10th May 1984 - en route to England

Thursday May 10.  I woke up before 6.30. We were passing through smooth green fields, town areas, ploughed fields, and Swedes’ small garden allotments with their little garden sheds and vegetables and flowers, mostly tulips. It’s much like a model town.

   We arrived in Malmö just after 7.00 and I walked along to the hydrofoil terminal to wait for the 8.00 flygbät. The two of them arrived and everybody got on – they were both very crowded; I think a lot of the passengers must have been commuters on their way to work in Copenhagen. During the forty-five minutes of the trip I caught up a little bit of this thing. [diary] [Since those days the Øresund Bridge and Tunnel, which was completed in 2000, has probably taken away most of the
flygbäts' business. People can drive or take the train between Denmark and Sweden.]

A flygbät  with a Danish flag.

    At the Copenhagen end of the flyg I caught a bus to Central Station. It looks like a very nice city, Copenhagen does. I tried to ring Mette Lindgren [another one of my sister’s fellow exchange students in Texas] but the woman who answered didn’t speak English and I got the impression that Mette didn’t live there anymore. This being the case, I got on the train on Platform 10 an hour later and it left. I had to pay 32 DKK surcharge to the conductor, but it was a newish comfortable train with laminated windows of different colours (mostly orange). But because of the double glazing, reflections had a wonderful colour shift. Denmark – more green fields, houses and garden allotments, tulips. The train got on the boat at Rod something [Rødby] and we sailed to Puttgarten in West Germany. All the way through it’s so green and lush, with sunlight through the new leaf growth of foresty areas; amazing clouds and cloud formations. Green fields, lots of blossoms, tulips and other flowers LOTS OF DAFFODILS colouring the little shedded allotments. I bought a drink and cheesecake in the buffet.

   We shunted around for a while in Hamburg and then went on to Osnabrück where I changed trains with a girl from Tacoma, Wa. This carriage was six seat compartments, fortunately empty ones were to be found. We had passport checks at the border into Holland and kept on going. As it got dark I fell asleep. I slept through Amsterdam.  [That's if the train did go through Amsterdam.]

  We arrived at Hoek van Holland, went through customs and embarked on Sealink’s ‘St Nicholas’ – another huge ship [built in Sweden in 1981, changed owners and names many times, scrapped in India in 2012]. I had some bread rolls, cheese, strawberry milk and mandarin yoghurt for £1.36. Again I alternated between the floor and the chair in sleeping.

St Nicholas, in more recent livery than when I went on it.