For the first time this trip, breakfast was not provided, so Eric, Jaden and I took advantage and made ourselves fried egg and bacon sandwiches with orange slices on the side. It was a great meal to prepare us for the big day ahead with Malmö city planners. We biked over to City Hall and were given a presentation about biking and planning in Malmö. They discussed transportation, infrastructure, and Malmö’s history, among other things. I found it interesting that Malmö chose to have almost all bi-directional bike paths, so that bikes could go both directions on either side of the street. This makes sense if the path is on just one side of the street, but it makes unnecessary traffic moving in both directions next to each other. I enjoyed the space of having a whole lane of bike traffic in Denmark and not needing to worry about oncoming traffic.
One diagram I did enjoy from their presentation was that Malmö has 64% of its people live in an area that has great bike infrastructure to get to points of interest. Another 31% of their population they categorized as having good infrastructure. This means that 95% of Malmö people have the infrastructure available to get everywhere they need to go by bike. Another interesting fact was that 80,000 people commute everyday between Malmö and Copenhagen. With this amount of people crossing the water everyday, they are looking into building an even faster high speed train between the Nordic cities that would only take 20 minutes. It currently takes 35 minutes on the train, so they want to be able to cut that time in half.
After the presentation, we took a tour with Jesper around the city and stopped for lunch at an intersection. We took our lunch to go and ate by one of the canals. It was a beautiful day in the 3rd largest city in Sweden and we carried on through giant bike parking garages and busy shopping streets. A few of us went shopping after the tour, but I was unsuccessful in finding anything good. Jaden, Mikah, and I ended up at a café and had muffins and made haikus. We then got prepared for Marc’s 50th birthday which would entail a progressive dinner at our hotel which was on the ground floor, so it worked really well. Jaden, Eric and I made brie and jam on a baguette and had some prosciutto, crackers, and jam on the side too. We were so full by the last few rooms that I could barely down the amazing passion fruit cake. The food was great, the company was better, and I hope my 50th is at least half as good as this party.
After a great dinner, Ryan, Eric, Mikah, and I went and played shuffleboard at a bar and kept the good times rolling. We hung around Malmö a bit longer knowing full well we had to get up at 5 the next morning, but we figured there was sleep to be had on the plane and trains to the Netherlands. After all, we never knew when we’d be back in Sweden.
