You experience some serious sticker shock in Sweden. First off, everything really is more expensive than in the USA. Then you throw in the fact that $1= 6.3 SEK (Swedish Kroners aka Swedish crowns). It makes you do a doubletake when you buy lunch for the family at Burger King and they say "That will be 200:-"
We managed to exchange some money and buy some food. The next goal was to get SIM cards for the kids' cell phones. Teenagers just don't feel complete without a working cell phone in hand. What follows will probably not interest you if you aren't a techie or don't ever plan to go to Europe, but maybe it will save someone some grief. We'd researched before we left the states and learned that Sweden was very flexible with prepaid cell phone plans. You can just buy a SIM card from whatever company you want and stick it into your phone and off you go-- in theory. We acquired a few GSM phones in the states (the actual phones are cheaper there) with 900/1800 frequencies-- one was unlocked and the other we were able to get an unlock code from Verizon. So we wandered into a cell phone store (chose solely on the fact that it was the least busy at that moment) and bought two SIM cards and brought them back to the hotel. Then the battle began. We couldn't get either phone to work with these cards and we didn't know if it was the cards or the phones. So we wasted a lot of time with the phones, trying to figure out if they were really unlocked or what. It was days later that we gave up and went back to the store we bought them. That's when we learned that the company we randomly picked, called 3, DOESN'T use the standard GSM network. They send all their data over 3G and neither of these phones were 3g compatible. Oops! At least the 2 cards weren't a complete loss, they do work in our jailbroken and unlocked iphone. We then acquired two Halebop prepaid SIMS from Telia. This time we stayed in the cell phone store until they were all fully working. That was good because we also hadn't understood that the SIM cards don't come with any minutes loaded on them. The little slip of paper they give you, that we thought was just a receipt, has a code on it that you have to enter into the phone to load the minutes-- important detail. :-) We have also learned that not knowing the language makes EVERYTHING challenging. We had to have friends listen to the voice prompts to get the cell phone plans all set up how we wanted them.
Thursday evening, we had one more piece of business to attend to.We took a walk out to the neighborhood where we hope to rent a house. Kristianstad is not a big town and rentals are not plentiful. This house is smaller and older than another one way out in the country that we'd been sent a listing for, but it is much more centrally located and we're told it is a very desireable neighborhood. The kids both really want to live in town so that they can experience the full European lifestyle-- walking, biking and mass transit most of the time. You wouldn't believe the number of bikes you see everywhere. It also is weird as a lazy American to see people of every possible demographic biking. Nearly every road has a bike line or bike/walking path along it. There are also lots of paths crossing through green spaces between neighborhoods.
Of course, people do still have cars. We ran across this sign in the window of a car and it cracked us up.
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| It means "children in car"-- like "Baby on Board" |
