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.

Sweden’s Best Place to Live

Fokus is Sweden’s leading weekly news magazine. It features national and global stories on politics, the economy and culture. Think Newsweek meets The Economist.

Since its launch in 2005, Fokus has ranked the country’s 290 municipalities each year to determine the overall best place to live based on more than 40 factors that fall into five overall best categories: to be young, to be old, to have a family, to work, and for fundamentals such as housing values, crime and suicide rates, health statistics and protected environmental areas.

Falköping ranked 68^th overall in the new rankings Fokus released today to crack the top 25 percent, up 62 spots from its 2011 mark.

Our town scored in the top quarter in buying a house (17), divorce rate (50), unemployment development (50) and environmentally protected areas (72), and top fifth in two of the “best to be old” categories.

We ranked in the lowest quarter, though, in business climate (232, the justification for my commute), achieved goals in school (243) and beach length (280, we don’t have any beaches).

Habo, a tiny town of 7,000 near Sweden’s second largest lake about 30 minutes south of us, earned the top overall ranking.

Many of the other results were pretty predictable. Many of the rich Stockholm suburbs are ranked in the top 20, while the capital itself is 54 this year. Sweden’s two big university towns, Lund in the south and Uppsala north of Stockholm, ranked 3 and 29, respectively.  

At 68, Falköping ranked behind Amanda’s university town, Jönköping (27), as well as nearby Skövde (33), but ahead of Sweden’s nicest ski village, Åre (72), the closest town to the summer house, Falkenberg (134), and significantly ahead of Sweden’s second and third cities, Göteborg (207) and Malmö (284), the latter of which slipped 97 spots since last year’s rankings and has earned a negative reputation for its recent crime.

Fokus compiled the rankings using numbers from administrative agency Statistics Sweden and the National Public Health Institute, so they’re more objective than one might think. Still, you can’t take these things too seriously — especially if your municipality isn’t highly ranked, I guess.

I’ve been to many cities and towns in central and southern Sweden, and while Falköping may leave me feeling a bit under stimulated at times, overall I believe it’s very deserving of its 2012 ranking and significant improvement from a year ago.

Expanding Musical Horizons

I’m going to see this guy scream tomorrow night. Voluntarily. I’m actually paying money to do it.

 

It’s a lengthy explanation, but let me give it a shot.

For more than 50 winters, Sweden has held an annual music competition called Melodifestivalen — you guessed it, “The Melody Festival” — to select the Swedish representative for the Eurovision Song Contest in May.

I had never heard of Eurovision before moving across the pond, which some might call embarrassing considering how musically connected I consider myself.

In any event, the European Broadcasting Union settled on an international song contest when exploring ways to bring its member countries together in the years following World War II.

Participating countries perform their song on live TV and then use a positional vote system to award 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 12 points to other countries’ songs, with a country’s favorite song being given 12 points. Determining the overall winner is quite a process, and global audience numbers have topped 600 million. Eurovision is credited with launching the international careers of ABBA, which won for Sweden in 1974 with “Waterloo,” and Celine Dion, who won for Switzerland in 1988.

Sweden makes a huge deal out of its eight-week Melodifestivalen. It’s far and away the most popular Swedish TV program. Of the 9.1 million people living in the country in 2007, 4 million watched the final.

Public phone votes and panels of jurors have equal weight in selecting the Swedish winner, but from what I’m told, it’s taken a very radio-friendly pop song no matter what to win the contest in recent years. That sure was true this year, as you’ll hear below. Loreen beat Danny in a two-horse race for the honor of representing Sweden in Azerbaijan a few weeks from now.



One band that appeared to win a lot of new fans throughout the competition before falling short in the semifinals is Dead By April. Wikipedia describes them as “Pop-Metal.” Their Spotify bio says “metalcore.” iTunes simply classifies them as “rock.”

 

I’m not quite sure how to describe Dead By April. They’re like a fusion of a boy band and a hardcore punk band. Think, maybe, Backstreet Boys meet The Used or 30 Seconds to Mars.

I’ve never really been a fan of any genre of guitar music, other than maybe country. My musical tastes are almost exclusively rap and R&B, and with a growing amount of trance. Never any type of rock whatsoever.

But I think Dead By April have kind of a nice sound. The interspersed screaming probably threw a lot of people off during Melodifestivalen and undoubtedly didn’t earn the band any of Sweden’s pensioner votes. I can’t really take it seriously, either. I find myself laughing every time Jimmie does his thing. But it seems so difficult to do I’m also sort of fascinated, so I have to see it live.

Tomorrow is Valborg, a big spring kickoff festival in Sweden and other countries in Northern Europe. The bar up on Mösseberg here in Falköping somehow landed Dead By April for the evening, which is an accomplishment considering the small size of our town and the fact that the band is a pretty big name in Sweden. As you’d expect, the town is abuzz.

It promises to be a very different concert experience for me and I’m looking forward to it.