Beyond Malmo
Skanor-Falsterbo 6th July
For our last full day in Sweden we went for a short drive to the south coast 30 minutes from Malmo. The first stop was Hollviken for lunch and a geocache, the town has Viking history and sandy beaches which makes it a summer holiday destination for Northern Europeans. We couldn’t find a decent café that doesn’t specialise in pizza and schnitzel so we completed the ‘Oystercatcher’ cache by the ‘flight of the concord’ bronze sculpture on the promenade and left.
We headed to Skanor-Falsterbo, two merged towns, out on the peninsula, with Oresund on one side and the Baltic Sea on the other. Skanor has a marina, several cafes and little beach huts.
The fish café was full so we went for the European fusion café, Roger’s was supposed to be a croque monsieur, but was a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, mine was a smashed truffle, beef and jalapeno burger.
The photo shows the remains of our lunch; obviously pickled red onion is cheap.
People come here not just for the food but for the white sandy beaches. You can see all the way to Denmark, the Oresund Bridge, the ocean wind farms and the shipping lanes from Oresund. The people in the deck chairs are looking straight at a sand dune not the sea, I’m not sure why as you have to walk some distance to see the water on the other side of the dune.
These three huts best represent Scandinavian houses; they are mostly painted white, yellow or red. The red (almost brown) colour, called Falun Red, is very popular in Sweden, particularly in rural areas, where farm buildings are mostly painted red. The paint was created in the 16th century from the sludge produced by mines and smelters. They discovered when the sludge was heated and mixed with linseed oil and rye flour it formed an anti-weathering paint. Norway also has houses mainly painted yellow, white or red, however their red paint came from mixing ochre and cod liver oil. Red paint was cheapest to produce because there were a lot of cod by-products available in days gone by.
Scandinavia people are very patriotic and love to fly their nation’s flag, however the Swedes take patriotism that little bit further and have made all their traffic signs blue and yellow instead of international black and white.
Today’s ABBA tribute is ‘Knowing me, Knowing you’ (1977), for our holiday in Sweden. We have mixed feelings about Sweden, we had some good times and bad, some nice accommodation and some forgettable.
The food experiences were varied, however they were cheaper than Norway and Denmark, just like the petrol. We aren’t suffering from Stockholm syndrome, I hope, and we don’t have delirium from too much ABBA, Ikea or sugar, however I can’t say the same about the constant presence of mosquitoes.
Memories
Good days
Bad days
They’ll be
With me
Always
