city council says that the water in the canal will be clean enough to swim in within a couple of years. He also said he wanted the city councillors to swim in it before he does.

The captain said that he’d lived in Malmö all his life. He had a lot of stories about the city.

For example, he said that a nearby old town, Lund (I’m thinking of going there this trip, perhaps tomorrow), is a university town. People used to say that Lund is where you go to read, but Malmö is where you go to work.

He said, and I sorely hope he was joking about this, that he’s a proud Malmöer—he’s never read a book in his life.

That’s not as true today. There used to be a large shipbuilding industry in Malmö, along with a major port. The shipbuilding is completely finished due to globalization and competition, and the port is greatly diminished.

As a result, the city is reinventing itself. He said that, ironically, Malmö is now doing what it always hated about Lund. It has the youngest university in Sweden. And much of it is being built where the shipbuilding yards used to be. Um. Okay.

At one point, he said that Malmö used to be a walled city because they wanted to build a wall to keep the outsiders outside, just like, and these are his words, “the orange man wants to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out.” He mentioned “the orange man” a few times, without ever mentioning the orange man’s name. I was pleased to see that people elsewhere in the world laugh at Trump too, not that it’s a laughing matter.

When the captain took us into the canal that led out to The Sound, he said that that was where the old harbour used to be. He pointed to the few small ships docked there and said only one of them is still capable of moving. He said that’s all that’s left of the old harbour because they shut it all down after a disaster that happened in 2000.

He didn’t tell us what that disaster was for a while. But then he said that it was the building of the Öresund Bridge. He said that, before that, there used to be ferries that were, in effect, party boats that went to Copenhagen. After the bridge was built, they disappeared.

Plus, he said that the economies of Denmark and Sweden have reversed. Sweden used to be the rich country, and Denmark used to be the poor one. People in Malmö used to take their money and party in Copenhagen. He pointed to some of the newer condos by the water and said, “But now Danes are the only ones who can afford the penthouses there.”

He also said that he used to say that Danes were the only ones who could afford any of the condos by the water. But one day, a woman in one of the condos, who must have heard him giving his spiel several times, was on her balcony and screamed at him that she was a Swede and lots of Swedes can afford to live there. So now he’s amended it to say it’s just the penthouses that only Danes can afford.

He also said that people in Malmö are Danes at heart.

Centuries ago, the Danes and Swedes fought a total of 11 major wars. Had those wars been consecutive, they would have lasted for 75 years.

Malmö and the surrounding area are part of the Scania region of Sweden. As we traversed the canals, the captain pointed out a number of people flying Scania flags and not the flag of Sweden. Scania used to be part of Denmark, and, according to the captain, the people of Scania are still waiting for Denmark to take it back again. However, it’s been Swedish for more than 300 years.

Having said all that, I should point out that the captain liked to kibbitz a lot. So, I can’t tell you how much of what he said was true. And there is a lot more that he said that I didn’t repeat here, solely because I can’t remember it.

So ends a fine day in Malmö and another fine day in Sweden. More to come. Days that is, I hope they’re fine, but we’ll see, dear.