Three Years Later

I relocated to Sweden three years ago today. I could now apply for citizenship.

To become a Swedish citizen, most must have been living here for a consecutive period of at least five years. That period is reduced to three years, however, for those of us who are cohabiting with a Swede.

Having a Swedish passport would certainly simplify crossing EU borders, and there are more than a few world countries I’d like to visit that would be much easier (and cheaper) to enter with a Swedish passport than a U.S. one.

That said, while I am now theoretically allowed to carry dual citizenship, the U.S. really frowns upon it, particularly in this situation. Many Americans who voluntarily apply for Swedish citizenship have lost their American citizenship — and they didn’t even consider that possibility when applying.

Furthermore, the vast majority of generous benefits enjoyed by Swedish citizens — including healthcare and childcare that are heavily subsidized by the government and a guaranteed pension — are also afforded to those of us who hold permanent residence permits. I’m not chomping at the bit to vote in Swedish national elections, so that doesn’t leave much motivation at all for pursuing dual citizenship, considering the circumstances — as appealing as the idea may sound. If Swedish citizenship is someday offered to me unsolicited, that may be a different story. Swedish citizenship, unlike American citizenship, can’t be revoked.

The Swedish government probably assumes that someone who has cohabited with a Swede in Sweden for three years has fully assimilated and deserves the privilege of citizenship.

I’m not so sure I would even deserve it, though. My integration has been stalled for months by my own resistance to speaking Swedish. I’ve been here long enough to develop a respectable understanding of the language, and there are people both in my personal and professional circles who speak Swedish to me and I answer in English. It seems to work well.

For the vast majority of immigrants in Sweden, securing gainful employment is completely dependent on first mastering the language. I’ve been fortunate enough to grow myself professionally here in a way I sometimes doubt I would have even been able to if I had never left the States, relying on my skills, experience and education. While it hinders others, I truly believe that stubbornly sticking to English in Sweden has actually helped advance my career.

I could likely live the rest of my life here without ever speaking Swedish, but people would always view me as a “foreigner” speaking English. Fluency in Swedish is crucial to social integration, and that’s the real disadvantage about not speaking it.

As I reflect on these three years in Sweden, not making more of an effort from day one to speak the language is probably my only regret — and a shortcoming I understand I can choose to improve at any time.

Each of my three years in Sweden has been better than the last. This year, I was granted permanent residency, put a ridiculously long train commute in my past, moved to one of Europe’s most beautiful capital cities and secured a second-hand contract for an ideal apartment in one of the world’s most notoriously frustrating rental markets. I’m also two weeks away from starting my new career with one of Sweden’s oldest and proudest engineering companies.

I’m still happy that I chose to relocate to Sweden. Quality of life is very high here. I’ve really learned to appreciate a different pace of life, the breathtaking nature and the warm people as I’ve spent more time in the country this year. After seven trips back to the States in my first 26 months, I’ve visited only twice in the past 10.

As the summer starts to wind down and we prepare for a fall that always seems to be too short, I do wonder how I’ll handle another cold, dark and depressing winter ahead. I used to live for the snowy months — I even had the vanity license plate on my Subaru to prove it. (God, I miss that plate.) Maybe it’s that I’ve been snowboarding a whopping three times in three winters here — after tallying as many as a few dozen days a season in Tahoe several years ago? I’m not sure.

I do know that the benefits of living in Sweden still far outweigh the negatives, and until that changes, I’ll continue to enjoy life here as an expat.

TV fee

It’s no secret that Sweden has some of the highest tax rates in the world. We put a lot in, but I complain about it far less than when I first moved here because over these past few years I’ve discovered that we get a lot out in different ways, too.

I read about a jaw-dropping study one of Sweden’s big banks conducted last fall that claimed the average Swede pays up to 70 percent of our monthly salary in taxes. Granted, that total includes traditional paycheck withholding, steep value added taxes on goods and services and hefty payroll taxes paid by employers that employees never even see — but it’s still a pretty insane figure to wrap one’s mind around.

Among the ways we’re slowly but surely parted with our hard-earned kronor is a TV and radio tax assessed by the Swedish government, independently of any monthly fee charged by a cable or satellite provider for channel packages.

It used to be called a “TV license” but nowadays it’s referred to as a “TV fee.” I consider it a tax. Radiotjänst (“Radio Service”) is tasked with collecting 2076 SEK ($315 USD) annually per household, either in one lump sum or four quarterly installments, on behalf of Sweden’s three public broadcasters — Sveriges Television (SVT), Sveriges Radio and Sveriges Utbildningsradio (educational broadcasting). In return we receive several commercial-free TV channels, many radio channels and Internet TV and radio.

Only two of the TV channels are really relevant as far as I’m concerned. SVT1 is the first channel in Swedish TV history. It features a wide range of news, entertainment, drama and sports programming, while SVT2 has a more tailored focus with an emphasis on cultural performances, documentaries, current affairs and nature series.

SVT broadcasts everything from sporting events like Vasaloppet (the world’s oldest, longest and biggest cross-country ski — I like to pretend my yearly 2000 SEK goes into the gas tank of the helicopter that gets such awesome aerial shots of the skiers) to random concerts — one night SVT aired a Lady Gaga performance from Madison Square Garden. There’s also a quiz show similar to Jeopardy! that I like called Vem vet mest? (“Who knows the most?”) that helps me with my basic Swedish, and of course the country’s most popular program, Melodifestivalen, the six-week preselection for the Eurovision Song Contest. As many as half of Sweden’s 9 million residents tune in to SVT for the Melodifestivalen final.

Both main SVT channels broadcast a great deal of foreign programming from the U.S. and UK in English with subtitles. SVT also shows some Danish, Norwegian and Finnish programming. Some of the programming is boring and uninteresting, but viewership is very high — it remains the biggest TV network in Sweden with an audience share upwards of 35 percent.

Under Swedish law, everyone who has had a television receiver in their residence has been required for many years to pay the license fee, regardless of whether or not they watched SVT programming and even if a TV was only used to view DVDs or play video games. Somewhat ridiculously, if a household even had a TV with no way to physically receive a signal, they were still obligated to pay the tax.

Radiotjänst brings in upwards of 7 billion SEK annually — well over $1 billion USD — to part-finance the public broadcasters, but it claims only nine of 10 households that should pay the tax do. Several Swedes I know object to the principle of paying it, and Radiotjänst claims that is shorting the broadcasters close to 1 billion SEK every year.

Radiotjänst constantly checks its customer database against address registers and diligently enforces collection of the tax, by phone, mail and in-person. It has both licensed and freelance foot soldiers (I guess their actual title would be something like “inspectors”) located around the country who go door-to-door visiting households that don’t pay the tax to find out why and to try to change that.

These days, SVT’s focus has naturally shifted to mobile internet devices as it tries to bring TV tax payment closer to 100 percent. I think SVT feels some pressure from mobile streaming services like Netflix, which launched here only recently and has a very poor content selection compared to the U.S. service, but is a much cheaper monthly subscription than Sweden’s (albeit compulsory) TV tax.

SVT now offers its entire content lineup “for free” online, requiring Swedes who only watch digitally streamed programming on iPads or other tablets to pay even if they don’t have a TV. I don’t think it legally covers all smartphones yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. SVT does have a pretty decent app for iOS and I’ve watched content through it on my iPhone on a few occasions.

I respect these changes and the efforts — and certainly don’t approve of anyone stiffing any business out of any amount of money — but how many of the 10 percent who should be paying the tax but aren’t will start now? I find it hard to believe anyone is getting rid of their TV and only watching content on mobile devices just to legally save 2000 SEK per year. If they’re cheating the tax now, they’ll keep cheating it. I can’t see the new licensing system that targets connected devices making much of a difference in the bottom line, but maybe I’m wrong.  

When I first moved here, I was a bit shocked to learn about the cumpolsory TV tax. Even though I don’t watch much TV and often am not interested in SVT’s programming, I pay the TV tax and have paid it since the day I moved into my first apartment in Sweden. I’m an honest person (I also don’t want to jeopardize my residency or risk being hit with a huge fine) but beyond all that, I believe these license fees in countries like Sweden and the UK (SVT shares many similarities with the BBC system) support an important public service — broadcasting that is, at least for the most part, objective, impartial, commercial-free and of a fairly high quality.

Loads of Fun

Sweden is a country that plans ahead. Whether it’s arranging a coffee date with a friend at least several days in advance or crafting a Saturday schedule around Systembolaget’s early-afternoon close, not many activities are spontaneous here.

Planning even extends to doing laundry, which took me a lot of getting used to when I rented my first Swedish apartment.

Laundry is serious business in Sweden. If you fail to clean out a dryer’s lint filter, spill detergent on top of a washer or encroach a few minutes into someone’s pre-booked time, there will be a dispute. Some arguments have escalated to the point they’ve actually landed people in prison.

You can get banned for doing too much laundry, too. Some people, such as Sweden’s Prime Minister, just love laundry.

Like most complexes in the U.S., Swedish apartment buildings have communal laundry facilities. Unlike U.S. complexes, though, you have to book a time — sometimes many days in advance — and stick to it.

I suppose there are some advantages to planned laundry. You know you’ll have the washers and dryers all to yourself for a specific duration, and at least here I don’t need to stockpile coins the way I used to in California apartment complexes. I just still find it a little annoying and sometimes downright inconvenient to have to schedule my laundry so specifically.

In some apartment buildings, like the first one we lived in, you book via a paper list. Small buildings like that one in Falköping usually have slots per day of at least several hours.

Our new building in Stockholm houses the facility for several in the neighborhood, so there are a lot more people using it on a regular basis. For each of the two washers and dryers, there is a metal board of dates and times with 2.5-hour slots between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. 

  

And don’t even think of trying to clean clothes after hours. The rather blunt sign below is posted in our facility and I hear some facilities’ power even shuts off automatically at night.

“Other times, it is absolutely forbidden to use any machine. Think of your neighbors close to the laundry room and accept this.”

Each apartment has a numbered lock and you can put it in any open slot to book the time, so you can obviously only book one 2.5-hour slot at a time — which is as challenging as it sounds. You can only do laundry spontaneously if nobody has booked a slot or if they haven’t started washing within 30 minutes of the start of their time.

Our facility has two “stations” and each one features a tumble dryer and a drying cabinet. Maybe the most annoying thing about doing laundry here, though, is that the washers don’t have built-in centrifuges. That means clothes come out sopping wet and you need to put them in a standalone spinner for five minutes per load. 

That adds an extra 10 minutes you have to be in the laundry room to facilitate the transfer process from washer to dryer. I guess in theory the specialized centrifuge cycle means the clothes would require less drying time, but it’s still inconvenient.

Laundry is a chore few people enjoy, and it’s even less enjoyable when it must be planned so precisely.

A Priceless Taste of the West Coast

In two-and-a-half years living in Sweden, I’ve been known to monstrously overspend from time to time for a taste of the West Coast. Historically that’s meant indulging in a special food or beer, and tonight it was the latter.

Systembolaget, the infamous government-run alcohol monopoly, released limited numbers of more than a dozen new beers today in its chain of stores across the country to start the month of February off right.

While the System regularly carries one or two Sierra Nevada varieties (the classic Pale Ale — quite possibly my favorite all-time beer — and sometimes a seasonal alongside it) today’s special releases included Sierra’s 2012 Northern Hemisphere Harvest Wet Hop Ale, brewed each fall with hops less than 24 hours off the vine.

I’ve only tasted it once in the States but that was enough to know it’s truly a treat for IPA-lovers like myself.

Thanks to an article this morning on beersweden.se, Sweden’s first digital beer magazine, I knew the System had only imported 5,000 bombers (22-ounce bottles, for you non-connoisseurs). Still, I was both surprised and disappointed to find only a lone ranger left on the shelf at Stockholm’s busiest booze store at 5 p.m. on the day of release.

If you don’t live in Sweden you probably didn’t bat an eye at that price, but it’s more than $14 at the current exchange. For one bomber. If I were anywhere near California right now, I could have picked up a 12-pack of the aforementioned Pale Ale for less.

Such are the frustrations of a beer-loving expat in Sweden. I’m going to enjoy every last drop, that’s for sure.

Three Circumnavigations

My last same-day commute from Falköping to Stockholm and back is finally in the books. It truly feels unreal.

When I take the train back up to Stockholm on Monday morning, I’ll spend the night there. Not in a hotel room. Not at someone else’s apartment. At my own place.

I’ve covered 682 kilometers (424 miles) of rail virtually every weekday for the better part of 14 months. That’s close to six hours a day on trains.

During that time, I’ve circumnavigated the globe THREE TIMES. As I’ll now have the opportunity to start reflecting on what I’ve done, that statistic alone is incomprehensible.

I say I’ve spent close to six hours a day on trains but in reality my actual daily commute during this year-plus, to each of three different offices with two companies, has always been longer than six. For the last half-year, this has been the routine:

I set alarms for 5:03, 5:11 and 5:25 every weekday morning. I’m a sound sleeper and I usually haven’t gone to bed until 1 a.m. or later, anyway, so I always ignore the first alarm. If I don’t hear the second one, though, I’m in trouble. Not only will I not have time for breakfast, I’ll only have about 20 minutes to shower, get dressed and do anything else I need to do to get out the door.

The train leaves Falköping Central at 6:03 a.m. and our apartment is 1.1 kilometers (.8 miles) away. I’ve never missed a train on a morning that I made it out the door but I’ve come pretty close. If I leave home at 5:45-5:47 I have no problem as long as I take long strides, but if it’s 5:48-5:50 I’m in various states of trouble and won’t make it without some short stretches of jogging.

Unless it’s winter, the train is probably on time and as long as there are no signal failures along the way it’s a relatively quick trip of 2 hours, 32 minutes — an average of 135 kilometers (84 miles) per hour including four stops along the way.

When I get to Stockholm I’ve got a short walk to the subway, where I return to the rails for three quick stops. Then it’s about a five-minute walk from that station to my office. If everything has been on time, it’s 8:55. Depending on what time I left home, that’s 3:05-3:10, one-way.

I’ve been very fortunate that, for a town as small as Falköping is, we have arguably the best train service in the entire country. The only two direct trains to Stockholm each day are 6:03 and 7:05 a.m., and there have been plenty of times I missed the first one in favor of an extra hour in bed and was still able to be in the office by 10 a.m.

I’ve been even more fortunate to have incredibly understanding employers who have routinely let me do my last 60-90 minutes to finish my 7.5-hour workday from the only direct train back to Falköping.

It leaves Stockholm Central at 4:36 every afternoon, so I’ve had to leave the office by 4:15. If it’s on time it gets back to Falköping at 7:04 p.m. I’m usually pretty tired by then so I walk a bit slower on the way home than I do on the way to the station in the morning. I’m usually in the door right around 7:20, so that’s also 3:05 to get home.

So there it is, my 6:10-6:15 daily commute. There isn’t much I’m going to miss about it, that’s for sure.

 

Home?

It’s been exactly 800 days since I “moved” to Sweden.

I use quotation marks because even though I’ve been back in the country almost three weeks since my last international trip, I’ve still spent less than 80 percent of those 800 days in Sweden.

That’s right. I’ve been away from Sweden a little more than 1 of every 5 days since I’ve called it “home.” Between vacations to Scotland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, and SEVEN trips back to the U.S. in 26 months, I’ve spent 166 of those 800 outside of Sweden. That’s 20.75 percent, a pretty ridiculous number when you really think about it.

Granted there have been some extenuating circumstances, but how could I ever hope or expect to assimilate myself into a culture when I’m never here long enough to feel settled?

I do miss the States — the people, the food, the weather, the sports — quite often, and despite how often I’ve been back to visit in these first two-plus years it never feels like I have time to see everyone or do everything. Still, I’m starting to recognize I’ll be doing myself a disservice if I keep this pace up.

Not that I probably could, anyway. Even though some of that travel has been made possible by Sweden’s very generous paid vacation benefits, much of it also occurred while I was underemployed (and even unemployed for a time).

Now that I’m continuing to establish myself professionally with a great company in an exciting industry, and even though my job has brought and will bring more opportunities for travel, I won’t have that kind of time to vacation on the other side of the world anymore.

Not to mention the fact that if Sweden truly is my current “home” — for whatever period of time I choose it to be that, since I’ve been granted permanent residency this week — I shouldn’t want to be away so often, anyway, right?

Grilling with Gas

Over the years I’ve learned the secrets of successful grilling from two charcoal masters, my dad and Dan Squier. When Amanda’s family bought me a beautiful new gas grill for my 25^th birthday, I was very appreciative but a bit apprehensive at the same time.

For different reasons — poor late-spring weather, a month back in the States and a long evening commute, among others — it took more than three months before I finally grilled with gas for the first time.

I’ve used it a few times since and I really like the push-button convenience and ability to use dials to control and maintain a desired temperature, but I miss the intense smells and flavors of charcoal grilling. I also think the latter experience is more hands-on, but on the other hand it’s much messier than gas.

There are other pros and cons for both barbecue methods and you can even throw electric grilling into the ring. I’ll probably never fully commit to one technique. Even though I have an awesome gas grill now I still think there’s a time and a place for charcoal every once in a while. You just can’t beat the smoky flavor.