Day 4, Oslo to Copenhagen

Havnelageret - this picture doesn't do justice to the size of this place

​Greetings, humans! Today’s entry will come in two parts, mostly because the train is long, I am bored and writing gives me something to do. The journey is very long – 8 ½ hours including an hour stop between trains, we had to make one change. We left our room this morning, our last trek into Oslo, with time for a last sit at our (well, my humans’, there is water involved) favourite places. We also discovered this gigantic building known as Havnelageret, its function unknown. Despite rigorous Internet searches I'm still not entirely sure what it's giant walls contain, other than that it is a commercial building, 11 floors tall with foundations 20 metres deep. It was completed in 1921 at which point it was the largest concrete building in Europe and its fourth floor used as an air raid shelter during World War II (my thanks to Wikipedia). Pretty impressive, one must admit.
We boarded the 1 o’clock train from Oslo to Gothenburg, Sweden. As we journeyed across the border in the world’s hottest train (the air conditioning was broken and the windows didn’t open – I call that a design flaw), the hills, trees and city buildings gave way to much flatter open farmland. We saw more red, purple and yellow painted wood-clad houses and fewer trees. Most of the journey had that dreaded water known as the sea next to us (luckily the side furthest from our seats) but occasionally the evil stuff would come over our side and I would be surrounded. Not even slowly roasting was enough to make me want to get near the wet stuff.

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The arrival of our first train - Oslo to Gothenburg

Enjoying the view

In Gothenburg, a famous building (probably)

​Anyway, four hours of baked train later, we arrived in Gothenburg. What an achievement! My humans might have their shortcomings, namely their insistence on spending considerable amounts of time near water, but they have got us by train to another country. I do not give praise lightly but well done, Charlie and Jack. Though please note, this will be the only praise I shall bestow upon you, I can’t have you getting above yourselves and suggesting I should walk. After all, you’ve made one inter-rail journey, the rest must be easy!
Well, I’ve got distracted. I blame the train, hotter than that hell-hole factory in Vietnam – no I wasn’t going to mention Vietnam.
Right, Gothenburg. By the time we had got out the station and made sure we were back so as not to miss the next train, we only got to spend half an hour in this city.
In some ways, it had its similarities to Oslo, big buildings, scary trams, a river, parks, but this city was older and had a rather worrying lack of pedestrian crossings, unlike Oslo where the stripy things were everywhere.
My humans sat down to admire the view in a park under a shady tree. After the blazes of that train, I would have quite liked this but would they let me enjoy it? No, these evil humans had to sit by the river, didn’t they?

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Why is there always water?

In the park, trees, beautiful old buildings... and more water

My only view of Lund, being stuck temporarily in Sweden could definitely be worse

​Well, after that it was back to the station and our next train, Gothenburg to Copenhagen. One short delay and some slight confusion as to whether we were actually on the right train later, we were off. The Sweden that is rolling past us as I (well, Charlie) write is green, still mostly flat, but a few more trees have returned. Some of the buildings are similar to those in Norway, but now there’s some more brick thrown in too, the difference subtle enough to let us know we’re firmly in a different country now.
And there’s some whirly things. What the blazes are they? (Sorry, still cooling down from the last train).
Oh, Charlie informs me they are wind turbines that make green electricity. I didn’t think wind or electricity were green, more a blue colour for the former and a crackly white-yellow for the latter.
Well, either way, I think that sums up the day so far, I will continue today’s entry when we arrive at the room this evening.
 
Part II – broken air con and water were the least of my worries! Basically, as soon as I caught you up to speed on leaving Gothenburg, things started to go wrong. There was a technical fault with the train (I don’t really know…) which meant it ran slower than normal and so we became late. So late, in fact, the train decided to terminate in Malmö and not carry on to Copenhagen.
This resulted in us getting off in Lund and catching a different train into Copenhagen – luckily we didn’t have to wait too long. There were some nice old buildings opposite the station which almost (but definitely didn’t) make up for the pain in my backside our train caused me.

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A little blurry but the bridge at sunset

The train from Lund ran on time so all was going well finally. Charlie and Jack have been talking all day about a bridge into Denmark (that’s where Copenhagen is). That’s good news, I like bridges.
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I do not like this bridge, it is over water. Fortunately I survived the big scary bridge and after our unplanned second stop in Sweden, we have eventually arrived in Denmark. Only, we had missed our direct bus to our room for the night so this meant taking a train to the next station (Nørreport) – which was late – and running for another bus.
Copenhagen seems nice enough, although older than Oslo. Very dark as well, although we did arrive at 10pm so I should probably assume this is not always the case. At least it actually gets properly dark here, unlike Oslo’s 24 hour summer sunlight which was weird yet strangely endearing.
The room is nice but it is too dark for me to see out the window (my favourite pastime) and someone has put a lot of planty things and some blinds in the way. It is like they are making it purposely difficult for cats to look outside. Anyway, I suspect I’ll get my humans to take a picture of the view in the morning.
We’ll be exploring Copenhagen and then getting another long train to Berlin tomorrow.
Until then, Chesh.

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