Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Älmhult(pronouncedElmhult) experience

Following are my thoughts/experiences in a place called Älmhult in Sweden . This first one is about my arrival in Älmhult.

Well,
What an eventful first day in Europe ! Well after what I thought was a really long flight to Paris (close to 11 hrs from Blore, have been in longer flights before but i guess it was after a long time and hence felt weird!) , we were not allowed to get down from the plane coz' ppl were busy trying to clean up the ground coz' it had snowed in Paris, the previous night. After what seemed like an eternally long delay, we got down and i saw one of the most confusing yet cool airports. Confusing coz' there are way too many terminals and cool , coz' the design of the airport is such that ppl landing out of flights and ppl chking in the same area .... Something that is uncommon.

The next flight was pretty much normal and short ...close to 2 hr flight to Copenhagen . Only interesting aspect was that I didn't get any veg food in the flight apart from some juice and bread and that added to the hunger. I thought the interesting parts of the journey were complete without knowing that the most interesting part was just about to start !

The next one was a 100 min train from Copenhagen to Almhult and man, was it an amazing train journey. The train kept going from one place to the other and even backtracked with instructions like "train will change track to this , train will change track to that " . I must have seen a couple of places atleast twice . Also, the speed of the train was something amazing to experience .Reminded me of Sydney but this was superior by a long way ( that was coz' of the distance ..this was inter-city whereas that was just within sydney). At 5.01pm ( yes , its 5.01 and not 5.02 or 5.00) , it landed there and i froze more than i ever did in my entire life.

The place was filled with snow.(pics to follow soon!) 1st time in my life had i seen actual snow all over and that too covering a real large area .....a super sight . After quickly wearing the new overcoat that i bought just before I left( thankfully) , i proceeded to figure out where this hotel was . At that time, i could hear familiar sound of tamil and found that our indian population came to my rescue here as well ! 3 wiproites who are working here for the same customer , talking in tamil walked past and that was enough for me to enquire about the hotel .

They gave me some instructions and asked me about my journey and why i was there etc and went away. As I walked on those slippery roads at one point of time, i completely lost balance and fell on the road to the joy/glee of a guy in the car who was on the . Quickly figured out that the funda is to walk with small,short steps without a trace of dragging your step and thankfully didnt slip again!

Was blissfully thankful to find the room and man, the room looked like a hostel room but very well furnished . This is surely the smallest hotel room i have ever stayed in .

There is a window and a door that leads me out to a common lawn shared by other rooms and guess what? Its freezing out there and its filled with snow ! The lady at the reception told me to wait for a few days to see 100% snow as this was a mixture of snow and rain .

Well, i then enquired what i should do about food and she said the restaurant was closed but i can use the microwave oven. MTR came to my rescue here and the couple of packets i had taken along with a kitkat made sure that i had enough to eat for now and wait for hopefully sunny skies on the morrow.

1 comment:

markphilip said...

Hey Ranjan...I really happy to see your post. I need to get to Almhult end of Feb and was wondering if you help me out with some info.