The City Whose Name I Still Don’t Know How To Pronounce

6 July 2012

OO or OH or OE. Those are the possible ways to pronunce the last letter of Malmo; the city I pull into. Someone banging on the glass doors of the train carriage woke me up.

Malmo welcomes me with a very grey sky which remains grey and dim much later into the evening. Not that I would know as my watch broke. It fell out of my pocket and the face smashed on the floor. I would rather lose my fucking wallet than my watch. But I’ve already lost my wallet. What’s next? Shitty weather? Check.

The weather and my attitude clears when I walk all the way to the water. Denmark can be seen lying low and flat in the distance joined to Sweden by a hulking great bridge in the distance. It feels like I’m in some scifi dystopia.

Out on the pier the sand is a grey-brown. Unfortunately you see a lot of it as the water is nice and clear and surprisingly not that cold.

Loud electro music wakes me up from the beach club in a tent being set up. An old man panting keeps me awake.

Like the parts of Stockholm outside the centre, Malmo consists of mainly apartments but in less attractive industrial buildings. On the streets with me are a whole mix of Swedish people - but only Swedish ethnicity. They all look like they’re going somewhere to escape the cold that doesn’t actually exist.

I suppose I do too; I want to sit down, write all this up and site some more on this refreshingly uneventful day.