nibot | 2002-05-04: UC Excursion

So today was the last UC excursion for this year. First we went to some castle called Torups Slott down in the Skåne on the way to Trelleborg. We got a little bus this time, instead of Göran's regular big bus — after all, there aren't so many of us here anymore. The castle wasn't so particularly extraordinary, but combined with the surrounding area, well, it really felt castle-esque, with the birch forests and the rolling hills and the ponds and whatnot and so-on. Nonetheless the `adults' couldn't help but oooh and aaah over every bit of castleishness inside, as if it were some programatic response to famous builings by tourists. In truth the `living room' of the castle looked rather normal; indeed, the castle is currently lived-in by the current heirs (the "woman of the house" and her daughter?). Oh, apparently the daughter married someone in another noblefamily and inherited a different castle that way — all this nobility stuff is apparently alive and well. (As Keith says, southern Sweden, which was Danish until 1658, is Chateau country, full of these mannorhouses and such; northern Sweden, on the other hand, never experienced feudalism.)

The next stop on the excursion was a *, a type of road house established in Sweden during * by royal decree. We had the now standard lunch of salmon and potatoes with Åbro beer and chocolate cake with mint and raspberry sauce for desert (yes we have pretty high standards). The most interesting thing I learned was that Ryan is planning on going to Istanbul in the summer. The funniest part about the lunch was that the plates were so huge, making the portions look rather diminuative by comparison.

Leaving * we drove out some one-lane, unpaved `highway' eventually ending up at a little sort of fishing village looking remarkably similar to a similar place where we had dinner in Kivik. The reason for coming to this place was that it is the southernmost point in Sweden. They have a signpost there with arrows pointing and giving the distances to various important cities, and this served as the focal point for many photos; but then we realized that the sign couldn't possibly be right, since it had Stockholm and Moscow 180° apart, and London only ≈30° anticlockwise from Stockholm. Finally, we nearly lost Keith when he fell off the southernmost point of Sweden, astonishingly surviving without injury.

The final destination of our excursion was Trelleborg itself, or should I say Trelle-borgen, some kind of Viking fort built there long, long ago by Danish king Harold Bluetooth in his effort to unify Denmark. The tour turned out to be very much a use-your-imagination sort of affair. Example: They think the fort was made of wood, but have found no actual traces of timber in the excavation, so they basically guess what things looked like. Originally the thing was a (roughly) circular fortification; when the city of Trelleborg discovered it in 1988 they eagerly rebuilt a quarter of it. Anyway, the tour guide, who happened to be an archæology student here at Lunds, was rather cute, so I took the liberty of offering her a ride back to Lund with us on the bus. This apparently pleased her greatly as her plan had been to wait nearly an hour for the next public bus to Lund. Keith rejoiced too at this plan (seeking as he was to reward the tour guide for the tour he liked so much), and all was well, and I was quite pleased with the minor coup.