Hi all,

Well today was supposed to be a simple travelling day from Munich to Malmo, but it turned out to be a completely bizarre one instead. Firstly, i caught the train from Munich at 6.50 this morning, the plan being to get into Hamburg at 12.50 to make my connection to Nykoebing in Denmark at 1.30. That was, until the driver decided to go insanely slow, so that by the time we stopped in Wuerzberg we were about 18 mins behind schedule-which was fine still i thought. However, i hadnt planned on railway works at Goettingen, which delayed us another 20 minutes. That meant that by the time we were in Hannover we were over 40 minutes behind, and suddenly i was looking at a 3 hour wait in Hamburg and not getting to Malmo until 10.30pm because of all the connection troubles that would occur from missing the Nykoebing connection. Luckily, we got a different driver from Hannover who made up a few precious minutes, meaning that our train arrived to Hamburg at 1.26, with my train to Nykoebing leaving at 1.28 7 platforms away. Well, i have never sprinted so quickly in my life, and somehow managed to make it on the train (completely the wrong compartment but at least i was on) with about 35 seconds to spare.

After that, i had a relatively quiet couple of hours until we got to the Danish ?border? and i found out that the train actually goes on a ferry to get to Denmark!!! This is completely unnecessary as Denmark is connected by land to Germany anyway, but for some reason the train literally drove on to the ferry and we had a 45 minute ferry ride in extremely windy and rough conditions (sure some people were seasick) and reached Denmark. That was all good, until finding in Denmark that about 15km of rail was damaged and we couldn?t go on it. Therefore, the train?s passengers all had to be loaded on to 3 seperate buses and driven 1 hour to a station further down the road, and the buses were EXTREMELY cramped. From there we would be taken to Copenhagen. That was all fine, but when we got to the station we (me and 3 Americans on board) realised it wasn?t Nykoebing, and so therefore technically our tickets weren?t valid on that train, only for the regional Nykoebing one, and for the next hour we were paranoid about them checking our tickets (luckily they didn?t as it is a 50 Euro fine for travelling without a valid ticket). So we all reached Copenhagen safely, but during the train trip I was lucky enough to find out that one of the Americans (Kyle, from Oregon-about my age) is living in Malmo and so knows everything about it and all the train connections/platforms etc, which meant i could follow him until i (finally) reached Malmo about 13 hours after I left Munich. I plan to catch up with him the next few days and he will show me around the city a bit, which will be good.

Luckily there were no problems finding my accommodation, i had had just about enough by the end of the day!!!