Trip to Sweden and Denmark was one of those typical scenarios when I decided to make my weekend longer in some destination I have never been before. This time I wasn’t very specific of any places to visit. I was looking for meeting new people and making new friends and the best way to do this is couchsurfing. After being accepted by 3 different couchsurfing hosts with 3 different nationalities and living in 2 different countries I was ready to go.
I have never seen so many people with so much alcohol from duty free zone than at the Budapest airport on the gate to Malmo. Alcohol in Sweden is so expensive and difficult to get that now I understand why all the people buy that much in duty frees. In supermarkets in Sweden you are allowed to buy just a beer up to 3.5% of alcohol. 3.5% !!! The rest of the real alcohol you can get only at special stores owned by government called Systembolaget. These stores close around 6 pm on weekdays, around 2 pm on Saturdays and during Sundays or holidays are closed. Can you imagine that you forget to buy a bottle for a party and there is nowhere else to go for it?
Anyway, my first place to visit was Malmo. It is small enough to see it by foot in a short time which is always good for me. One of the coolest facts I have noticed in first minutes of my visit was that everyone speaks really good English over there. You dont even have to bother asking if they do speak english, just ask what you need in English no matter if it is a bus driver or an old lady on a wheel chair. In the time of my visit in Malmo was pretty windy and I guess there were more bikes fallen on the ground because of the wind than just bikes on the street of any Slovak city. I really liked the bicycle garage near the train station, where you can park two bikes on top of each other. While walking around the city I also found many „air stations“ for bikes to put some air into tyres. Pretty useful. Even though there are many bikes some people still use cars for transportation but when I say cars I mean Tesla. I have never seen so many Teslas in my life (until I went to Copenhagen). There were not just Teslas but also many Ferraris and lamborghinis so at least the CO2 was leveled.
Malmo was very nice city to visit but to say the truth I can’t imagine living there. It was a Saturday and around 5 pm there was almost no people on the streets and sudenly I started to feel sad. So I left Malmo and went about 10km north to Lomma, small town where Leif (couchsurfing host) was supposed to live. BTW on the bus you are able to pay just with credit card which is definitelly the best option. In Lomma I met with 3 great people. My host Leif, Chloe and Moa and spent rest of the evening talking and getting to know each other. In Leif’s house I realised how important is recycling in Sweden. I had an used napkin and honestly I didnt know where to throw it. There was a trash can for cardboard, plastic, cans, paper, food and glass. To none of those would fit my used napkin until Chloe woke up and showed me another trash can for mixed stuff like my napkin. Level of recyclacion 999 🙂 Lomma BTW is great gateaway in the summer because of its beach, but since it was pretty shity weather and also me being in hurry beach was no option.
My next step was a student city of Lund where I got in about 30 minutes or so. Shaun, an American student and my couchsurfing host was waiting for me in his dormitory called „Smalands nation“ which is based on socialism, feminism and anti-capitalism or something like that. Lund is a college city with more students living there than inhabitants. I was truly amazed by the architecture of different college buildings there. Lund was very clean city full of young energy. Different student nations or organisations and students dormitories made me feel like in the USA. After visting the city and making a diner with Shaun I spent the rest of the evening in the dormitory with students from different countries talking about current situation in Europe and I realised in first seconds how open-minded those people were. When our kitchen talk was over I went to bed and to get ready for next day. After two days and two nights my short couchsurfing trip to Sweden was coming to end and it was time for me to move to the capital of Denmark.
