On January 2nd I decided to venture from Copenhagen over to Malmo, Sweden for the day. Naturally, this had been planned WAY ahead and Sweden was going to be country #5 on my eight country tour this past December. But this was the day I was going to do it, I was going to visit Banja Luka Jr. Now if you’ve never heard of Banja Luka it is a city in Northern Bosnia where only tall, attractive women are born.
i.e. – Me. I was born there and so were many other tall, attractive women. YAY US!
The reason I call Malmo this name is because my mom told me that apparently after the war many Bosnians settled in Malmo, but specifically, many people from Banja Luka. My city. (well, what use to be ‘my’ city now it’s the de facto capital of…. nvm, let’s not do this right now.)
I woke up nice and early to have breakfast at some hipster spot named ‘Next Door Cafe’ in Copenhagen before heading over to the train terminal. I will say, probably the NICEST servers ever were in this cafe and their blueberry pancakes were delicious. Also, the dinosaur they have you hold as proof that you paid for your meal was especially awesome.
As I merrily made my way over to the terminal, this was the headline that read across my Twitter timeline:
Denmark Train Accident Kills Six on Bridge
Whoa.
Pardon? I’m in Denmark. I’m about to go over a bridge with a train. Whoa. Rest in peace to those who lost their lives that day and prayers to those who were injured. Super scary.
My train was on the opposite side of Denmark, going towards Sweden though. The train that the accident occurred on was going between Zealand and Funen. I made SURE to Whatsapp my mom at this moment because the last thing I needed was her seeing that headline and thinking the absolute worst.
I made it to my 11:27am train and left for Malmo finally.
At noon I make it to Malmo and the first thing I saw was pastries. I had a very difficult time this entire trip saying no to pastries so this time would be no different. The cinnamon roll I got was yummy, thanks.
I proceeded to just walk around the center of Malmo for a couple of hours, see what the feel of the city was. I found the shopping area to be quite busy and they had a very good variety of places to buy things, eat things and especially find sneakers. Between Copenhagen and Malmo, I don’t think I had ever seen so many sneaker stores. I also had found this super super cute set of trees that had gift boxes and hearts dangling from them. Took a million pictures trying to get both in one shot. Eventually I stumbled onto a place that sells cevapi. I had mentioned earlier than Malmo was supposed to be Banja Luka Jr so I definitely had to indulge in some delicious Bosnian food.
Malmos Cevapi was the name of the restaurant I had found. I really enjoyed walking into a restaurant and hearing my native language spoken, even though I was not in my native land. There’s something so warm and welcoming about that, it’s hard to fully articulate it. Just feels good you know?
HOWEVER.
I was a little disheartened when I went to order my food. I ordered some burek and the person behind the counter said ‘what kind?’ Sigh. So disappointing. I should have cancelled the burek order that second and just stuck to the cevapi.
For those of you who don’t know, burek is a phyllo pastry filled with meat. There are other variations of it WITH DIFFERENT NAMES like sirnica (with cheese), zeljanica (spinach) or krumpirusa (with potato). Therefore there can’t be ANY OTHER KIND of burek, as saying the word burek should automatically mean it is filled with meat. If you want to piss real Bosnians off, this would be a good way to go about it. We will argue to the death of us about how to use burek. Please see picture below for how serious we take it, it’s a running joke among people in the Balkans.
Yes, yes we take it that seriously.
So I get some burek and cevapi. As I predicted the burek was just OK, but the cevapi were very good. I liked those. My belly was nice and full now and it was time to make the trek over to what the main purpose of my trip to Malmo was.
Finding Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
I mean obviously I didn’t actually expect to find HIM, but there was a place called Zlatan Court built by Nike in Malmo to commemorate him in the neighbourhood he was raised in. I checked my Google Maps and it was about a 40 minute walk there from the location I was standing in, so I started my walk. Found some graffiti hailing Drake on the way too, yay Toronto!
After some confusion about where I was (yes, even with Google Maps) I finally found it. I had made it to Zlatan Court. I was just a little bit closer to that beautiful man, Zlatan. Rawr.
I took some pictures and posed in front of the court after setting up my tripod and praying that the strong wind wouldn’t knock it over. I was content. I got cevapi and I got to my fave soccer players court.
Made my way back to the central station and headed back to Copenhagen. Another 40 minute walk, but I guess between all the pastries and cevapi it served me well to get some steps in right?
Overall, I quite liked Malmo. It isn’t somewhere that’s particularly memorable out of all the places I’ve been to but it also does have charm to it. If you’re ever in Copenhagen and want to do a quick day trip, I’d definitely encourage you to take this quick train over the bridge and visit.
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Mirna