Finding My Voice: Malmö Part I - Welcome to Skåne!

My first impression of Skåne was how much longer the days were even in December compared to Örebro. It really was only like an extra hour or so, (maybe even half hour) but it made a huge difference!

You can see inside this church in a lower picture

Downtown Malmö

I love the city and felt I had the best of both worlds - being innerstan (downtown) as well as most of the outlying towns including Svedala, Ystad, and Trelleborg.

I just love old architecture and seeing detailing like this always leaves me in awe.

The ward is a great mix of cultures particularly since Denmark is only a short drive or train ride away.
My journey to Malmö was long... I think my train ended up being delayed about two hours in the end. Transfers are always interesting because they involve sticking a bunch of foreign young adults on public transportation for hours without any sort of communication device. I'm amazed at how well they really do go considering all of the things that could most definitely go wrong.

I arrived late December 30th and just had enough time to settle into our apartment before turning in. This apartment was definitely one of, if not the largest one, I had the chance to live in or visit while on my mission (I think it beats out my Jönköping one a smidge because the living room was so huge, but the Jönköping one was two bedroom... not that we ever really used that second bedroom because we liked studying in the main room so much more.... anyway Malmö).

Syster Eborn is just incredible! I love her (though she's no longer known as an Eborn ;-) ). She's spunky, fun, intelligent and gorgeous. One of my absolute favorite things that we did was share stories with each other - both real and fiction.

A blurry picture from New Year's haha

My first full day was New Year's Eve. We had two lessons with two new investigators before heading off to the Clarks - Stake President's home, for New Year's Eve with all of the missionaries serving in the ward. My entire 3.5 months in Malmö we had 8 missionaries serving there - 3 sets of elders and us :-) . Definitely made for some fun times!

New Year's we had permission to stay out until after midnight but you can just tell as the night wore on we were all getting exceptionally tired. After going to bed consistently at 22:30 every night, it's just hard staying up later.

The hours leading up to new years and for hours afterward there are just fireworks everywhere. Come midnight we went out on the street and we were just surrounded by fireworks. It was a surreal experience.

Malmö had a very different dialect of Swedish (known as Skånish or skånska to my American friends) which has a very definite Danish influence. My first Sunday there, the relief society lesson was taught in Danish and I was impressed with how much I understood. My time down there helped me a lot with understanding Danish, but I definitely don't speak it. Similar enough that I can understand, different enough that there is no way I would be getting it right. Some dialects of Norwegian are closer to "traditional" Swedish so I have better luck there... but still.

At one point we had to cancel a "date." We contacted a man on the street who was from the Dominican Republic. He was super friendly and said sure he would love to meet but he wasn't sure if he would tell his girlfriend about, which frankly wasn't entirely weird. We had called him to see if we could reschedule because of a last minute dinner appointment and he wanted to see if we could meet earlier, because he wanted to do things right with flowers and coffee before we got going. We just ended up canceling altogether.

We had an explosion of lessons and we were teaching so many people that were actually progressing! It was a super fun time spiritually as well as traditionally.

We even went bowling and I didn't totally lose my bowling skills. We were able to go with some of the other missionaries and with a member or two from the ward.