New Year's Eve

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Our day started off early, taking the bus to Emporia shopping mall by the Malmo Arena. We wandered around with minimal shopping then had lunch at a couple fast food places by the arena. We went to the Sweden-Russia game in the arena after lunch and while looking for our seats, we were approached by one of the volunteers. She was waiting for us with four new tickets, 11th row centre ice, because the system had accidentally generated our original tickets in seats that did not exist. Great service! And always nice to get a free upgrade!

It was an exciting game and the Swedes were winning when we left after the 2nd period to bus over to the Malmo Isstadion for the Canada-USA game. We watched the Swedes win their game on the big screen in the Fan Zone then had to switch seats a couple of times in the rink, jockeying for the best spot available, our own free upgrade technique! 😊 We finally ended up with nice seats near The Edmonton Oilers GM, Craig McTavish, a variety of scouts, and four of the Norway players who Greg got autographs from. He also went over to the far side of the rink in a break to get 16 autographs from the German team.

Canada made the game far more exciting than we were comfortable with by allowing the USA to score first. But we did pull off the win 3-2 in regulation time.

After the game we caught a bus downtown to find a nice restaurant for our New Year Eve celebration only to discover that nearly EVERYTHING in the city was closed. They seem to have all the eve's of our regular holidays as their main holiday here, with more businesses open on the actual holiday than on the eve. We finally managed to find a Swedish burger place for our supper. There were only two employees in the place and dozens and dozens of people coming in, lined up right through the restaurant to the door. Those two poor guys must have missed locking up before the crowd started arriving and now they wouldn't even have time for a break until everyone in the city was fed!

Wandering around that area, we found the famous giant talking lamp of Lilla Torg square. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Swedish city of Malmö. The 5.8 meters high lamp was installed in 2006 and quickly became a favorite spot for both locals and tourists. Throughout the year, the enormous lamp tours the various squares of Malmö, but on December 15, just before Christmas, it always returns to Lilla Torg. The giant lamp of Lilla Torg actually talks, as well, in Swedish, but we didn't hear it. And from everything I've seen online it actually speaks in quite poor, broken Swedish and nobody can understand what it's saying.

We had a key to Mim & Jim's room so hung out there for a while, watching the televised replay of our game tonight then we met up with them at the hotel where all the Canadian players parents were staying. From there we walked to the Malmo Opera House where there was a huge, free outdoor New Year's Eve celebration in the square. There were fireworks going off all evening all over Malmo from squares in every direction around us as we walked through Malmo.

As we approached the Opera House square, streets were closed in every direction and there were constant fireworks going off all around us. There were thousands of people there and as we squeezed our way through the crowd to get close to the stage, thousands more filled in behind us. They had a variety of singers perform then the countdown to midnight was followed by the real fireworks display which was great.

Canadians wearing our hockey colours were everywhere and the Swedes were all very friendly, cheering us on and wanting to talk to us and find out where we were from and asking how our team was doing. We walked along with crowds of other people back towards Malmo Central train station after the fireworks (although they continued to go off everywhere around us) to start our journey back to our house. And what a LONG journey it turned out to be!

We easily found a train to Triangeln station and then wandered around that area trying to find the #6 bus stop heading back towards our neighbourhood. we could only find the stop heading in the wrong direction and taxis weren't readily available so around 1:20AM we finally decided to take the bus the long way home. About an hour later, we were the last people on the bus when it reached the end of the line and the driver announced we should get off. I asked him if he wasn't continuing on in a circular route, with our stop just a few more away. But no, it's not a circular route and he was just reversing all the way back we had come!

So, as we were in the hinterlands we had no other choice so stayed on the bus going back along our previous route. About 20 minutes later as we approached Hyllie train station I noticed a taxi parked there so we all jumped off and flagged it down just as it was pulling away. We were finally home 15 minutes later after a short cab ride, close to 3AM. All in all it was a really great day though and we all had a lot of fun. The fireworks continued to go off around the city as we fell asleep close to 3:30!

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