Tourism Fail

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Tourist Fail

So for the most part I’ve been staying local and enjoying Lund, with the exception of a few trips to Malmo and of course Bergen.  However, my friend Johanna gave me a list of things to do and places to see and on that list was Ystad.   

When I googled Ystad it turned out that there was some sort of asparagus celebration going on there on the weekend, and I figured that was a good reason go.  Also, Ystad is on the water so I would be able to see the sea.  

I booked my train ticket for a day trip to Ystad and got ready to enjoy what I envisioned would be an interesting, if eclectic, festival focused on asparagus.  What I discovered the day before my trip was that the asparagus event was taking place somewhere out of the town proper, probably on a farm, given the theme. 

I decided I would have to play it by ear as far as the asparagus event was concerned.

Saturday morning I woke up early to catch my train but I also woke up with a cough and not feeling completely without illness.  Evidently I need to climatize to Swedish illnesses since this is the second time I’ve been sick since arrival.  However, I had purchased my train ticket already and it was a beautiful day, so I was not deterred from heading to Ystad.

Upon arrival I realized immediately that there had been no real reason to get there so early because nothing was open.  I had the entire town to myself as you can see from the distinct lack of people in the photographs. 

From the train station, with no one to really follow, I wandered across a square and found the tourist information center, which was closed.  Fortunately, they had some brochures outside in a metal cabinet thingy.  It was here that I found out about Ystad’s most famous author – Henning Mankell -- who writes detective novels set in Ystad.  It turns out that there is a tour on an old fire engine that takes you around the city and shows you all the places where different scenes from the books are set.  It is called the Wallander tour, named after the main character of the books.  Obviously, this would make more sense as a tour if you had read the books, but I am a nerdy book person, so even having not read the books, I figured this was the way to see the city.

Last weekend at the book store in the Malmo train station, the book store guy didn’t tell me about the Wallander books, he didn’t even mention them, which seems to show a bias against detective novels, really.  He recommended, and I have now read, a Swedish classic – Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberge – which I will acknowledge is an awesome book, and as the bookstore guy said, very contemporary given it was written in 1905.  The Swedes are clearly more advanced in every way, including their adoption of Nietzschean morality or at least the literary discussion of it.

Anyway, I wanted to go on the fire engine/Wallander tour of Ystad but for inexplicable reasons, the brochure that lists all the books and movies and dates when they were published or produced and maps of all the places the tour will go, did not include any information at all on where the tour started.  My “international” phone, which is really more trouble than it is worth, was not working.  I’m guessing I need to add more minutes because that thing drinks them like water.

Since the tourist center was not open and it was too early to do anything yet anyway, I decided that I would wander around the city and check out all the sights. 

It is a flat city but there was no need to go fast.

Early morning really the best time to wander around a city because you can take a lot of pictures before anyone else is up and then they don’t really know you are a tourist.  

Leaving the tourist center via one of the many small alleyways

Main church in the town square

Heading towards the town square

Shopping district

I liked this sign because of the cat poster

So I walked around a bit and as it got later more people started to emerge from wherever they were staying.  I came across a public square were they had set up a flea market.  This had exactly the same types of things you would see in an American flea market – used clothing and shoes that you wonder who buys or who thought was worth buying, lots of dishes and strange knick-knacks.  I will admit, I am very attracted to glassware, but am saved by the fact I don’t speak Swedish and have very little room in my luggage.

The Rose Garden (from the sign above)

Not really part of my door photography, but a cool one.

Neat monk sculpture with flowers

After stopping at a café close to the city center for some tea and second breakfast, I determined that I would need to be a real tourist to spend the day most effectively in Ystad. 

What do tourists do? 

Well, since I couldn’t find the fire truck/Wallander tour, I figured tourists like to shop. 

I am not a good shopper. 

I buy most of my clothing used and I tend to do targeted need-based shopping.

I tried to convince myself that I should buy some new clothes since mine are hopelessly out of fashion.  However, it only took a few clothing stores to make me realize that even on a normal day I don’t have the energy to do this, and I wasn’t feeling all that well today to being with.

Then I realized I should look for a can opener.  

 It isn’t the typical tourist purchase, but my Lund house has a can opener that is rusted shut and the replacement one is a Swedish design and I can’t figure it out.  

 

Trust me, it makes no sense as a can opener

I know it doesn’t look complicated and it could be that being left handed I just can’t use it, but the one time I tried, I basically just bludgeoned the can until a hole opened in the side large enough to shake out the contents.

While I'm on the subject of things I don't understand.  I don't understand the garbage bag outside the garbage can thing either.

My office garbage can which I can't figure out how best to use.

Anyway, since I was not going to be updating my wardrobe, I spent some time looking for a can opener. 

Which I found. 

But it cost something like $20 and this seemed expensive for a can opener, so I didn’t buy it.  I'm really more a catch and release sort of shopper.

Having failed to buy clothes and a can opener, I wandered around the city some more and took pictures of doors.  

Shopping route until my Garmin ran out of batteries -- thanks Doug and Sarah for this awesome gift by the way!

The doors in this city are really amazing!  Aside from taking pictures of street lights, which I also think are super interesting in their incredible variety, doors are my next favorite thing to photograph.  

I think it has something to do with form/function and the fact that both are super functional and thus utilitarian and yet come in so many varieties!

Besides rocks of course.  I like taking pictures of rocks, there just are not that many rocks in southern Sweden.

Periodically, I wandered back past the visitor’s center to see if it was open yet so I could ask about taking the fire truck/Wallander tour.  

For a tourist town, the visitor’s center opened really late.

After the second pass past the visitor’s center, I walked back towards the town center and went into the H&M store.  I’m pretty sure that if I were to buy clothes, I would buy them from here.  When the airlines lost my luggage a few years back when I went to Berlin for a conference, I finally (after two days without clothes) went to H&M and purchased some stuff to wear, including my favorite Hello Kitty bra and a pair of black pants, which I have now lost.  I have no idea how I lost these pants and I am very sad they are gone.  I keep thinking they will reappear on their own, but I fear they are gone forever.

Anyway, that is backstory to say that I do have at least one good memory of shopping at H&M. 

Probably because I wasn’t feeling well, I made it so far as to pick up some new black pants and wander around the store for a few minutes before putting them back on the rack and going outside to sit on a bench and stare at nothing.

I was sitting on the bench watching people go by and thinking about fashion and my lack of it and otherwise just feeling sort of tired and without energy when a man sat down next to me and said something in Swedish. 

I really do blend as long as I don’t say anything.  People have already begun asking me for directions.

Since he had addressed me directly, it meant I had to respond in order to be polite. 

I said I didn’t speak Swedish, so of course he switched to English, even though he was German and this means he speaks at least three languages, just fueling my American-induced monolinguistic inferiority complex. 

A short aside on European masculinity.  

Now, culturally speaking, it seems that most European men are different in their masculinity than most American ones, in a general assessment of this concept devoid of all the appropriate nuances of course.  The differences are most striking in the fact there is a distinct lack of interest in guns and monster trucks, or trucks of any kind, here in Sweden combined with a willingness to wear pastel colored pants or capri pants and ride bikes with baskets on them. Plus the fact that the former constituency (scary gun/monster truck men), because they don't exist, cannot beat up the later constituency (pastel wearing bike riding men) or call them names.  I find all of this very civilized.  I should also note that many of my male friends in the U.S. would fit in in Europe, even if they don't wear pastel colors or ride bikes with baskets probably because they are afraid, but I digress.

All this being said to set up the very minor observation -- that despite the differences between American and Swedish men, they seem to share a lack of interest in shopping.  Though, to be fair, there were a lot of men in all the clothing stores as well. 

Back to the bench I was sitting on and to make my sidetrack into European masculinity relevant to my new bench companion, this particular man was waiting for his respective spouse and female children to stop shopping in H&M.  I could see another male (with baby) sitting on the steps by the H&M, presumably waiting for his wife/partner as well.

So, after said bench sharer explained that his wife/children were shopping, I was less suspicious of why he was talking to me.  He was just bored and I had monopolized the bench closest to the entrance to the store.

We chatted a bit and at some point his wife and kids stopped by to get a credit card from him.  They did not seem surprised that he was talking to a complete stranger sitting on the bench.  

They left again.

I asked what he did, because that is what Americans ask – what is your work – and he said he was a tour guide. 

At this point I became afraid that the reason he sat down and started talking to me was to perhaps get me to hire him as a tour guide.   I cannot remember now if I had already asked what he would recommend that I see in Ystad or if I asked that after he told me he was a tour guide.

Either way, I became immediately concerned that he was trying to get me to be a client and perhaps he was offended that I asked him for advice about what I should do since that was professional advice from his perspective.  At this point it was getting towards later in the afternoon and mostly I just wanted to sit on the bench and be quiet and feel kind of sick and didn't want to be a tourist anymore anyway. 

However, he asked what I had in mind for my time in Ystad and so I told him I wanted to take the Wallander/fire truck tour but I didn’t know where it started.  He of course knew, being a tour guide and all.  I said that I wanted to read one of the books too, to which he replied that there was a bookstore across the square if I wanted to buy one. 

I already knew there was a bookstore across the square because I have bookstore radar and I also had been walking around Ystad for five hours at this point and it isn’t a big city.  However, he offered to take me over to the bookstore to buy a Wallander book and so I said, sure, why not?

So we got up from our bench outside the H&M and started walking towards the bookstore, as his wife and kids were walking past us in the other direction.  A conversation ensued in Swedish.

I was still not sure if I had just hired a guide to take me to the bookstore or not.

At the bookstore he asked about English books and we found the right section and then he showed me which one was his favorite, so I bought that one. 

I still was not sure if this was now some sort of commercial transaction or not. I kind of got the feeling that perhaps he thought I wasn't competent enough to buy the book on my own, but that probably isn't a nice thing to think about a complete stranger going out of his way to be nice to me in a strange town where I don't know the language.

Anyway, it wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea of paying someone to walk me across the square to a bookstore, I just wasn’t sure if that was what was going on or not.

It turned out not.  He was just being nice and he was bored.

So after I bought my book, he said goodbye and went to rejoin his family and I wandered away to check out the marina and then go by the tourist center one more time.  

There are people on this beach in swim suits but I was wearing a jacket -- it was not warm enough to be sunbathing at the beach if you ask me!

It was open finally, not that I needed it anymore.

I did decide to go to the attached museum, however, where there was a really nice collection of contemporary Swedish art. 

Then I caught the train back to Lund.

All things considered, I mostly failed to be a tourist.  I didn’t buy clothes or a can opener.  I didn’t get to take the Wallander tour on the fire truck or see the asparagus festival.   

My success for the day was being helped buy a book by a German tour guide. 

Still, I liked Ystad.  As my ersatz tour guide had said, for a town of not many people, there is always a lot happening.  

Sadly, I never did get to see any asparagus.