Day 16

Weather not too bad today – about minus 3 and overcast.  Was going to go to Copenhagen but decided to head back to Malmo instead.  Caught the bus shortly after 10am and got there before 11am.  Turns out a lot of shops don’t open on Sunday, and those that do are closed until midday so it was a pretty quiet start to my visit. 

Wandered a bit further through the town than we had yesterday, found a couple of fountains that had partially turned to ice.  Watched a little kid walk on to the fountain over some frozen ice hoping he might fall in so I could get a good action shot – he didn’t.

Is it bad that I wanted him to fall in?

Made it home by about 3pm and decided to watch some Winter Olympics.  Found it on SVT1 – a Swedish language channel.  Quickly discovered that trying to watch sport with commentary in a language you don’t understand sucks big-time.  Normally I would have watched the biathlon (ski, shoot, ski, shoot) without complaining – yeah, it’s not the most exciting sport but it IS the Olympics.  But after 10 minutes I was forced to turn it off through sheer boredom.  Without commentary there’s nothing to get you interested in what’s happening.

Watched the first episode of The Wire and wasn’t really that impressed.  It’s been nominated for quite a few awards and was in TIME magazines ‘Top 10 TV Series of the Past Decade’ list, so I brought all five seasons with me.  I’ll give it a few more episodes before making up my mind.  Ended up watching season 1 of ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’.  Not bad, have a few seasons of that as well.

Spent a bit of time on Google trying to find another way to watch the Olympics and discovered something called StreamTorrent.  Uses the bittorrent protocol to stream TV, works pretty well. Right now I’m watching women’s ice hockey – USA vs China.  It’s a US broadcast so the commentary is all in English (with a somewhat American bias).  Looks like I’ll be watching the games on my laptop this year.  Better than nothing…