May 23–24: Malmö to Berlin

And so we rode overnight from Malmö to Berlin, thanks to an impressive symbiosis of infrastructural modes.

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Deepening twilight over the Malmö railyards.

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The club-blue lighting of the train floor nearly equalled the color of the evening light outside.

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My top-bunk bed on the train, with a reassuring set of straps and flaps to prevent rolling out.

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A Post-Impression of a field that appears to consist of flowering rapeseed.

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Arriving at the Trelleborg port.

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Wait a minute. The train is getting on a boat.

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The ferry cold contains a train station!!

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We were allowed to step out of the train and explore the ferry.

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So I went up on deck and checked out the views; here, some runway-like lanes outside at the port, seemingly for boarding car ferries (note the ferry in the background at the end of the runway).

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An infinite recession of railroad lights.

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Ship superstructure.

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A view off the stern down to the tracks we'd entered on.

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Inside, the ferry was quite similar to the others I'd traversed the Baltic Sea on over the course of the spring, right down to the duty-free shop with sufficiencies of candy. The familiarity felt odd, due to the utterly different way we'd boarded the ship.

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After we pushed off from shore, this lovely remaining bit of twilight color offered a counterpoint to the electric lights reflecting on the water.

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This series of apparent drums with overhead lights receding up to the other ship is inscrutable in this photo; maybe they're the ends of jetties or docks?

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The blue hour.

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J/K, the red's still there!

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Onshore lights getting ever more compressed in toward the horizon line.

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A beacon before the receding shore.

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A map on display showing the connection, from Trelleborg at the north end to Sässnitz at the south, on the large German island Rügen.

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Last light line.

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I awoke to sunny, misty views of the Brandenburg countryside, having slept through our arrival in Germany and disembarcation from the ferry (which I was sorry to have missed, but I was not sorry to have slept).

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I wonder what the autumnal colors in the foreground here were.

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A nice altocumulus tableau as we arrived on the outskirts of Berlin.

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And then, just like that, there we were in the bowels of the Berlin Hauptbahnhof.