Things that are different in Sweden

The US and Sweden have many similarities. It is definitely an easier place to adjust to then many other countries would be.  There are still quite a few differences and I thought I'd share a few.

*Weird European outlet plugs-- and if the different shaped outlet weren't pain enough, they run a different voltge, too (240V)

*People walk, bike and take mass transit.  Yes, they still have cars but they just don't seem to use them very much. There are bike racks everywhere and they are always full. (Which we think is why you don't see many overweight people in Sweden) It is fun to see all ages of people biking and they have great bike/walking paths that go everywhere so you don't feel like you are risking your life by riding a bike.

*Doors open the wrong way.  We have felt stupid a number of times but its just so counterintuitive to have exterior doors open outwards!

*At most eating establishments (other than US chain burger joints), meals are served on real dishes with real silverware.  Same with cafeteria at school.  (G was amazed that he actually gets to use a real knife)

*You take off your shoes upon entering people's houses AND upon entering the elementary school. They go around in stocking feet all day.

*Garbage is complicated.  Here's the garbage area at the local McDonald's. Huh?

At home we have two mid-sized garbage cans (that can only be emptied every other week and nothing put to the side either).  One is only for "Food waste,"  The other is for "combustible waste." All paper packaging, newspaper, plastic, metal and glass must be taken to a recycling center.  We are motivated to do this because otherwise there is no way we won't overwhelm the garbage can in those two weeks! (If you're curious, they use the food waste to make biogas to run the above mentioned mass transit busses and they burn the combustibles to make electricity and heat).

*Everything is smaller.  Drinks at restaraunts come in kiddy cups :-), oreos come in little packages that only hold about 10 cookies.  Biggest milk I've seen yet is a 2 liter.  But I guess that is just as well because anything bigger wouldn't fit in my little refrigerator.  Oven, washer and dryer are all much smaller than their American counterparts.  (And laundry takes forever.  2+ hours to wash one load. And you clean out the lint and empty the water out of the dryer after each load.  Interesting to see how much water was in those clothes). Parking spaces and roads are also narrower.

*Money is colorful and all different sizes.  Higher denomination bills are physically bigger than smaller denominations. It is hard not to get sticker shock when buying things because the exchange rate is around 6.3 SEK (Swedish Kroner)/$.  I know that but it still is shocking to order lunch and have the bill be 200:-

A donation box at a museum.  It felt odd not to see it full of green.

*Nothing gets done in Sweden in July/beginning of August.  They all get at least 5 weeks of vacation and they take it in a great big chunk.  Then Germany does the same in August/early September.  Since T's work involves those two countries, he's concluded that if one more person he needs to talk to is "on vacation," he's going to scream.

*Nothing gets done in Sweden without the revered Personnummer.  It is like the social security number in the US but they use it for EVERYTHING! You are supposed to have it to do serious things like open a bank account or get insurance but also for lots of day to day things like accessing your cell phone plan online (or getting any cellphone plan beyond a prepaid), accessing the school's online parent info, etc.  You can apparently only get a personnummer if you will be a resident for at least a year.  We applied to be here from Aug 1, 2011 to Aug 1, 2012.  But our permits didn't get processed until August 8th and they didn't adjust the end date accordingly.  So we are one week short of eligibility for a beloved Personnummer. (We have to think the relo company should have caught that one before it happened.) It has been a pain, but I have managed to talk people into giving us library cards and an insurance policy without one. Next goal, talk someone into giving me a bank account.  No one uses checks here.  Everything (even paying tithing) is done by Internet banking.  But since US and Swedish banks don't talk to each other that well, it is problematic not having a local account. 

* Food is different. Obviously. We are having to find new foods to eat.  M is not liking that they don't sell a real American cheddar cheese and T doesn't like that the ice cream sandwiches taste different.  Vanilla is a sugar not a liquid.  And no chocolate chips!! Water is often fizzy.

*People aren't wimpy about weather.  They continue to bike and walk in the rain (which it does a lot) and I imagine they will in the cold and snow, too.  At school, they ALWAYS go out for recess.  It downpoured yesterday during recess and the school yard soccer game went on.

*Kids are trusted to be responsible.  They are allowed a lot more freedom.  You frequently see young kids walking, biking or riding the bus on their own.  Teens take busses and trains long distances on their own.  At M's highschool, she has a college-like schedule.  She doesn't have to show up until she has a scheduled class and she can leave when her classes for the day are over.  They can come and go as they please during breaks.  There are no such things as hall monitors. It probably helps that high school (gymnasium) is optional (still free, well actually if you are a citizen they PAY YOU to go to high school) so kids who don't want to be there don't have to be. Also, gymnasiums are specialized.  You have to chose what type of program you want to complete: vocational schools, art schools, college prep, even a dedicated sports school-- so students are sorted by their interests. Cell phones and electronics can be used during breaks.  She can log into the school wifi to access her e-mail, facebook, etc. Oh, and the school provides a laptop to each student to use for their school work!





*Clothes are more fashionable. They don't wear the US teen uniform of jeans, American Eagle t-shirt and hoodie every day. 

*Showers are weird-- there is no tub around them.  The whole floor is tile and you just have some glass doors around a drain and a shower head.

*The school people look at you like you've grown a second head when you ask how to send money for school lunch or whether you need to send school supplies.  (They are appalled that someone would have to pay for such things themselves--all such things are provided by the school)

*Everyone goes by first names.  I have never seen or heard anyone use terms like Mr. or Mrs.  This includes school teachers.  It really freaks my kids out to call their teachers by their first names. 

*All the roofs are tile or occasionally metal or very rarely, straw.  I have not seen an asphalt shingle roof.  We wonder why that is?

Putting on a new tile roof

*Swedes seem to love plants.  The typical house has a fairly small yard (they would say garden) but they overflow with fruit trees and flowers.  We have seen many amazingly beautiful front yards.  Even in apartment buildings the windows have window boxes full of flowers and their decks are covered with flowers.

And here is a picture of our rental house.  Note the nice sidewalk and the short fence in the front yard is very common. As are the tall hedges down the sides and the back.

Visiting knights, vikings, and saints

We decided to hit the road on Saturday to see a few more sights.  First on the agenda was a medieval castle called Glimmingehus.  It was built by a Danish knight in 1499 and is the best-preserved medieval manor in Scandanavia.

It was a really fun place.  Kids were free.  Adult admission was reasonable.  They gave you a piece of paper explaining what each of the rooms was used for (even had an English version!) and let you roam freely through the castle.  Not being group tour people, we loved this!

Death trap abouve the front door-- a great way to get rid of those pesky door-to-door salesmen.

We loved that this was a fortress-- not some fancy mansion.  All along the stair case were arrow slits to defend against intruders.  There was also a number of "death traps" where you could pour hot oil down on someone's head.  The castle even had a moat.  We loved that all the windows had window seats cut into the super thick stone walls.

They even had a medeival barn on the property.  It was interesting to see the roof made of straw.  What has been even more amazing is that we have seen a couple of straw roofs like that on houses that are being lived in!

After fully exploring all four floors of the castle, we had a yummy early lunch of chocolate crepes at the castle's cafe and then headed on to our next destination, Ales Stenar (Ale's Stones).

Ales Stenar is an iron age stone monument consisting 59 large boulders arranged in the shape of a ship.  They aren't sure what exactly it was used for, but it is alligned with the sun to be a sort of calendar and is thousands of years old.  Legend says that it was the burial place of a Viking king named Ale.

The walk out to the stones was very peacefull-- across a high prarie.  We saw both the black sheep...

and the lost sheep.

 

The stones are on a bluff overlooking the Baltic Sea.  We enjoyed looking out over the shore and then walked down to the harbor for a closer look.



We drove on to the Ystad-- in truth in search of a McDonald's.  Sometimes you just can' resist the craving for some "normal" food.  Ystad is a port city and it is very compact. Driving the narrow streets looking for parking was a little exciting.  We never did find a McDonald's and had to settle for Max Hamburgers instead.  Oh well, it was food.  Then we wandered around town.  There was a beautiful medieval church, Mariakyrkan, that we were able to see.





And an old monastery, Klostret, that we were able to see from the outside (too late in the day to get inside)

Tourists in Skåne

Friday was a mix of business and pleasure.  We needed to go to Malmö to do the biometrics for our Residency permits.  We wanted to pick up a rental car and T's company usually uses Hertz. The Hertz location looked a little ways out of town, but not too far, so we headed out to walk there.  Well, 3 miles feels farther than it looks.  45 minutes and a few blisters later, we finally arrived at the car rental place.  We walked a little past it because it was in the Volvo dealership and didn't have much of a sign.  Luckily we asked someone before we'd gone too far past it.  At that point, we were all happy to climb into our Renault station wagon and sit for a while.

The drive to Malmö was uneventful.  We did crack up a little trying to decipher some of the signs and there were a few crazy construction areas.  There were some cool moose crossing signs.  A swedish coworker informed us that they had trouble in the past with German tourists stealing the moose signs as souveneirs.

We enjoyed seeing the countryside of Skåne (pronounced Skona), the southernmost province of Sweden. We saw lots of farms, forests and windmills.

The kids were counting how many windmills they could see at a given time. It was often around 10.

And we saw this one picturesque antique.

We were a little concerned when we got to the Migrationsverket office and found there was a line to get into the building, but that line moved pretty quickly and then it was just like being at the DMV.  You were given a number and waited for your number to appear on an electronic sign.  About half an hour later, we were called back.  We had already done all our paperwork for our permits and been approved so they only needed to take our pictures and fingerprints. They had a cool machine that looked a lot like an ATM machine.  It took your picture and scanned your fingers.  It was all very easy and sure beat driving all the way up to the Swedish embassy in DC before we left (which was our other option). 

There are many immigrants in Sweden-- mostly Arabic but also some African, Serbian, etc.  They are dealing with many of the same issues and debates that the US is dealing with regarding Hispanic immigrants.

Once the business was done, we asked our GPS for interesting things to see in town.  We drove to an skyscraper called "The Twisting Torso." It was by the harbor so we also so a bunch of huge ferries unloading.

The Twisting Torso

We drove a little more around Malmö but it was a little large and intimidating, so we decided to head towards home.  We stopped at a shopping mall in the outskirts of town to have lunch.  We haven't really discovered what would be considered "Swedish" food.  Like in the US, they have Italian, Chinese, Indian, and lots of Arabic restaraunts.  We had Hawaiian Italian-style pizza from a store run by Arabs (the menus were in Swedish and Arabic).  We thought it a very multi-cultural meal!

On the way home, we stopped in the town of Lund. We parked along a street and were trying to figure out if we needed to pay to park.  In Malmö we'd learned, by watching someone else do it, that rather than put money into a specific parking meter, you went to little vending machine somewhere along the street, put in money, and got a ticket printed which you put in your car's windshield.  So in Lund, we were looking for something similar. We found a metal box and were all gathered around it trying to figure out how to pay for the parking when a lady comes by and says something to us in Sweden.  We were like, "Sorry, no Swedish" and then she laughed even harder and said, "I was just wondering what you were doing with the post box?" We all got a good laugh then and she showed us where the parking vending machines were and also gave us tips on what to see in town.  We have met so many helpful, friendly people who are patient with stupid Americans!




The biggest attraction in Lund is there cathedral.  It is a beautiful stone building constructed sometime around 1100 AD and it is amazing. M loved it! It's hard to capture the enormity of it in photos.

Cathedral in Lund



 Lund is the home of one of Sweden's oldest colleges.  We enjoyed walking through the campus and seeing all the old buildings.  Then we visited the Botanical gardens and saw lots of beautiful flowers.





Exploring Kristianstad and cell phones in Europe

Since we showed up near the weekend, we were able to play tourist for our first few days in the country. When we woke up a little on Thursday afternoon, we ventured out into the center of Kristianstad to find some food.  Kristianstad has lots of picturesque old buildings and cobblestone streets.  Unfortunately, it rained most of the first few days.  Oh well, we all brought our umbrellas. We were surprised at how cool the weather was. I don't think we've seen a temperature above 70 yet.  We started wondering if we shouldn't have brought warmer jackets with us (the warmer ones are coming in the later shipments).

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.


It means "children in car"-- like "Baby on Board"

 I'll wait to post house pictures once we really move in.  For the time being, we are hotel dwellers.  We have two rooms at a hotel right in the center of town.  It felt really weird that first night to have the kids next door.  The kids are enjoying the fact that Swedish motel rooms have 2 twin beds instead of one big double. We don't enjoy that as much.  The hotel has been reasonably quiet, but we are all ready to get back into a house.

The Journey Begins

We are an American family that has the opportunity to spend one year working and living in Kristianstad, Sweden.  Everyone at home said, "You have to start a blog so we can see your adventures!" so here it goes.

Our family has moved several times within the United States but this is our first International move.  In the few months we had to get ready, we worked hard to learn a little Swedish and to get things finished up at the house we were leaving behind. 

Packing was interesting-- what to bring in the suitcases, what to air ship, what to send by slow boat.  We wanted to bring a lot of suitcases, but then realized we'd have to #1) get those suitcases to the airport in the US and #2) Get them from the airport in Copenhagen, Denmark to Kristianstad. We wound up bringing 3 very large suitcases, 2 large suitcases and 8 carry-on items-- all bulging with stuff.  Problem #1 was taken care of by a kind friend with a minivan dropping us at the airport.  For problem #2, we decided the luggage would fit on the train better than in a rental car.



Our flights were surprisingly incident free-- no delays, no lost luggage.  The transatlantic flight was long and none of us slept very well.  The kids liked the cool touch screens and picking their own movies and games-- for the first few hours anyway.  Once we landed, we managed to get all our luggage down to the train station and catch the train out of the Copenhagen airport quite easily.  Luckily, our hotel is very close to the train station in Kristianstad so dragging the luggage over to it was not bad.  





We left our home in Virginia at noon on Wednesday and officially arrived in Sweden at 9 am in the morning on Thursday.  We wandered around just a little and then pulled the fortunately dark curtains in the hotel room and all went to sleep!