Gothenburg

The journey to Gothenburg began with a 3km treck to Malmö Central Station. It shouldn’t really take all that long to cover the distance but with a large rucksack on your back it is extremely tiring. I suppose this is in part due to my extreme lack of fitness but also due to the large amount of unnecessary clothing I have with me. I seem to end up wearing the same t-shirt/jeans/hoodie combo most of the time, so I could probably throw away a large portion of my clothes.

Fortunately we managed to get seats on the train to Gothenburg where I listened to the mellow tones of the latest Bring Me The Horizon album and read pages from Mark Custis’ Web of Deceit.

Arriving in Gothenburg we faced another long treck to the hostel. The walk along the waterfront was somewhat more pleasant than the treck we had undertaken in Malmö, but the weight of my rucksack still crushed my knees into the ground.

We arrived at the hostel to find that we had been given the top bunks. This is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you when sharing a room with strangers. Having the top bunk is great fun when you are a child, but when you are 22 years old there is no dignified way of making the climb into bed. It is also impossible to avoid making large amounts of noise and waking everyone up in the middle of the night. It also seemed that the hostel staff had decided to play a game of “how many beds can you fit in one room”. Apparently the answer is five, although I would argue that the room was only big enough for two (three at a push).

Bed Challenge...

In the evening we walked down Avenyn in search of something to eat. It quickly became apparent that this was where all the very expensive restaurants were located. I use the word expensive very loosely because the Scandinavians seem to consider these prices “normal”. Maybe I’m just being a cheap skate but I would consider £25 to be rather a lot for a single course. The price of alcohol is also becoming a point of great amusement. I’m assuming that alcohol related violence in Sweden is extremely low because there is no way anyone can afford to get drunk. In a bar or restaurant £4 is the absolute minimum for a drink, and £6 or £7 is common place. If they started charging prices like that in the UK there would be riots in the street.

We decided that we probably weren’t going to find anywhere within our price range along Avenyn and so went in search of cheaper cuisine. We ended the evening sat on a bench by the waterside eating Kebab Pizza and drinking Coca-Cola. I’d never even heard of Kebab Pizza before this trip but it is pretty much as you imagine. Pizza base with a load of Kebab meat on top. It tasted surprisingly good as was very filling, although by this stage we were so hungry that we could have got by on an assortment of different road kill.

The next morning we walked to the Masthuggs Kyrkan, a large church which was very close to our hostel. From the top of the hill on which it is located you can get a reasonable view of Gothenburg.

Much of the afternoon was spent in one of the parks discussing how it was that all the Swedish people managed to get so good looking. Before coming here I assumed it was just a stereotype that all Swedes were good looking, but it isn’t, they really are outrageously attractive. This posed a couple of questions. Firstly, where did they put all the ugly people? Secondly, how do they stop the “ugly” gene from infecting the population? And finally, why don’t people in England look this good?

What remained of the afternoon was spent looking for a supermarket in the City Centre. We didn’t find one and so decided to head back to the hostel only to discover that there was a supermarket just five minutes from where we were staying.

Gothenburg, much like Malmö is a fairly average town. Unless you are interested in shopping there is very little else to see or do. I don’t mean this in the same sense as I did about Rotterdam. In Rotterdam there is literally nothing to do, but in Gothenburg there are plenty of bars and restaurants as well as the large shopping mall. Even just sitting in the park is very pleasant. Whilst it isn’t a place I intend to go back to it isn’t somewhere that I actively dislike either.