My Life As A Swede

BBC's Sweden

2009-11-10T09:14:00.001+01:00

The BBC has just made a television adaptation of Henning Menkel’s novels, starring Kenneath Branaugh as Kurt Wallander. I’m not sure now the rest of the world views it but from Sweden it looks completely bizarre. This is a TV series set in Sweden, filmed in Sweden, where all the characters are meant to be Swedish, and yet the whole thing is in English.

The contradiction is hardly seemless with Swedish names constantly being mispronounced. For example “skana” for Skåne (actual pronunciation is “skor-na”) and “nor-co-ping” for Norrköping (“norr-sha-ping”). Having gone to the trouble to film the series on location in Sweden, why didn’t they just ask someone for advice on pronunciation?

Another glaring inconsistency is when the characters watch TV or listen to the radio it is in English, but newspapers and Internet sites are in Swedish. When Wallander is on his computer he talks in English yet simultaneously types in Swedish.

Language is not the only thing that has been changed. The last episode I saw was about a young boy from an impoverish family who was going around scalping people. In the Swedish television adaptation of this same book the young boy lives in a glum urban housing estates as would be expected of an impoverish family. But in the BBC version they are transported to a typically Swedish wooden house in the countryside, the sort most commonly inhabited by wealthy Swedes on summer holidays. The only indicators of a less affluent lifestyle is a slightly messy living room. I cannot think of any good reason for this change other than it is more in accordance with how British people view Sweden.

I suppose when you’re living in an English speaking country you don’t think about it. Wallander speaking English is no more bizarre than Roman soldiers in Hollywood epics speaking English. Or aliens from over a million light years away speaking English. “’Allo ‘allo!” would have you believe that the French speak English with bad accents. And I’ve seen plenty of Swedish television shows where characters end up in 18^th century China, or meet Amazon hill tribes, to find everyone speaks fluent Swedish.

But having said that films do not have to be in the native tongue of the audience to be enjoyable. I always thought it was a shame that Mel Gibson had to go on his drunken fascist rant right after he released Apocalypto as this ensured the film never received the praised it deserved. To make the film as authentic as possible he revived the dying Yucatec language. Even Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, a film so fantastical that it involves a small band of American soldiers single-handedly killing Hitler and ending the Second World War, ensures characters speak their native languages until a convenient (if sometimes lame) excuse is found for switching to English.

The BBC could have solved all these language issues by relocated the series to England. There is nothing distinctively Swedish about Menkel’s novels and they could easily have been transported. The only sign of Swedish culture is the fact that the characters are often carrying a thermos of coffee and constantly stopping for coffee breaks, but again this has been removed from the British version. The BBC is essentially relying on Sweden to create an exotic location. Hence the reason for the change in setting: Red wooden houses next to lakes are exotic, council estates are not. Typing with letters like Å or Ö is far more interesting than A and O. Once you remove the location you’re just left with another Sunday night crime drama.

God is Swedish

2009-09-01T12:59:00.003+01:00

Contrary to the views of some, God doesn’t hate Sweden. In fact he lives in Sweden and even has a mobile phone here. A church in Helsingborg are pleased to report that they've uncovered a phone number for the big man that people are more than welcome to text. God doesn't mind, always has time for his fans. Soon he’ll also be on Facebook. No joke, so get those friendship requests ready.

A Midsummer Treat

2009-06-20T12:31:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was the Swedish Midsummer, a big national event here. Despite being a celebration of summer, the weather is always inevitably gray and wet. Below is an advertisement made by Ikea Germany making fun of the Swedish Midsummer traditions. Ikea HQ in Sweden didn't find it so funny and banned the ads, yet they've made their way onto youtube.com.

On the Other Side of the Bar

2009-06-20T12:10:00.005+01:00

I’ve just been going over my previous blog entries and realised it has been a while since I wrote about my work and what I’m actually doing here. Since I left the construction site I’ve barely mentioned my experiences with the market research company. Partly this is because this blog has gained a readership much larger than my friends and family, and that because I don’t write anonymously it would only take one work colleague to stumble across my blog before I’m potentially in big trouble. But the good news is that the market research company is slowly going bust in this economic crisis and when it does I have a truckload of amusing anecdotes and stories about the market research industry.

In the meantime I’ve finally succumbed to the typical Australian expat occupation and started working in a pub. Because of the low pay and unsocial working hours this was one line of work I’ve been looking to avoid but it has actually turned out to be one of my more enjoyable occupations since moving to Sweden. For one in Sweden bartender pay isn’t particularly low at all. In fact when you add in tips and the penalty rates I get for working after midnight and on weekends, my hourly rate is actually double what I was earning at the construction company. And then there are regular free pints just to sweeten the deal. It’s actually a logical job for me to take since most weekends would be spent in a pub anyway, except this way I’m making money rather than spending it.

In many ways working in a pub is not dissimilar to working as a substitute teacher as drunken adults are a lot like children. For one they’re both oblivious to reasoning. It’s futile arguing with them as they’re not in a state of mind to think rationally. Like children they can’t engage in an intelligent argument as they’re only counter arguments are to simply refute whatever you say, and failing that to resort to insults and personal slurs. Almost every Friday night at around 2am I have to endure a conversation along the lines of: “Can I have two beers?” “Sorry but the bar is closed now.” “…But I want two beers.”

In the same way a child will ask their father for an ice cream when their mother has already said no, a drunkard will keep trying to order a drink from another bartender even when they’ve already been denied. I’ve had people swear to me that they’re only buying a drink for themselves and not for their drunken friend who has already been refused more alcohol, while simultaneously buying four pints and four shots of tequila for a group of only four people. Drunk people really have no idea of their own state. Some will swear to that they’ve only had one pint despite the fact they need to hang onto the bar just to stand up and push their phone right up to their face to read a text message. Neither drunken adults nor children have any self-awareness. They have no concept of the noise they’re making or chaos they’re causing. When someone is really drunk they genuinely don’t understand why staff might object to them carting our furniture out onto the street, or why they’re not allowed to step behind the bar uninvited to change the music.

I probably make bar work sound quite tiresome but it isn’t that hard. You just have to treat drunken adults like children. When you’re a teacher you don’t argue with a child, you just exert your authority and dictate the terms. “Put it back and sit down! Alright then, I’m taking your drink away! If you want it back sit down and behave! Okay I’m taking your drink away now. I’m not going to argue with you. Sit down! That’s better, here’s your drink back.” Drunkenness allows you to exert a level of authority that would be unaccepted in any other line of customer service. A few weeks ago we had a couple of pissed-up businessmen whistle at one of my colleagues in an attempt to get some service. She just marched up to them with her hands on her hips and said, “I beg your pardon! Have you lost your dog or something?” The two businessmen sheepishly looked at the ground and were forced to apologise. You can’t do that in restaurants or retail.

Bar staff can get away with this because consuming alcohol puts in you in a serious disadvantage in any argument. If you think about it in any dispute between a sober person and drunk, one is naturally going to lean towards the sober one. If someone did come back to complain the question of how much they've had to drink is inevitable going to come up and from that point onwards you’re fighting a losing battle.

People generally know this and this is why they often avoid returning to a place where they had consumed a lot of alcohol the night before. I suspect there is always a fear that they can’t quite remember everything they said and did, or how they would have come across, and there is a degree of embarrassment with being confronted with someone who was stone cold sober and remembers everything about the night before. Thus the funnier experiences are when customers, for whatever reason, are forced to return the next day when they’re sober. Examples such as “I was here having a few drinks here last night and it seems I accidentally left with the wrong jacket.” It often then transpires that they’ve done something like mistaken their black leather jacket for a brown trench coat, all the while maintaining it was a honest mistake and not at all related to the ten pints they consumed prior to leaving.

This is also the first job I’ve had that requires me to speak Swedish, and already I’ve improved dramatically. From all the expats I’ve meet since moving to Göteborg, a common thread amongst all those that have learnt the language is that nearly all of them have worked in bars. Since the bar has an English theme I can get away with English, and often customers can tell from a Swedish dialect that my native language is English (all English speakers, whether from Canada, Australia or Scotland, always speak Swedish in the same broken dialect), and will willingly speak English themselves. Although I’m gradually getting through more and more shifts without having to resort to English, there is still one notable area where I’m still struggling: differentiating between nötter (nuts) and nota (bill). So when people ask for their bill I keep offering them bowls of peanuts.

Svensk Stad

2009-06-11T11:40:00.001+01:00

I’ve just spent the weekend in a town called Falun up in the north of Sweden, and I’ve returned to Göteborg with the realisation that nearly all Swedish towns are the same. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making this conclusion based on Falun alone but from my experiences in a number of towns and small cities. Obviously the bigger cities like Stockholm and Göteborg stand out, and of course there are some regional differences. For one towns in Skåne definitely have a distinct Danish influence in some of their older buildings. And there are certainly cultural variations, with each region having their own distinct dialect. But in terms of how places look, how street are laid out and how they are named, there is remarkable uniformity.

Every town will typically centre around a large public square and 99% of the time that square will be called Stor Torget (The Big Square). I can confidently say there is not a town or village in all of Sweden that doesn’t have a Stor Torget, even if it isn’t the main square.
On the main square there will be a Rådhus (Town Hall) and in close proximity there will be a church, often called Domkyrkan. Streets will be arranged in a grid like fashion. There will always be a street called Storgatan (Big Street), Kungsgatan (King’s Street), Drottinggatan (Queen Street), Nygatan (New Street) and Vasagatan. There will almost always be a Lilla Torget (Little Street), Järntorget (The Iron Square) and Linnegatan, There will be a district called Gamla Stan or Gamla Stad (both mean Old Town). The street by the train station will be Järnvägsgatan.
There will be a few well-preserved 18th and 19th century buildings in the city centre, especially around Stor Torget. But most buildings will be brick and cement constructions from the 1970s and 80s. Inner city apartments will be in drab four story blocks painted in uniform colours. The wealthier suburbs will be compact wooden houses in bright reds, yellows and blues. The outer suburbs will consist of the monotonous grey towers of the Million Programme era. On the very edge of town, just out of range of public transport, there will often be a massive shopping complex surrounded by an endless car park.
The main commercial district in town will house all same chain shops: Åhlens, H&M, KappAhl, Dressman, Stadium, Intersport, Hemköp, ICA, a Systembolaget, Apoteket, etc. They have the same pubs: there will be Harry’s, or an O’Leary’s, probably a Bishops Arms, and a couple of smaller places frequented by the local alcoholics once the Systembolaget closes. There will be plenty of kebab/pizza take-aways and Gatuköks (street kitchens). There will be a Pressbyrån at the main bus stop.
There is a 95% percent chance the name of the town will end in either “köping”, “berg”, “borg”, “stad”, “stan”, “hamn” or “holm”.

In a way Swedish towns are like little Legoland towns. Buildings and streets are symmetrical, monotonous and clearly defined by bright colours. They’re both surgically clean and neat, but with nothing particularly stimulating or interesting

Guide to Swedish Football

2009-04-04T15:21:00.004+01:00

In case anyone is interested I've just written an expat's guide to the Allsvenskan, Sweden's domestic football competition. My adopted team is GAIS because they remind me of St.Kilda: perpetually hopeless, incapable of winning but with a loyal and committed fan base.

Keeping It Wheel

2009-03-11T14:33:00.003+01:00

What is it with ferris wheels at the moment? I’ve just returned to Sweden after a holiday back in Melbourne, where the most visible sign of change on the skyline of my native city is a giant wheel. On my return I learn that Gothenburg are planning on building a giant wheel too. Why this obsession with glorified amusement park rides?

Melbourne’s wheel, the Southern Star, cost A$100 million to build. A littler over month after completion it suddenly stopped working. During my visit a delegation of Japanese engineers were flown in who subsequently ruled the wheel inoperable for at least the next six months.
Naturally people are asking why, during a world financial crisis, was A$100 million spent on something the city arguably really doesn’t need and doesn’t even work anyway. Well according to their website a “flight” (this is their word for a ride) on the wheel is “…an experience like nothing on earth.” Maybe no one has told them about the taller London Eye. Or the Singapore Flyer. Or the Star of Nanchang, Great Berlin Wheel, and Great Beijing Wheel, as well as a host of other structures all taller than the Southern Star.
But the Southern Wheel does have some advantages. For one it is the only permanent observation wheel in the southern hemisphere. And it also has the world’s first LED lighting system. Just in case you’re into that sort of thing.
The Southern Star will supposedly attract 1.5 million visitors a year, presumably after they’ve already seen all other wheels mentioned above and still have some change left over to see some more.

Gothenburg’s proposed wheel isn’t quite as grand, coming in at a lazy 60 metres. (The Southern Star is 120 metres, the London Eye 135 metres). But assuming that the whole point of a giant observational ferris wheel is to provide a good view of the surrounding area, Gothenburg’s planned wheel makes even less sense. The truth is Gothenburg is not short of lookout points. What they lack is something to look at. It’s a small compact city with a low-rise skyline. Any elevated spot above a fifth floor usually provides a good view of the city and its surrounds. At present they already have one ferris wheel, which at 25 metres is sufficient for seeing right out to the city’s outskirts. On top of this they also have an 80 metre high skyscraper, and a 116 metre tower each with their own viewing platforms. Considering there is nothing much to see from either of these places other than rooftops, what can a 60 metre ferris wheel possibly add?

According to a poll in the Göteborg Posten, 54% of the public think it’s a great idea. As with the Southern Star the potential pull of tourists is the motivating key. But who are these people who travel large distances just to see ferris wheels? Even Facebook, where fan pages exist for things as banal and irrelevant as duct tape, dried leaves and Bono, lacks any evidence of ferris wheels’ supposed mass appeal. A group called ‘Ferris Wheels are the Greatest Things Ever’ has 53 members while another called “I Love Ferris Wheels” has one. Basically vast sums of money are being spent trying to attract a demographic that doesn’t even exist.

When Fox News Came to Sweden

2009-03-05T16:55:00.002+01:00

I recently came across this clip from another blog (Daniel Lampinen’s Stockholm 2009, I can highly recommend it.) It’s a report from Fox News about migrants in Rosengård, the famous Miljonprogrammet suburb in Sweden’s third city Malmö. In typical tabloid fashion the report is sensationalist and misleading, yet I still found it quite interesting to watch.

Sweden does have a large migrant population but it is interesting to note that both of my parents, who visited Sweden on separate occasions in 2008, remarked on how homogenous Sweden appeared. As I’ve said countless times in this blog, Sweden is very segregated with the majority of migrants living in satellite towns like Rosengård. Out of sight, out of mind. But tension does seem to be bubbling away and if I’m bold enough to make one prediction about Sweden’s future it is that racial tension will become a big issues in coming years. Already there have been minor riots in Rosengård and reports of a rise in Muslim extremism.

In many ways Sweden reminds me of pre-1996 Australia in that there seems to be a lot of racism and prejudice simmering away, which the media and political establishments don’t want to acknowledge. Like Australia, all it needs is either a Swedish Pauline Hanson (a bigot who can successfully portray themselves as average Joe Public and ‘voice of the silent majority’) or a John Howard (an opportunistic politician not afraid to exploit racism for electoral gain) and suddenly racism will be out in the open, wreaking havoc and tearing the place apart. You heard it here first.

Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared (A book review)

2009-01-23T19:21:00.003+01:00

Books about Sweden, in English, aren’t that common and one’s written by English writers are rarer still. There is the odd English translation of a Swedish history book, and plenty of books about Vikings, but I’ve seen very few books about contemporary Swedish politics and society, or much in the way of travel narratives. Until now the most extensive written material I’ve come across from an outsider were the two chapters on Sweden in Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There. So when I heard about Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia, a book written by an English journalist who used to live in Sweden, I was pretty quick to get a copy.

Part travelogue and part personal memoir, Fishing in Utopia is Brown’s attempt to document the changes Sweden has gone over in the past 30 years and to find out what happened to their famed welfare state, while simultaneously indulging in his love of fishing.
Like most expats Brown was lured to Sweden by a spouse. In the late 1970s they married, had a child, and moved into one of the miljonprogrammet suburbs outside of Gothenburg. His first job was working as a labourer in a factory making wooden pallets for Volvo. His only escape from the drudgery of manual labour and lifeless concrete satellite towns was his passion for fishing and writing. Brown later moved back to England but work and his son kept dragging him back to Sweden regularly, and in 2006 he returned to drive the length of the country from Skåne to Norrland.

As Andrew Brown makes quite clear Sweden in the 1970s was a different place from the Sweden of today. With the welfare state in its prime it was a safer and more egalitarian place. Poverty and crime were practically nonexistent and even the Prime Minister lived an ordinary life equivalent of a schoolteacher. But it was also more oppressive and insular with a mood of voluntary conformism making life stifling and restrictive. Brown tells of having to travel 10 miles on a bus to the nearest Systembolaget, and then having to smuggle the empty wine bottle out so as to hide it from the neighbours. Life was completely ruled and regulated by the state and the union movement. Everything was done collectively, for the collective whole, with little room for individuality. “It was the life of a battery salmon: packed into a crowd in the middle of a boundless stretch of water by a cage of netting that you could not see at all. It appeared to be part of the sea.”

By 2006 Brown returns to find a far more open and cosmopolitan society, with trendy bars and gourmet cafes. The country has since been opened up to migrants with one in nine being of non-Swedish heritage. “It is one of the marks of modern Sweden that you cannot fine anywhere so remote that it does not have a Kurdish family running a pizza restaurant.” But in the same space of time many of the shipyards and factories that kept so many Swedes employed have been shut down. The welfare state has been significantly dismantled, state industries have been privatised, and both crime and unemployment have risen rapidly.

The central thesis of Brown’s book seems to be to answer the question of what happened. What are the underlying courses for these changes? Unfortunately Brown doesn’t seem to offer any concrete answers; quite possibly because there aren’t any. It seems Sweden has been opened up and exposed to the outside world, allowing new luxuries and experiences but also exposing them to new perils outside of their control. But is it a case of Sweden reaching out and willingly abandoning their third-way quasi socialism, or have the forces of globalisation invaded and dragged Sweden out of its safe insular naivety? Is the welfare state dead, killed off by an over-feed, under-worked generation with no appreciation of their ancestor’s poverty and hardship? Was the welfare state a concept that could only have worked in Scandinavia in that particular time frame? Or will history show that the past 15 years were just a minor blip in the creation of the most equal and prosperous society on earth? All big questions.

Personally I enjoyed Fishing in Utopia because Andrew Brown’s personal experiences are so recognisable. Anyone who read my earlier blog entries on my time working as a labourer on construction sites will instantly see parallels with Brown’s experiences at the timber factory: The initial exhaustion of manual work, slowly learning enough Swedish to listen in on conversations, lazy and apathetic work colleagues who think manual work is beneath them. We’ve both used the crime novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö to educate ourselves on Sweden.

I also share his simultaneous derision and admiration for Swedish society. Like most other expats (including myself) Brown initially derides Sweden’s rigidness and conformity but on returning to Thatcher’s Britain, with an ethos of no-such-thing-as-society, Brown starts to appreciate what Sweden offered. “I had mocked Sweden for failing to live up to its own ideals, but I had always supposed these were ideals that everyone shared. I had not considered the possibility that some people could want a less equal society.” I couldn’t agree more and despite all its faults and odd novelties, there is still a lot to admire Sweden for.

My only real criticism would be Brown’s sections on fishing and fishing equipment that I found so dull and tedious I ended up skimming pages just to get through it. This is because I have no interest in fishing but admittedly anyone with any vague understanding of why sitting by a lake for hours on end with a long piece of string dangling in the water might be entertaining, may think quite differently.

Brown doesn’t glorify Sweden like so many left-wing progressives: It has its faults and it’s far from utopia. Nor does he demonstrate the outright disdain and ridicule common amongst frustrated expats and right-wing conservatives. Instead he offers a very honest, personal, grounded analysis built upon his own personal experiences. He provides a clear picture of what life was like in Sweden in those early days, and despite the changes the country subsequently goes through, it is a narrative that most expats can still relate to today. Even if he can’t stop talking about a handmade fishing reel he once owned, it was still a great pleasure to read an account from someone who, thirty years ago, conducted a similar journey to my own.

Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared, by Andrew Brown, Granta, London, 2008.

Straight Outta Hammerkullen: The Miljonprogrammet.

2008-10-15T14:54:00.016+01:00

When I first arrived in Sweden, the most off putting sight were the huge lifeless apartment blocks everywhere. Unless you’ve been to Sweden, you’re idea of Swedish housing is most probably the wooden red houses surrounded by forests and lakes. But in reality large mass-produced sterile concrete blocks are far more common. These buildings litter the skyline of every Swedish city and town, often on their outskirts. They can look so similar to old Soviet Union-era satellite towns that one could be forgiven for thinking the iron curtain was actually located 1000 km west of St. Petersburg.

Such suburbs are commonly referred to as Miljonprogrammet suburbs, named after the government initiative that spawned them. In 1965, in an effort to combat an emerging housing shortage, the Social Democrats launched the Miljonprogrammet (Swedish for the Million Programme), with the aim the building over a million new homes within ten years. The new dwellings were designed and built on the principles of cheap, simple, functional living. Much thought was given to providing shared facilities such as laundries, bike sheds and rubbish rooms, as well as public utilities such as parks, churches, libraries, nurseries, schools and hospitals. The new suburbs were designed just as much by sociologists as architects, with the eventual aim of building the ideal environment to breed healthy, comfortable, community-minded citizens, with all their basic needs provided for. The one factor that wasn’t taken into consideration was aesthetics. Housing needed to be built quickly and cheaply thus the grey concrete exteriors and monotonous design.

In Gothenburg typical Miljonprogrammet suburbs include Angered, Hammarkullen and Bergsjön. Other famous Miljonprogrammet suburbs are Rinkeby in Stockholm and Rosengård in Malmö. But the Miljonprogrammet are not limited to the big cities and even the smallest towns can boast their own Miljonprogrammet areas.

They were meant to be the suburbs of the future, and considering how they’ve ended up it’s amusing to look at original artists’ impressions and designs in museums. The sketches might depict something from The Jetsons, but forty years on the Miljonprogrammet suburbs are now synonymous with immigrants, crime, unemployment and social decay.

As I’ve already mentioned last month in another blog entry, Sweden is one of the most racially segregated countries I’ve ever seen, and it is the Miljonprogrammet suburbs that have ended up hosting nearly all the immigrants. In such areas there is barely a blonde hair in sight, yet other suburbs would suggest Sweden is the most culturally homogenous place on earth. Either a suburb is populated exclusively by immigrants, or not at all: the division is that distinct.

Not surprisingly, like any area predominately populated by immigrants, Miljonprogrammet suburbs have a poor reputation amongst the host culture. Listening to some people talk of them you’d think they were talking about Grozny and they are indeed often nicknamed “the ghettos”. The worst perception of them is that they’re full of Swede-hating Islamic extremists planning the next September 11 attack. At the very least they’re populated by welfare cheating foreigners who refuse to integrate. Tabloid media also like to seize on higher crime statistics and portray them as de facto war zones where even the police are too scared to tread.

Old readers may remember Hammarkullen as the location of the very first construction site I worked at, so unlike many Gothernburgers I’ve actually been to a Miljonprogrammet suburb. I was there everyday for nearly a month and from my experiences I can confidently say it really isn’t that bad. It wouldn’t be my first choice when looking for a flat but if it is the worst part of Gothenburg, then Gothenburg has some very comfortable living standards. I’m not so widely travelled that I can claim to have seen the world’s most down trodden but I have seen plenty of suburbs in cities like London, Paris, Glasgow and Belfast, which are significantly worse. Windows are bordered up or broken, barbed wire lines every fence, rubbish is strewn everywhere, everything is falling apart and in decay, junkies are passed out in the gutter, CCTV cameras monitor your every move and large conveys of heavily armed police are ever present. These are all aspects of really run down areas and Hammarkullen has none of them. I found it was clean, well maintained, and so safe kids played in the street unsupervised. Hammerkullen might not be about to win any architectural awards but it isn’t skid row.

For me the most disturbing aspect of Hammerkullen and Angered is their location as they are quite visibly isolated and cut off from the rest of Gothenburg. When you take the tram from town you actually leave the city as you travel through large industrial areas and forests, without making any stops for a good 10 minutes before finally arriving. Coupled with the fact that its populated exclusively by immigrants, and you’ve created a real sense that this an out-of-sight, out-mind-dumping ground for non-Swedes.

Anyone opposed to migration to Sweden will point to areas like Hammarkullen as proof of their convictions. Higher unemployment and crime, the argument goes, are caused by immigrants who don’t want to work and/or are more inclined to commit crime, while the deep segregation comes down to immigrants’ refusal to integrate. Now I don’t want to get up on my soap box (but I will anyway) but there are some glaring problems with such arguments, not least of all the assumption that immigrants choice to live in Miljonprogrammet suburbs, or that they’re even given a choice. Half the students in my SFI class live in places like Angered or Hammarkullen and I’m yet to meet one who does so by preference. I’ve already been through the perils of the Swedish housing market so I won’t do so again here, but suffice to say that finding a rental property isn’t easy for anyone. If you’re a immigrant, especially one that doesn’t have a job or speak much Swedish, it’s harder still.

I’m yet to see the city where newly arrived immigrants are allowed to move straight into prime real estate. Due to its location and relatively lower living standards compared to the rest of the city, its plain delusional to believe people choice to live in Hammarkullen rather then Örgyte (a wealthy part of Gothenburg). But as one of my classmates said recently, “I need to live somewhere, I can’t sleep on the streets.”

As for integration if you want migrants to integrate it is hardly conducive to force them all to live together in the same suburb on the city’s outskirts, physically detached from the rest of society.

It is easy to look at the Miljonprogrammet housing and see it as a giant ugly mistake. But in the end the Social Democrats did succeed in reaching their aim of creating over a million new homes. (Considering the Swedish tendency to be exact with figures, if the programme had fallen short I wouldn’t put it pass them to rename it the 957,200 programme instead.) Considering Sweden’s population at the time was only seven million (today it is nine million) creating a million homes in only ten years is quite an achievement. The living standards they offered have since been surpassed but at the time they did represent a significant improvement.

The Miljonprogrammet suburbs have also spawned a life and culture of their own. For one they’ve given birth to their own dialect of Swedish, popularly known as Rinkeby Swedish after the Miljonprogrammet suburb of Stockholm. (Rinkeby Swedish is basically Swedish mixed with terms and pronunciations from Middle-Eastern, African and Latin American languages.) Miljonprogrammet suburbs have also produced a host of contemporary Swedish musicians, filmmakers, artists and athletes. Internationally the most famous Miljonprogrammet citizen is Inter Milan footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic who grew up in the means streets of Malmö’s Rosengård.

Given their reputations as ghettos it’s hardly surprising that the Miljonprogrammet has given birth to Sweden’s hip-hop scene. The Latin Kings, one of Sweden’s first commercial successful hip hop acts, became renowned in the 1990s for writing lyrics that were not only in Swedish (until then all Swedish hip hop was in English) but in Rinkeby Swedish. As you can see from this film clip, Miljonprogrammet buildings are a prominent feature and life in the Miljonprogrammet is pretty integral to their image.

Since the 90s The Latin Kings have lost a fair bit of street cred as their front man, the ludicrously named Dogge Doggelito, is now more famous of his segments on lifestyle programs and advertisements for supermarkets (pictured right). It doesn’t help that he dresses like a real-life Ali G without the satire. However the legacy of intertwining hip-hop culture with the Miljonprogrammet continues. Rather then feel ashamed or stigmatised by the hyperbole surrounding the Miljonprogrammet suburbs, hip-hops artists have co-opted it and even glorified it for their own ends. (There are even white middle-class Swedish hip-hop artists have to pretend to be from the Miljonprogrammet.) Below is a more contemporary example, and one more local to Gothenburg. The music isn’t anything special but the clip gives you a good idea of what a Miljonprogrammet suburb looks like.

UPDATE: It has since been brought to my attention that the fifth picture in this blog entry, of the pink flats by the cliffs, isn't a miljonet suburb at all. It's from the island of Lidingö, one of the more posher areas of Stockholm. But I suppose the fact that it can be mistaken for a miljonet suburb is reflective of the egalitarian nature of Swedish housing.

SFI and the Steve McClaren School of Languages

2008-09-25T22:22:00.007+01:00

The other week I had this dream. Basically I’m in a large room with all my friends and family…and for some reason Mick Jagger is there too. Naturally everyone in the room is asking about life in Sweden and the topic of language comes up. Someone (I can’t remember who exactly) asks if I can speak Swedish yet. I reply by saying something like “Not really but I’m learning, and I’m slowly getting there”. Then Mick Jagger starts laughing and shouts at me “What do you mean? You hardly speak any Swedish!’ To illustrate his point he then bombards with a tirade of Swedish and I can only respond with a blank vacant stare. “See? He doesn’t understand anything,” he shouts to everyone in the room. He then proceeds to ridicule and humiliate me in front of everyone I know.

When I woke up I didn’t need to delve too deeply into psychoanalysis theories to interpret what this dream meant (except for maybe the Mick Jagger part. That confuses me; I don’t even like the Rolling Stones.) Subconsciously I feel guilty and ashamed that after 18 months I still don’t speak or understand enough Swedish to confidently say, “Yes, I speak Swedish!” or more accurately “Ja! Jag pratar Svenska!”

The common retort from native English speakers living in Sweden is to bemoan the lack of opportunity to practice. This is in fact true and the majority of Swedes will switch straight to English without blinking an eyelid if they detect just the slightest accent. It doesn’t help either that all my friends are English speakers, as are my work colleagues. And now that she’s back in Sweden A is more concerned about the possibility she might forget how to speak English than how much progress I make in learning Swedish (and I also suspect she enjoys having her own language and being able to talk without me being able to understand.) So I’m only speaking English at home too.

However while I’m in process of deflecting blame and absolving myself of any responsibility for my poor linguistic skills, I would also like to point an accusing finger at SFI.

SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) is the government-funded program designed to, as the name suggests, provide free Swedish lessons to immigrants. Two evenings a week, for close to a year now, I’ve been going to such classes. Having paid good money for a beginner’s course in Melbourne I was pretty rapt when I learnt that my visa entitled me to learn here for free. But unfortunately, like a lot of initiatives from the Swedish welfare state, the ideal doesn’t match up to the reality and SFI has a pretty poor reputation.

The most common complaint I hear is the quality of the teachers. The few people I have meet who have been happy with their SFI education are adamant that it came down to having a good teacher. But such people are in the minority. One of my work colleagues has a teacher so bad that currently the whole class are officially boycotting classes until she is replaced. According to my colleague lessons don’t get any more taxing then passing a ball around the room and saying “Hello, My name is …” in Swedish when the ball lands in your lap.

I’m pleased to say my teacher isn’t quite as apathetic but she’s no Mr Chips either. She’ll typically turn up 20-30 minutes late. Half way through our 2 hour lesson she’ll stop for a 30 minute coffee break, and it is not unusual for her to let us all go early either. And that’s when she turns up. Often she’ll let us into the computer room and let us play around with Swedish educational computer programmes. Although I don’t complain too much when this happens because I often end up learning more then I would if our teacher ran her usual lesson.

As far as I can tell there is no standardised curriculum or class plan. Teachers are given textbooks and learning aides but beyond that it seems they’re free to run the class anyway they like, hence the inconsistency in standards between classes. My teacher chooses to move through things at a comically slow pace, and through class exercises that are as helpful and stimulating as dot-to-dot puzzles are to an aspiring artist.

One of her favourite tasks involves handing out cards with pictures of various fruit and vegetables, and corresponding cards with their names in Swedish. We then take it in turns, in pairs, to match the words with the pictures. It isn’t until everyone in the class has done it 50 times over that our teacher is convinced we understand and we’re ready to move onto something else. We can spend weeks working on things that I’ve managed to pick up within the first half hour.

The last class I attended we went though adjectives. Basically an adjective can be slightly different depending on the category of word it is being applied to, and whether it is singular or plural. When we first covered this in a class last month, I had it down pat by the end of the lesson. Not because I’m a fast learner (quite the opposite when it comes to languages) but because it just isn’t that hard. A month later we’re still on adjectives, and I’m getting a good idea how Bill Murray felt in Groundhog Day.

Another problem with SFI, which I’m sure adds to teachers’ apathy, are the large class sizes and lack of resources. Due to a large influx of immigrants there is a long waiting list to enrol, and the SFI schools obviously can’t cope. At the start of every semester my class will typically have 30-40 students. After three or four weeks this will drop down to 20, but then it won’t be long before another 20 students from the waiting list are rushed in.

The running joke amongst expats is that you can pass SFI without learning a single word of Swedish. A lot of people I know say they’ve passed two levels of SFI when on every occasion they’ve had a test they’ve been convinced they had failed. Because of the high demand, it’s suspected that students are passed just to churn them out and ease the workload.

So there you are Mick, an educated cosmopolitan population combined with an under funded education program, and I’m left speaking Swedish at the level of a 2 year-old.

Maybe I should take a leaf out of the Steve McLaren School of learning languages. For those not in the know, Steve McClaren is an English football manager who recently accepted a job coaching FC Twente in Holland. Below is a video of him being interviewed by a Dutch journalist. Despite the fact she speaks excellent English, McClaren does his best to pass himself off as a native Dutchman. Obviously he can’t speak Dutch, so he does the next best thing…

…He speaks English with a Dutch accent. I like the way he needs to pause and think before he says long words or add in phrases like ‘it is like…how you say...” thus adding further to the impression that English is his second language. Swedish people often make such pauses, but it’s because they’re thinking of the Swedish word in their mind and need a moment to search through their English vocabulary to find its equivalent. Seeing as McClaren is speaking his native tongue, it makes you wonder what’s going through his mind when he stops and pauses.

To be fair I do have a friend who, when stuck for a Swedish work, will resort to using the English word but in a Swenglish accent. But he can often get away with it because Swedish people do in fact talk this way: add in an English phrase in Swenglish midsentence while talking Swedish. Although even he wouldn’t try and do it for a whole conversation!

My Castle

2008-09-06T18:09:00.002+01:00

My apologies for another long absence between blog entries. This time my excuse is that I’ve been moving flats. However I’m settled now and back to the blog with a load of material on the Swedish housing market.

Like a lot of things in Sweden, finding a place to rent isn’t easy. In part this is because of a shortage of housing that seems to be affecting a lot of places. But it is also compounded by the Swedish fixation on rules and regulations, and closer analysis of the situation once again reveals sticky fingerprints from the meddling hands of the Social Democrats.

In our last flat we were living on what is called a second-hand lease, aka we were renting off someone who in turn was renting off the original owners. This is quite common in Sweden. In fact getting hold of a first hand lease where you’re renting directly off the owners, is exceptionally difficult and often involves being on a waiting list for years. Second-hand leases are significantly easier to obtain, but by no means easy. Demand is so high that if you place an ad for a vacant flat you’ll get half of Gothenburg banging on your door. It is generally accepted in Sweden that if you want to find a place to live, you need contacts. Don’t bother with advertisements or agencies, just tell all your friends to tell their friends and hopefully someone will get back to you. This is basically how we found our new flat.

Because first-hand leases are so sought after when one manages to finally get one they loath to give it up even if they have no real desire to ever live there again. This is exactly the situation A and me found ourselves in with our flat. Our landlady rented it out because she no longer wanted to live there. But we did. We were quite happy there and would have been happy to continue living there. However the rules governing second leases means that after 18 months our landlady had to either move back into her flat or give up her first hand contract. Thus we were forced to leave while she’ll move into a flat she doesn’t want to live in. All this just to keep a first hand contract!
This is quite common. Anyone in Sweden can retell similar stories and just about everyone I know who rents second-hand is renting off someone who has no intention or desire to live there in the foreseeable future but refuses to give up their contract.
We’ve heard from our neighbours that our landlady was hardly ever home when she rented it, and the flat next to us is also empty. Meanwhile Gothenburg is in the midst of a housing shortage.

It’s a bizarre and crazy situation and I’ve spent the last month asking every Swede I know why this is. After all a first hand contract is basically the only way people rent property in the rest of the world and holding one is no big achievement. They’re better than second hand contracts as it gives you more long-term stability. Second-hand contract by contrast means you’ll have to move in 6-12 months. But otherwise there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about first hand contracts other than their rarity thus starting a vicious circle. No one wants to give them up about their hard to obtain, so they become hard to obtain because no one is willing to give theirs up. This seems to be the common explanation from expats but there has to be more to it than that.

A big feature of the Swedish housing market is the strict government control over rents instead of a free market allowing you to charge whatever you want. There are rules that dictate exactly what you can charge governed mainly by the properties size and attributes. If you’re renting second hand you cannot charge more then what you’re paying unless the flat is furnished in which case you add no more than 10%. Location isn’t a big factor so a 2 bedroom flat will cost the same regardless of its location in the city. If it’s an inner city or in an outer suburb, assuming their of similar size and standard they’ll be the same rent. For Melbournians it would be like renting a flat right by the Yarra River in Southbank for the same price as a flat in the most decrepit industrial areas of North Sunshine. Or for Sydneysiders, renting a house in Kirribilli for the same as a house in Redfern.

This ensures rents stay low and affordable, and thus landlords cannot exploit the housing shortage by charging extortionate rents such as they’re currently doing in Sydney and Melbourne. Consequently investing in property isn’t the money-spinner it is in other countries and far fewer rental properties are owned by private individuals. Furthermore there are plenty of rules that restrict what you can deal with a property once you buy it. I’m lead to believe that when you buy a flat in Sweden you’re not really buying a flat (and this is one of those situations that starts to verge into Communism) but you’re buying the right to live there indefinitely rent-free. But the flat is still owned by the co-op that own the whole building thus you’re still subject to their rules and restrictions.

Most apartment blocks are owned by government agencies or private corporations. The upside of all these rules is that rents stay relatively low. The downside is that the rental market is a lot smaller and finding a rental property becomes a lot harder. From what I gather it has become more difficult in recent years because currently many of these agencies are encouraging tenants to buy their properties outright. If you already own the first hand contract than you can buy it at a discounted rate, sometimes up to 30% cheaper. One theory I’ve heard is that people are hanging onto their leases in the hope that they’ll be offered the chance to buy it at a bargain basement price thus allowing them to immediately resell it on the free market and pocket the difference.

The idea behind equality in rents regardless of location is to prevent rich-poor divides developing in Swedish cities, as no one will be priced out of a certain area. While there is definitely still some sort of economic divide (plenty of landlords and housing agencies factor in an applicant’s income when choosing tenants) to some extent it has worked as most Swedish cities seem to lack obscenely wealthy suburbs and desperately poor ghettos. However as few people find rental properties the traditional way and instead you rely on contacts, newly arrived migrants are significantly disadvantages and this has caused large ethnic ghettos to emerge in the outer suburbs. As migrants typically don’t have a large network of contacts to rely on, they’re often forced to take the first property offered to them, which is most likely to be in the one of the less desirable locations.

For all it’s ideals and good intentions the Social Democratic housing policy for rental properties has contributed to making Sweden an exceptional racially segregated city which I can envisage as being a major social problem in the coming years. But this is a whole other topic and one for a whole new blog entry. (Possibly one I’ll have written by next week).

However looking around me in my new flat I can’t really complain too much. Right now I live in a newly renovated flat, fully furnished with all the modern conveniences such as dishwasher and central heating, in a very central location (only four tram stops to the centre of town.) Despite my struggle to find a secure or fulfilling job, I cannot complain about my living standards, which are quite possibly the highest I've had since moving out of home. If I were to move back to Melbourne today a flat of this standard and location would be right out of my price range and I cannot envisage myself living like this in Australia for at least a good number of years. But thanks to the Social Democrats even a student and a minimum wage earner can afford to live like inner city yuppies.

See…I’m not the only one who thinks there’s something stifling about this place.

2008-09-06T18:04:00.001+01:00

Following on from my most recent blog entries I was surprised to find an article in the Guardian Weekly a couple of weeks ago essentially making a similar point about the Nordic welfare states (albeit far more articulately). You can read the article here.

Meet the Myrdals

2008-07-18T17:21:00.003+01:00

With temporary unemployment and very disappointing summer weather I suddenly have time on my hands and not much to do with it so I’ve started educating myself a bit more on Swedish history. Now I’d like to share some of this knowledge and introduce you to Gunnar and Alva Myrdal: arguably the mother and father of the modern Swedish welfare state. Their published work and ideas have been hugely influential in Swedish policy making from the 1930s onwards. As well as being distinguished academics in their own fields both have also served as Government ministers for the Social Democrats. The repercussions of their ideas can be seen everywhere in Sweden today.

Gunnar Myrdal was an economist and a prominent member of the Stockholm school. This body of economists and academics anticipated many of the ideas later developed by John Maynard Keyes. He served as a Minister from 1933 until 1947. Alva was also a writer, academic and later a diplomat and peace activist. Both are also Nobel Prize winners. Gunnar won his in economics in 1974 (although he later argued that the prize should be abolished after it was also awarded to right-wing reactionary economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) while Alva won the Nobel Peace prize in 1982 for her work in campaigning for disarmament.

Gunnar Myrdal is best known outside of Sweden for his study into race relations in America, ‘An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy’. Published in 1944 Myrdal basically argued that while America held noble ideals about equality and liberty they had failed to enact such ideals in practice particularly in regards to its African-American population. The study was cited in the Brown vs. the Board of Education court case and is generally considered quite influential in subsequent race relations policies made thereafter. Gunnar Myrdal also wanted to undertake a similar study into gender inequality but could never get the funding.

In Sweden the Myrdals are better known for ‘Kris I befolkningsfrågan’ (Crisis in the Population Question) which they co-wrote in 1934. The premise of the book was to find ways of promoting universal living standards in Sweden while at the same time also preserving individual freedoms. This became the basis for Sweden’s third way: a compromise between socialism and capitalism that achieved the security and equality of the former while preserving the freedom of the latter. The goal was to create a society where everyone had equal access to health care, education, housing, employment and overall a comfortable lifestyle.

The Myrdals cannot be credited with creating the Swedish welfare state as the concept of Folkhem (Swedish for Peoples’ Home) had been advocated by the Social Democrats since the 1920s. However their ideas were important in the implementation of Folkhem in practice. They advocated a number of sweeping social reforms that transformed Sweden for the better and whose legacy can still be seen in Swedish society today.

However less commonly known about the Myrdals’ work was their promotion of eugenics and forced sterilisation. A key part of ‘Kris I befolkningsfrågan’ was addressing declining birth rates and encouraging child bearing. But the Myrdals also stressed that it was vital to the security of the Folkhem that children grew up in stable and relatively wealthy environments otherwise they were at risk of becoming a future burden on the state. Some inherent characteristics needed to be breed out of the population for the good of Folkhem and ‘unviable’ individuals needed to be prevented from reproducing and spreading such traits. Rather then seeing such characteristics as products of the environment of that individual, they were seen as inherent in that individual and therefore likely to be passed onto their offspring. If someone is an alcoholic or a criminal it is because they are inherently an alcoholic or criminal and so will their children. Basically the Myrdals argued that such individuals should be denied the right to raise children as they would inevitably be unproductive for society and just feed off the welfare state. Alva Myrdal herself argued that around 10% of the population are unfit to breed and should be forcibly sterilised.
Like the concept of Folkhem, forced sterilisation in Sweden predates the Myrdals. Compulsory sterilisation of the disabled and handicapped was first enacted in 1922. As one prominent politician said “The Folkhem…would be built up and populated by healthy and happy people, and in the same way you removed weeds from your own garden, you could remove weeds in the Folkhem before they grew up.”
However once again it was the Myrdals who expanded on these ideas and pushed them further. In 1941 forced sterilisation was expanded from the disabled to anyone deemed to have an asocial style of living. The guidelines were so broad and vague that in theory anyone could be forcibly sterilised if the appropriate authority deemed them abnormal. Forced sterilisation remained in Sweden until 1975.

As I said this aspect of the Myrdals work is rarely mentioned, probably because it grates badly against everything else that they advocated. But it certainly sheds some light on my perceived conformity of Swedish citizens. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the average Swede is too scared to break the mould of what is considered normal on the off chance that they might get their genitals snipped off like some sort of domesticated pet. Its more that government policy post-WW2 was obviously implemented with very distinct ideas of how one should live and behave. The ‘cradle-to-grave’ (or erection-to-resurrection) welfare state and the large degree of influence the government inevitably has on people’s lives, has possibly moulded individuals to act a certain way. Government housing for example, looks like it’s all come straight off a convey belt. Forced sterilisation is the most extreme example. Anyway, just a thought.

On another interesting (although possibly irrelevant) note is that Gunnar and Alva’s son Jan Myrdal grew up to become the Noam Chomsky of Sweden. These days he is a prominent far left writer and activist whose hatred of western liberal democracy has lead him to become an apologist for some dodgy people. In his younger days he stuck up for the regimes of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot, and even defended the Chinese government over the Tiananmen Square massacre. Like many old lefties who still cannot accept the communist lost the Cold War he has found solace in making a living from defending racist misogynist homophobic Islamic fundamentalists who happen to share his hatred of the west. Interestingly enough like his parents Jan also seems to have some glaringly obvious contradictions in his politics as he is also fervently opposed same sex marriages. You can read an interview with him here. Just like Chomsky he seems incapable of delivering a clear short answer to a question.

Note: I’m afraid my Swedish still isn’t good enough to read adult non-fiction so much of my information comes from the limited amount of material available in English. If I’ve made any mistakes, misunderstood something, missed anything important, or you have any criticism or feedback then I encourage you to get in touch. I’m happy to admit when I’m wrong.

Denmark: Bizarro Sweden.

2008-07-07T12:13:00.004+01:00

I’ve just spent the past week in the north of Denmark. Some friends of mine rented a house right on the coast near a town called Løkken.

I didn’t really expect Denmark to be much different from Sweden at all. It is only a two-hour ferry trip from Gothenburg. At its closest point Denmark is only a 15-minute ferry trip from Helsingborg and Copenhagen is only a 20-minute drive from Malmö. In theory Danish and Swedish are similar enough to one another that Danes and Swedes can still understand each other. Not surprisingly few Swedes consider a trip to Denmark as going abroad.

For me being in Denmark was a little like being in Sweden in some sort of parallel universe. Everything was similar but subtly different, hence a bizarro Sweden. (Bizarro world is a term from Superman comics that was later made popular by Seinfeld. It basically describes a world where everything is reversed and/or inverted from the norm. For example in Seinfeld Elaine enters a bizarro world when she meets a new group of friends each of which resemble her original friends in some way but have completely opposite characteristics.)
The money is still called kronor and it is issued in the same dominions as Swedish kronor but the notes are different colours and the coins different sizes. The flag is also basically the same but with a different colour scheme. Written Danish looks very similar and even with my limited knowledge of Swedish I was able to understand many words. Most the words are basically the same with the odd letter or two changed. They also have a slightly different alphabet. Instead of letters like Ä and Ö the Danes have letters like Ø and Æ. Words are also pronounced differently so that they sound familiar yet still noticeably different.

In some aspects Denmark was very different. The landscape in the north of the country where we were staying was completely different. The whole west coast of Sweden is basically large mounds of solid rock leading to still lifeless sea, with plenty of forests inland. Denmark by contrast was completely flat and relatively barren. The west coast consisted of a long sand beach with white sand and decent surf. It was the first actually beach I’ve seen since leaving Australia. In all it reminded me of the Shetland Islands and the less spectacular parts of the Great Ocean Road (the part between Anglesea and Apollo Bay).

Architecture was also noticeably different. Rural Swedish homes are typically large wooden houses painted in bright colours. In Denmark most buildings were small and made of brick. We spent a day in Aalborg and it reminded me more of Germany than Scandinavia.

Denmark also seems to be one of the few European countries that allows smoking in pubs and restaurants. Having spent the past year in a country where smokers are forced out into the cold and onto the street, it was a little disconcerting to be in a restaurant where everyone was lighting up straight after their meals.
But the biggest cultural shock was being able to buy beer, wine and aspirin from a supermarket on a Sunday afternoon, as opposed to buying them from a state owned shop during business hours.

A Cause Without Rebels.

2008-06-19T21:42:00.002+01:00

The above photo is of a schoolyard in Stockholm I came across recently. If you can’t make it out, the message painted on the roof says “They Said ‘Sit Down’ I Stood Up”. I took the photo because this is the strongest articulation I’ve seen yet of the Swedish philosophy on education. True to its image Sweden has a lot of modern and progressive ideas about raising children. Kids are typically given a lot more freedom and independence compared to other countries while schools encourage students to question everything around them. When I was relief teaching at the international school, teachers often complained that the Swedish kids were more difficult than the international ones basically because they were far more assertive and less willing to submit to the teacher’s authority. Just think of Sweden’s most famous child: Pippi Longstocking. Completely independent, confident, assertive, irreverent, brash, insubordinate: she’s the archetypical Svenska Barn.

The bizarre thing is that despite being raised on such ideals Sweden is a remarkably law-abiding and subservient place. Far from creating a population of Bart Simpsons, it has actually resulted in a nation of Ned Flanders (but without the religious fundamentalism). The running joke amongst expats is that Swedes won’t even disobey traffic lights, even on a long road with no car in sight for miles in either direction. Supermarkets have introduced a scheme whereby you can scan your own purchases with a handhold scanner, and just swipe your credit card as you leave, thus having no need to queue at a cashier. Now this strikes me as in invitation for trouble. Imagine the possibilities such as only scanning every second or third item, or scanning the cheap generic brand while actually taking the expensive brand. For all I know this is a problem but that fact that the scheme is still up and running, and customers still aren’t scrutinised suggests to me that the majority of people are doing the right thing.

People’s lifestyles are also remarkable conformist. So many apartments and houses look alike, furnished with the same Ikea furniture. Everyone buys their cloths at the same shops, has the same activities, and go to the same places at the same time. Everyone eats the same thing. During the Xmas/New Year period I had three different Xmas dinners, each of which included exactly the same dishes. I recently saw a jumper advertised in the H&M catalogue and was thinking of buying it. In the week between the catalogue being delivered and actually buying the jumper I noticed half of Gothenburg was suddenly wearing the same jumper.

So now I’m thinking maybe there is some form collective reverse psychology going on. You encourage kids to rebel and so they do the opposite: they completely conform. You tell them to disobey, they obey.
Or maybe it’s simply a case that rebellion loses its appeal once it becomes legitimate. You tell kids they can disobey, that they don’t have to take orders, and suddenly there is no longer a point to being disobedient. One can stand when they’ve been told to sit but if no one is going to make an issue of it than one might as well be sitting and resting their feet.
And I suppose refusing to rebel when you’ve told to rebel is still a form of rebellion.

Articles on Sweden

2008-05-28T22:29:00.002+01:00

My apologies for not updating this blog for a while. Of late I've been flat out working as a phone monkey for that medical marketing research firm, interviewing Doctors in three different continents. Hopefully soon I’ll get a chance to start blogging regularly again but in the meantime I thought I might post a few links to some interesting articles that I've come across recently.

Language

This article was published in the Guardian Weekly last week and is basically about concerns that English is overtaking native languages in Scandinavia. Most of it is about Norway but I can conform that it all applies to Sweden too. In fact not only is English the language of business and academia, it also seems to be the language of graffiti, football hooligans, gangs, billboards and advertisements. It's also considered pretty hip and trendy to slip in English phrases and expressions into daily speech.

Politics

In this article Guardian colonist (and Swedephile) Polly Toynbee writes about recent Swedish politics while making parallels with developments in British politics. Due to its massive welfare state, gender equality and neutrality (often wrongly equated with pacifism) Sweden has been held up as a utopian model by lefties and liberals the world over and Toynbee seems to be a prime example. It is a view that can often grate with some Swedes who see it as an overly romantic view of their country that ignores many of their problems. The common rebuttal to the Toynbees of the world is that their naive and not fully aware of what Sweden is actually like. While this piece is written by an expat it gives you a general idea of the sort of gripes some Swedes have and the debates that take place. (Note: as this piece is published in a blog you might need to scroll down the page to find it. It's titled 'Polly Toynbee gets her Swedish Facts Wrong'.)
I've engaged in many debates just like it. Admittedly less frequently over time as the longer I stay here the further I move from Toynbee's romanticism, but I still maintain that Sweden's problems are minor compared to those of many of other countries such as Britain or America. I can understand why someone from either would see Sweden as a utopia in comparison.

And Finally...

An interesting article about the Swedish Australian Football team, who will be travelling to Melbourne this August to play in the International Cup. Regular readers of this blog may recognise the writing style...

Observations of the Swedish Language

2008-04-05T16:11:00.005+01:00

Generally speaking if a Swedish word looks like an English word, it often means the same thing even if it is pronounced differently. However notable exceptions are “slut” which means close/shut, “bra” which means good, “fart” means speed, “fack” means pigeonhole, and a “Facket” is a trade union.
The Swedish word for marriage, “gift”, also means poison, which seems appropriate in a country with one of the highest rates of divorce.

Some other Swedish terms are pretty funny when translated into English word for word. For example vegetables are called “Grönsaker” which literally translates as “Green things”. “Svartsjuk” translates as “black sick” which means jealousy. “Svartfisk” means “black-fish”, which is squid. “Ögonblick” literally translates “eye-blink” and means “moment”. (Eg. “Vänta en ögonblick” – “Wait one moment.”) And finally my favourite is the Swedish word for bat, “fladdermus” which translates as “flapping mouse”.

Some other amusing expressions include “Nej men hej” which is something you say when you unexpectedly bump into someone you know. Its literal translation is “No but hi.”

“Vad Sjutton” is a type of old-fashioned cursing. Translated into English it means “What Seventeen.” Why seventeen, I don't know, but don’t say “What sixteen” because you’ll just look stupid. A variation on this term is “Sjutton också!” which means “seventeen also”.

“Gott Mos” means “good mash” (as in mash potato) and can be used as an all-purpose compliment. If it strikes you as a little bizarre imagine what “cool bananas” sounds like to a Swede.

“Lagom” is a Swedish word which basically means “not too little, not too much, just right”. Despite being a highly subjective term I have been told if you’re in a deli or butcher it is possible to order a “lagom” amount and shopkeeper will know exactly how much to give you.

Mind you there are plenty of English terms and expressions that don’t make much sense to Swedes. When the Aussie Rules football team got together late last year to watch an AFL match, many of the Swedes in the room were befuddled when they heard the commentators says “He kicks the ball across the face of goal”. (“But a face is what’s in front of your head. How does a goal have a face?”) It is also difficult trying to explain how the act of being inside a closet, or coming out of a closet, relate to being gay.

UPDATE: Regular reader Fillipa (native Gothenburger now living in Coburg) has been kind enough to bring another odd Swedish expression to my attention.
"Jag kände inte igen dig" which means "I didn't recognise you" but in its literally tranlsation comes across as: "I didn't feel again you."

Another term that I've discovered since this blog entry was first posted is the term "extrapris" which obviously translates as "extra price" but not so obviously is applied to things that are on sale.

How Binge Drinkers the World Over Have Funding the Swedish State.

2008-04-02T10:26:00.000+01:00

An interesting fact I learnt this week: Until very recently the brand Absolut Vodka was actually owned by the Swedish state. After Bacardi and Smirnoff, Absolut is the highest selling brand of alcoholic spirit in the world. Unlike Ikea furniture it is still made here in Sweden.

Absolut is owned by a company called Vin & Spirit, who were originally set up by the government in 1917. Until 1994 they had a national monopoly over all production and distribution of alcohol in Sweden. This had to be relaxed before Sweden could join the EU in 1995, however the government maintained ownership. While western governments the world over were quick to sell-off everything they owned in the 1980s and 90s, Sweden was largely protected from privatisation from successive left-of-centre governments. However since 2006, Sweden are currently going through one of those rare phases in their history where they’re run by conservatives. (Although right-wing by Swedish standards is still left of Kevin Rudd.) One of their election promises was a plan to catch up with the rest of Europe and privatise a number of state-owned enterprises including V&S.

This week V&S were sold to French company Pernod Ricard. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they decide Swedish taxes are too high and relocate production to Estonia. Yet it is still surprising to hear of a state enterprise like this lasting until 2008. In fact despite recent sell-offs the Swedish state still own a lot of things. They own Apoteket (chemists), SJ (national railways), Vasakronan (real estate), Vattenfall (energy), Teracom (television and radio) and of course Systembolaget (bottle shops). Apoteket and Systembolaget have monopolies over their respective industries. The Swedish government also part owners of Nordea (a bank), SAS (airline) and Telia (telecommunications).

Definitive Proof that Global Warming is Real.

2008-03-27T10:21:00.009+01:00

It has been a crazy week on the west coast of Sweden. After a whole winter with barely any snow it has suddenly poured down for over a week. Below is a selection of photos taken in the last few days. The first one is a lake only 20 minutes walk from where I live.This is a table and BBQ just outside my flat, which gives you an idea how thick the snow was. (Yeah yeah, I'm sure you've seen thicker snow but I haven't alright!)
The next two were taken in my neighborhood.

This is right outside my flat.
A park in the city centre.

My Life As A Swede’s 1st Birthday.

2008-03-21T19:05:00.004+01:00

As of today I have been living in Sweden for exactly one year. I’ve been a bit slack at updating this blog of late but I’m still persisting with it and as I look back on the past 12 months I am proud of my achievements.

I’ve managed 50 posts (nearly 40 of which consist of me paraphrasing articles from thelocal.se). I’ve had close to 2000 hits. According to the cluster map on the blog I’ve had visitors from every continent on the planet. My blog has been read in countries such as Peru, Benin and what I think might be Mauritius (or someone with wireless internet connection stuck in the middle of the Indian Ocean). I’ve recorded many hits from America yet barely any from Canada indicating north of the border they're far more discerning about what they read on the Internet. I’ve even recorded hits in China meaning my blog has sneaked past the watchful eyes of the Chinese state censors (Free Tibet!)…until now. As I look towards the next 12 months I can only expect my hit count to increase further, especially now that I've insert the words “Porn”, “Free”, and “Download” into one of my blog posts.

Looking back it has been quite a year. The experience has really opened up my eyes and I’ve learnt many things. I’ve learnt that fish tastes much nicer when its been cooked. I’ve learnt that there are people outside of Australia who listen to John Farnham. I now know how to spend 8 hours sweeping the same floor. I know that you only bother going to Denmark if you want to buy cheap booze. I’ve discovered that sticking tobacco under my lip makes me dizzy. I’ve learnt there is still a country in this world that shows episodes of “Cops” and “Married With Children” during prime time, AND that there is a television station showing more episodes of “The Simpsons” than Channel 10. I’ve discovered that despite five years at university and a degree in Journalism I still struggle the basic principles of English grammar such as differentiating between “its” and it’s”, “then” and “than”, etc. I’ve learnt you should always check your pockets before washing your clothes. Finally I've learnt that slacking-off isn't a pass time, it's a life style. Yep, it has been a real journey of self-discovery and when I return to Australia it will be as a much wiser person.

A Walk In Delsjön

2008-03-21T18:22:00.010+01:00

Some photos from a lake not far from where I live.

Nystrom’s Sweden: “A Cold Piece of Shit Country”.

2008-02-28T17:25:00.002+01:00

Stefan Nystrom and I are both Australian expatriates currently living in Sweden. We both arrived here in early 2007 and still live here today. The difference is that I moved here by choice whereas Stefan was forced here as punishment for rape.
Stefan was born in Sweden while his mother was here on holidays visiting family but went back to Australia 27 days after giving birth. He has lived in Australia ever since albeit without Australian citizenship, just permanent residency. By the time he turned 32 he had been convicted of 127 charges including one charge of aggravated rape. In 2006 the ever-compassionate Amanda Vanstone decided to revoke Stefan’s residency on the grounds of him being a person of ‘poor character’ and thus deport him back to his country of birth.
Stefan Nystrom soon found himself stranded at Stockholm Airport with no job, no family, no friends, no accommodation, no Swedish and no clue to what he should do next. A year later and it seems Nystrom’s no closer to integrating into Swedish society. Recently Nystrom labelled Sweden as a “…Hitler society…” and described it as a “…cold, piece of shit country”.

Having also arrived here not knowing the language and having also faced many obstacles and frustrations, I can sympathise with Stefan Nystrom to the extent one can sympathise with a convicted rapist. Living here has been a very educational experience and at times very rewarding. But moving to a new country is never easy when you don’t speak the language or understand the culture, and even the simplest tasks become major missions. It would be worse still if you made the move involuntarily.

Having said that, it’s important to keep in mind that in Sweden Stefan Nystrom is a free man. If he were allowed to remain in Australia, I’d assume he’d be expected to serve out a prison sentence. In this sense forced exile in Sweden is a pretty good deal considering as he had been convicted of 127 charges. Many criminals attempt to flee the country to avoid prison anyway, so if I were in his shoes I wouldn’t be making too much fuss.

Yet this week Stefan joined the already long queue outside Kevin Rudd’s office that has formed since he won the last election, hoping for a change of policy. So fed up has he become with Swedish society he’s ready to do time in prison. I never thought Sweden was that bad!

A Guide to Swedish Cuisine.

2008-02-08T18:22:00.000+01:00

Last week I finally found a supermarket in Sweden that sold hummus. It was an exciting day, and the fact that I got so excited got me thinking about Swedish cuisine and the depths it has reduced me too.

I view Swedish food the same way I view Swedish design: Unusual, sometimes outright ugly, but always simple and practical. It fulfils its purpose. Nothing is wasted on superfluous needs like taste, aesthetics or any other requirement other then the basic need to keep one alive and relatively healthy.

The typical Swedish sandwich is a good example. This will often consist of a piece of bread, a slice of cheese (no margarine) topped with a piece of capsicum or slice of ham. That’s all. Two, absolute maximum three toppings and that’s your sandwich. Anything else is just being overly lavish. Of course there are some flash fancy cafes can offer something a little more ambitious but judging from the lunchboxes in my various work places, two toppings is the norm. Other popular dishes include pasta (just plain pasta, sometimes served with meatballs but no sauce), potatoes (again just plain boiled potatoes, sometimes with dill) and crisp bread.

In part this functionalism stems from Sweden’s impoverished past when trying to stay alive and survive the winter was more important than using the right spices. People weren’t fussy, and happy to eat any vegetable they could manage to grow in the harsh Nordic climate. Any meat or fish they could get their hands on was either salted or pickled to last as long as possible. Thus Swedish cuisine was designed to provide basic nutrients with little thought given to flavour or variety.
We’re long past those times now, but Swedes like to stick by their traditions. Today at anytime of the year they can buy fresh fish, but they keep eating pickled herring. They are offered a huge array of different vegetables but they stick to potatoes and turnips. The one addition the modern Swede has allowed into their kitchen is tomato ketchup. They add it to everything and anything: pasta, rice, eggs, whatever. People pour it over their meals like I pour milk over my muesli.

For all theses reasons or more, even in the most cosmopolitan and multicultural cities in the world, you’re unlikely to ever come across a Swedish restaurant. Not even in Sweden! Yet ironically the only Swedish word that has managed to force itself into the Swedish dictionary is one that specifically relates to food: smorgasbord.

However there is one important exception to these principles of culinary functionalism: the Smörgåstårta (pictured left). In my view this one dish surpasses Ikea and Henrik Larsson as the best thing Sweden has ever produced. In English this translates as Sandwich-Cake and that’s pretty much what it is: a massive sandwich the size of a cake. Four layers of bread, each stuffed with creamy filling, and then topped with any number of different garnishes. Unfortunately they involve a lot of work to prepare and too expensive to eat regularly. Generally they are saved for special occasions. Smörgåstårtas are so popular that a Swedish policeman recently got into trouble for extorting smörgåstårtas as bribes. That should give you some idea of what people will do for a tasty meal here.

Badlands

2008-01-22T20:27:00.000+01:00

I think I’ve already commented on the irony of Sweden producing so many renowned crime writers when Swedish society has such low crime. But today Gothenburg witnessed an event that could not only have come straight from a Martin Beck novel, but wouldn’t be out of place in the next Die Hard film.

Last night at around 1am masked men with rifles raided the main Post Office building. As they fled the scene they set alight to nearby cars, and scattered the road with metal spikes designed to puncture car tyres. They also left a series of suspected bombs (see picture below) around the post office and nearby police station. As far as I know it has yet to be confirmed whether these packages really were bombs. I do admire the robbers’ consideration by not only labelling their bombs accordingly, but also labelling them in English so even a migrant like myself would understand. I also admire the audacity and planning put into such a heist. But than again I also wonder why they wasted such a scheme on robbing a post office rather than say…a bank.

On discovery of these ‘bombs’ the local streets were cordoned off and evacuated. The bomb disposal experts were called in, but like most Swedish workers they were in no hurry and didn’t get there until 7am. No doubt they stopped for a coffee break at 7.30am. By 9.15am I was making my way to work and my tram was diverted so as not to pass the Post Office. One of my work colleagues who lived closer to the bomb scene wasn’t allowed to leave her flat until 12.30.

I’ve been trying to follow what coverage I can in the local media with my limited Swedish, as there is still a lot I don’t know. I’ve tried looking for articles in the international media but I haven’t found a single mention. In fact if you google the words ‘Gothenburg’ and ‘bomb’ you’re far more likely to get articles like this: articles about a suspected bomb found in a skip in Gothenburg last week which ended up being a vibrating dildo. This really says a lot for the standards of world journalism.

Still, twice in one week streets in Gothenburg have been cordoned off and bomb disposal experts called in. With the exception of maybe Baghdad there can’t be too many cities in the world that can claim a statistic like that.

UPDATE: It probably comes as no surprise that the "bombs" really were just suitcases with the word "bomb" painted on the side. It has also since been confirmed that nothing of significant value was pinched from the post office during the burglary.

Swedish Xmas

2007-12-25T14:36:00.000+01:00

Updating my blog isn’t something I would ordinarily expect to do on Christmas Day, but such is the strangeness of Christmas in Sweden that I’ve ended up doing a few things I wouldn’t normally do, and eating raw herring is just the start of it.

The first odd thing about Christmas in Sweden is that it takes place on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. The food, the presents, all the festivities are on Christmas Eve, meanwhile on Christmas Day nobody does anything except maybe go to a church service, or in my case write a blog entry. This of course begs the question: What is the point in having a Christmas Day when the actually festivities take place the night before?
I have since learnt that this practice derives from an earlier time when Sweden was far more religious and conservative place. As a religious holiday, it was forbidden to do anything remotely fun and enjoyable. Everything was closed and everyone was expected to attend the local church, thus all festivities had to be confined to the previous night. As time has passed and Sweden has become radically more progressive and educated, Swedes have gotten over this religious guilt complex and suddenly found themselves with a free day. Today Christmas Day has become a day to go out drinking with friends, and quite typically Swedes use this day to drink the only way they know how: to excess.

Another bizarre Christmas tradition in Sweden is watching Disney cartoons. At 3pm every Christmas Eve the local TV station broadcasts old Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. The story behind this oddity is that when television was first set up in Sweden in the 1950s, there was much debate about what it should be used for, and what should be shown to the nation’s youth. Cartoons were considered detrimental and destructive for young minds so Disney was banned. However one exception was made: for one hour every Christmas Eve Disney would be screened and thus a new Christmas tradition was born. Of course the ban on Disney has long been lifted, but the tradition remains, and for older Swedes it is a nostalgic reminder of an age when Mother Sweden protected their innocence.

To counteract this capitalist American propaganda, Disney is always followed by a Swedish made cartoon called ‘Karl Bertil Jonssons julafton’ (pictured below). It’s a short cartoon about a weedy looking kid who spends Christmas Eve stealing presents from the rich, and redistributing them to the poor. Some of Karl’s more bizarre acts of social justice include giving a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre to a homeless alcoholic, and a tie to a prostitute. Karl’s father, a successful sales executive, obviously gets upset when he finds his presents in the hands of whores and drunks and thus makes Karl go round and apologise to all the rich people he stole from. But much to everyone’s surprise all the upper class toffs they meet are actually getting more enjoyment from seeing poor people with their new gifts than they ever would from the gifts themselves. Hence they all pledge to continue to redistribute their wealth to the less well off, and the Swedish welfare state is born. Young children all over Sweden are left thinking “Sure we’re forbidden from watching Mickey Mouse, but isn’t it great to live in a country where we’re taxed 50% of our wages.”

Xmas Pictures

2007-12-23T19:07:00.001+01:00

Xmas in Göteborg

2007-12-18T20:46:00.001+01:00

There is a lot to be said for spending Christmas in Sweden. It’s freezing and it gets dark by 3.30pm but it somehow makes Christmas more enchanting. Hot dinners become far more appetising. The man dressed as Santa Clause at the local shops looks more welcoming because unlike his counterpart in Australia he isn’t sweating like a pig. People are ice-skating and singing songs by candlelight. Real Xmas trees that have been freshly chopped down from a forest are sold outside petrol stations. There is always half a chance you’ll wake up the next morning to find the street full of snow. And finally, the fact that it’s dark for 20 hours of the day means people really make an effort with Xmas lights.
In Göteborg just about every lamppost, tree, bridge, window or any other vertical structure, is decorated with Xmas lights. The power being drained to feed the city’s ornamentation would give Al Gore a fit.

Another Lazy Blog Entry

2007-12-15T13:09:00.000+01:00

I was going to write a blog entry about my new job, but I felt I couldn't quite capture how repetitive, tedious and mundane it is. So instead I'm posting the following clip, which articulates more then I ever could in writing.

At its worst my job really is like this. The only difference is that our interviews are over the phone, and I’m not as enthusiastic as David Brent. Generally I’m just as apathetic as Keith.

Job Number Three

2007-12-02T11:57:00.000+01:00

Eight months in Sweden, and now I’m onto my third job. For the past two weeks I have been working as ‘Data Collector’ for IMS.
Essentially IMS is a company that conducts medical market research on a worldwide scale. Pharmaceutical companies commissioned them to determine the prescriptions habits of doctors in various countries, as a means of better marketing their drugs. As a ‘Data Collector’, I basically sit around on the phone booking and interviewing doctors in English speaking countries. According to the company’s literature, there can be as many 100-200 data collectors working at any one time. Obviously I work in the English department, where there are only 20 of us, but there are dozens of other departments too. Walking through the offices is like going through the UN. Walk past one room where everyone is on the phone speaking Spanish, then in the next everyone is speaking Finnish.

The work can be quite interesting, and even educational. Before each assignment we’re given a run down on the diseases we’re looking into, and its various treatments. I’m also learning a little about how the pharmaceutical industry works; such as the exorbitant amounts of money such companies spend on marketing and promotion, rather then on actually developing medications. But above all it is so nice to work indoors, sleep in after 5am and be free of the physical labour.

Having said that, there are some drawbacks, which could see me back working in construction sooner then I like to admit. For one it is all short-term contract work. I’ve been given work right up until Christmas, but I’ve also been warned that work cannot be guaranteed after that. January is generally very quiet, and things can pick up in February, but it can be as late as April/May.
This not only makes for very little job security, but also creates a very competitive work environment. December is a particularly busy time and there are more workers now then normal. We are all painfully aware that when work does pick up again, not all of us will be called back. Consequently everyone is doing what they can to prove what hard diligent workers they are.

This fact alone should make the place competitive enough, but our boss Clare likes to add petrol to the flames by putting us into direct competition with one another. She keeps statistics of how many phone calls we’ve made, how many bookings we’ve taken, and how many interviews we’ve completed. Thus our work rate has a numerical measurement, which Clare isn’t afraid to make public.
On a weekly basis she’ll go over all these statistics in front of us, offering praise and criticism in front of all our work colleagues. A typically session will begin like this: “Well done Mike! You completed 65 tasks this week. Lets give him a hand everyone! Let’s all try to work as hard as Mike!” This is then followed by “Oh dear Nic, you only completed five tasks this week. I know you’ve only just started but let’s try a little harder next week shall we?” I’ll then be left to wallow in my humiliation, while Mike smugly boasts to Clare that he can work even harder and that next week he reckons he’ll even break his own record.
Throughout these sessions Clare always gives her criticisms in the collective ‘We’ even when it’s clearly being directed at one person. Before she finishes she likes to give a little speech about the importance of teamwork. Despite that fact she has openly ranked and compared us to one another like some sort of competition, and made it clear we’re all competing for limited work, it isn’t in fact a competition. We’re all a team.

It is kind of ironic that I end up working on an AWA-style contract in the same week that my country of origin decides to abolish them.

A New Chapter

2007-11-17T15:13:00.000+01:00

After six months of sweeping floors, demolishing walls, ferrying building materials around sites, and occasionally buildings something, I am finally free of what has possibly been the worst job I’ve ever had. In fact it was the worst job I’ve ever had. But now it’s all over. I have a new job, and so ends my career in construction.

I’d be lying if I said working as a builder’s labourer was in any way a pleasant experience, but it certainly has been an interesting one. I’ve learnt a lot, from how to install doorframes and skirting, to the daily work conditions of unskilled migrant workers in Sweden.

There will be a few things I’ll miss. For one I could be a bit short on content for this blog. Where would I be if I didn’t have stories of rorts, thefts, and Polish workers getting shafted? (I’d probably still be stuck trying to stretch out my worn out gag about wooing Princess Victoria.)
I’ll especially miss witnessing the fine art of bludging being performed with such distinction and fineness. (At my last site, one of the workers would start up the coffee machine five minutes before our break, so the coffee was ready as soon as break time started. After all coffee breaks are for drinking coffee, not making coffee.)
And for what ever damage such work was doing to my mind, it has certainly hasn’t harmed me physically. For five days week for the past six months, I’ve been getting the sort of work out that many people pay good money for at a gym. Another six months and I’ll look like guy pictured on the right. Having said that, I’d be more then happy to reclaim my old puny arms if it means never having to set foot on a construction site again.

As of Monday morning, I’ll be sitting behind a desk in a warm office, drinking a nice cup of tea while I interview doctors over the phone. I’ll be working for a company that conducts research of medical practices amongst doctors the world over. Pharmaceutical companies, looking at the best way to market their products, commission most of their work. My job will be to interview doctors in the English speaking countries. And so begins the next chapter of My Life As A Swede.

Weekend In Stockers

2007-11-15T18:23:00.001+01:00

Here are a few photos from my trip to Stockholm last weekend.

D'oh!

2007-11-09T21:04:00.000+01:00

I’m starting to worry that my job is dumbing me down. That so much mind-numbing manual labour has caused large parts of my brain to completely shut down due to inactivity. Certainly something must be going on, for I cannot find any other reason why I have made so many stupid mistakes over the past six weeks.
It all started when I accidentally put my iPod into the washing machine. I had it in a side pocket of my work trousers, and those things are so small and lightweight. Easy mistake to make, could have happened to anyone. Although you’d think that losing a $300 iPod would be a good lesson in the importance of checking your pockets before washing. Yet two weeks later I managed to put my passport through the wash too.
Losing a passport abroad is a real hassle. To get a replacement I have to travel to the Australian Embassy in Stockholm to be interviewed. I also need to provide my birth certificate, proof of address, and my application needs to be signed by guarantor who can certify my identity. The guarantor must be either an Australian citizen, or from an approved occupation (teacher, police officer, etc). They must have known me for at least 12 months, however they cannot be related to me either through birth, marriage or a de facto relationship. Seeing as I’ve only been here 7 months, the only people who have known me for more then a year are Ankie and her family. Although when I spoke to the Embassy they said they’d let Ankie’s mother be a guarantor if I couldn’t find anyone else.

Luckily I had the foresight to bring my birth certificate with me when I moved here, so the rest of the application was pretty straightforward. I had all my forms filled out, signed by a guarantor, along with all my documents ready to go. I booked my trip to Stockholm and organised a day off work. I was even able to time my trip with the federal election so I could vote at the same time.
Then last Saturday, and this is where I really hit the heights of stupidity, I noticed all my forms and documents were missing. Somehow I managed to lose them. The previous day Ankie had been cleaning the flat, and the obvious guess would be she chucked them out my mistake, but she swears she would have noticed them and wouldn’t have done that. What ever happened to them, they are definitely not in our flat. I’ve spent the whole week tearing the place apart, only ever stopping to punch the wall and scream four letter words starting with ‘F’.

So now I have to start the whole application again, expect this time I have to organise a new birth certificate too. To do this I need to post my drivers licence back home to my mum, as she cannot get a copy without it, and a letter from me giving her authorisation. When that is all organised then I can make another appointment at the embassy and organise another trip to Stockholm. Maybe then I might finally get a new passport.

Seeing as I’ve already booked my train trip and it’s non-refundable, I’m going to Stockholm tomorrow anyway. But now I’m basically going all that way just to make a very lacklustre decision between Kevin Rudd and John Howard. It’s the sort of uninspiring choice a moron like me deserves.

Politics and Scandals

2007-11-03T11:49:00.000+01:00

I’ve tried to keep up with the Australian election. I’ve checked the news daily but to be honest I’m bored. Everyday it’s the same. Rudd says this, Howard says that, Rudd responds by saying something remarkably similar but opposing Howard on some minor trivial point. ALP goes up 3%, then down 2%. Columnist after columnist offers tedious analysis of every word and action, all claiming they were the one that always had faith in Rudd’s ability, even when everyone else doubted him. How does the election coverage drag itself out for six weeks? So much fuss when we already know that a bland conservative politician who wears glasses will win it. So instead I’ve been following Swedish politics in what has been a week of full scandals.

But firstly a quick run down of the political situation in Sweden. The current Prime Minister is Frederick Reinfeldt (pictured right), who was elected last year as part of an alliance of various right-wing conservative parties. Swedish politics has traditionally been dominated by the Social Democrats (hence the large welfare state and strong union movement) and the centre-right parties have only ever received enough votes to form government on four occasions. So Freddie’s election win last year was a pretty big deal as conservative PM’s in Sweden are as rare as Liberal voters in Brunswick.
But from the minute Reinfeldt assumed government, his government has been plagued with scandals. Literally within 24 hours two ministers were already in trouble for hiring nannies under the table, and not paying their TV licence fees. Two weeks later they both resigned. A month later, another minister was exposed for hiring personal staff off the books. Since then there have been regular incidents of ministers misusing government credit cards, avoiding tax, and not fully disclosing their personal shares portfolios.

But the big scandal this week is probably as close as Sweden gets to a sex scandal. It involves one of Prime Minister Frederick Reinfeldt’s personal aides, Ulrica Schenström, who last Friday night went out on the town in Stockholm with a journalist from one of the main TV stations. They had a few glasses of wine and were later seen kissing (pictured left). The photos have since been splashed across the front page of every newspaper.
It’s a bit hard for opposition parties to criticise a single woman for having a few drinks in her free time and kissing someone in public. So instead they’ve made a big deal of the fact that she was supposedly on call in case of a national emergency, and that by being out drinking in a bar she was neglecting her duties.

Much media analysis has been dedicated into determining how much she had drunk, and whether she was drunk or not. She has denied she was drunk and insists she could have still performed her duties if called upon. Reinfeldt has accepted this, and didn’t want to pursue the issue further. However it was later revealed that their bar tab was Kr945 (A$160). It might sound like a lot for only two people, but keep in mind that alcohol is very expensive in Sweden, wine is particularly expensive, and in their circles they were probably drinking at a pretty upmarket bar.

Yet this new piece of information has led to an outcry from the media and opposition parties. Some articles have used words like “wine-fuelled” and “heavy consumption”, and the assumption seems to be that she was drunk rather then simply drinking a very expensive bottle of wine. Both Schenström and Reinfeldt have been hounded all week, until finally she resigned. And if that wasn’t enough, it was also revealed that the journalist in question paid for all the drinks, thus constituting a bribe. She may be facing criminal charges soon. If it wasn’t for the fact she was a right wing, union-bashing neo-liberal scumbag, I’d almost feel sorry for her.

Nor do the scandals don’t end here. Ulrica Schenström’s replacement, Nicola Clase, has already got into trouble. Apparently she hired a carpenter under the table to do renovations on her summer home.

On the whole this week Swedish politics has been providing far more entertainment then either Howard or Rudd. However, having said that, Sweden hasn’t quite provided the same scope of scandals as Australian politics. They’ve never had an ex-PM getting caught wearing nothing but a towel in a seedy bar in Memphis. Nor have they produced a minister like Tony ‘I gave up a son for adoption, now I’ve found him, now I’ve learnt he was never actually my son and my ex-girlfriend liked to sleep around’ Abbot. And unlike Australia, Sweden isn’t about to elect a man who likes to get absolutely hammered and go to strip clubs.

It Could Only Happen In Sweden No.4.

2007-11-03T11:46:00.001+01:00

Following on from my recent blog entry on the Swedish drinking culture, here is another hilarious example of the country’s rigidness when it comes to their alcohol laws. In a perfect illustration of bureaucracy triumphing over common sense, a 77 year-old man was recently asked for ID when buying a slab of low-alcohol beer. Both the cashier and the store manager refused to accept that the elderly pensioner was over 18, unless he could prove it with sufficient identification. Not only that but the local council have backed the store with one councillor stating "They are not supposed to sell alcohol and tobacco products to people under 18 and it's not always that easy to tell."

Proud Day To Be A Gothenburger.

2007-10-29T15:46:00.000+01:00

The city of Gothenburg is celebrating this week, after IFK Göteborg, one of our local football teams, won the Swedish premiership. Last weekend was the last round of matches for the season, and until yesterday three teams still had a chance of winning the cup. However, if IFK could beat opponents, Trelleborg, then they would win the premiership regardless of all the other results. The whole city had been gearing up for this match all last week, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket.

In the end IFK Göteborg won 2-0, in front of a sell out crowd. Once the final whistle went, the whole crowd invaded the pitch, and lit up flares. Within minutes of the match ending, hawkers selling ‘IFK champions 2007’ souvenirs suddenly sprung up. Within an hour, a special edition of the local newspaper had been printed and distributed, complete with photos and match reports. For the rest of the night, people were celebrating in the streets and bars of Gothenburg. Today the team will make an open-bus tour through the city.

Historically IFK are one of the strongest and best-supported clubs in Sweden, however of late they’ve been struggling. While this is their 19th premiership, it’s their first in 11 years. Below is a video I took.

You Booze, You Lose.

2007-10-14T17:57:00.000+01:00

Swedes have an unusual, and often conflicting attitude towards alcohol. One that is both very liberal and very conservative. As anyone who has every seen drunken Swedish backpackers/students/tourists knows, Swedes like to drink and they like to get drunk. Yet in Sweden itself, alcohol is often portrayed as an illicit drug on par with cocaine. Advertisements for wine include health warnings similar to those found on cigarette packets. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, the Swedish media love running fear stories on teenage binge drinking as much as A Current Affair love stories on unemployed youths and Lebanese gangs. There seems be a very sizable and vocal portion of the Swedish population who are convinced the whole country will descent into a bunch of alcoholics if their strict laws on the sale of alcohol are relaxed. This week there was even a protest march against teenage binge drinking.

Of course everything in Sweden is expensive, but alcohol is particularly expensive as the whole market is heavily regulated. Prices are artificially inflated through high taxes, and the government has a monopoly over the industry. Outside of pubs and restaurants the only place where you can buy wine, spirits and full-strength beer is at the Systembolaget: the state-owned chain of bottle shops.
Systembolagets are pretty much like any ordinary bottle shop, except queues are a lot longer, you have to show your passport to the cashier, and when you leave you’re offered a booklet (not a leaflet, but a whole 36-page booklet) on the dangers of alcohol. (The pictures below come from this booklet.) They’re open 9-5, Monday to Friday, and for a few hours on Saturday morning. Queues on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings are even longer (even by Swedish standards), as anyone planning a dinner or party the following weekend tries to get in at the last minute.
However at least these days you can browse through the stock like a normal shop. I’m told that in the past, they resembled something from the old Soviet Union, with everything locked away in storage. You had to read through a catalogue, and write down the reference number of what you wanted on a slip of paper. You then handed in your slip to a cashier, pay, and then wait for your order to be retrieved from the storeroom.

Another rule stipulates that pubs and bars must serve food, so most drinking holes are just as much restaurants and cafes as they are bars. Pubs that prefer to concentrate on drinking will often offer a bare minimum menu. For example Gothenburg’s only Aussie pub, the Dancin Dingo, offers four dishes (one of which is a bowl of chips) in what is definitely a “I’m legally required to sell food” menu.

Swedes have responded by invented various ways to get around such high prices. For one there is a big black market in homemade alcohol. I’m yet to get that desperate for a drink, but I hear such beverages are pretty putrid and the hangovers are even worse.
Pre-parties are also popular. That’s when people meet up at a friend’s place and drink before going out to a bar or pub. My friend Marte in Oslo used to buy a cheap cask of red wine whenever she went out, and hid it in her handbag. She’d then buy one glass of red wine, and just keep topping it up under the table.
Pre-parties also mean that many pubs and bars remain practically empty right up until 12-1am, as everyone is still at home indulging in cheaper booze. Then in a space of an hour they can be full to capacity with a long queue out front.

The idea behind Sweden’s strict laws is to discourage binge drinking and alcoholicism. But for all the effects such laws have had on Swedish drinking habits, as far as I can tell they have done nothing to reduce either. I see more drunkards in public here then I have in just about any other city in the world. Barely a week goes by that I don’t come across packs of boozed up derelicts throwing up on a tram, or passed out in a public park.
As for binge drinking, Swedes don’t drink any other way. No one has the occasional glass of wine with their meal, or meet up for a beer or two. Generally people drink with the sole intention of getting drunk. It’s either don’t drink at all, or drink to excess. No middle ground. If you arrange to meet up with a friend for a drink, you might be thinking one or two then home, but they’ll be preparing for a big night out. They arrive all dressed up, and have had drunk a bottle of wine beforehand. They’ll then proceed to order drink after drink, with the occasional shot thrown in. And they won’t stop until the bouncers are throwing them out covered in their own vomit.

Yet for all their excessiveness on a Friday or Saturday night, many Swedes also have a tendency to suddenly convert to a life of purity the rest of the week. Suddenly alcohol becomes a sin again. I came across a typical example just recently. I was on the way home from football training with one Australian and one Swede. The Australian asked if we wanted to go for a quick beer. I agreed but our Swedish teammate looked at us in disbelief. “What? On a Monday night?” he screeched, “No way!” The previous Saturday night I had seen the same guy knocking back whisky and cokes like his life depended on it. He obviously thought an invitation to the pub entailed a repeat performance, and could not even conceive the possibility of having one beer and leaving.
Judging from the local pubs and bars, this attitude is typical in Sweden. They may get crowded late on a Friday/Saturday night, but anyone drinking at any other time of the week is often an alcoholic. Sweden is the only country where I’ve been told it’s inappropriate to bring a bottle of wine when friends have invited us to a dinner party on a Sunday night. Or where I’ve gone to the local pub on a Sunday afternoon to watch the football, and found myself the only person drinking a beer rather then bottled water.

Sweden’s alcohol laws have been in the news a lot recently, as they have triggered a confrontation with the European Union. It appears they contravene a number of EU regulations on trade and movement of goods. The Swedish government have responded by making a short video explaining and justifying their laws, to be presented to the EU Parliament. You can watch it at http://www.dearmrb.se/. It’s in English, only goes for five minutes, and has some hilarious footage of a man injuring himself with a stick of rhubarb.

And You Thought He Was Just A Big Fish In A Small Pond

2007-10-12T18:14:00.000+01:00

For some reason I thought John Farnham was only known in Australia. But it seems he is more famous then I ever gave him credit for. A clip from this week's Swedish Pop Idol:

Being My Own Boss

2007-10-05T16:15:00.000+01:00

For the past fortnight I've continued working at Canon House, although there haven't been as many dramas as before. After one flare up too many, Bjorn was sent to another site. A week later, as there was less work to do, Robban was also transfered. Then on Wednesday Peter pushed himself too hard by actually attempting to do some work and ended up hurting his back. I guess years of inactivity had left his body unprepared for physical labour. When he first did it, he told me he was only going upstairs to rest. I didn't see him again for the rest of the week.

As a result, for the past two days I've been the most experienced (and only) carpenter on the whole site. There might be a skills shortage but you know the construction industry is in trouble when someone like me ends up in this position. I'm still too timid to use the nail gun.
At this stage just about everything is finished, and it is mainly just the painters and electricians working. But there are a few odd jobs around, and as the head carpenter, I'm the first person the painters and electricians go to if they need something done. There have been a few situations where I've not been quite sure what to do and just guessed, and tools I've learnt to use as I go. As a result there are little flaws and imperfections in just about everything I've touched. But on the other hand a lot of my time has been spent fixing flaws in Peter's and Robban's work. At least I've got inexperience as an excuse, where as they just like to cut corners. Besides today was my last day at Canon House so it will be up to Peter to fix all my mistakes.

Today was an even easier day. By lunch time I had run out of materials, and had no one around to tell me what I should be doing. As head carpenter I let myself go home early, but as a reward for another week of hard work I still signed off for an 8 hour shift. I'm really starting to get the hang of this Swedish work ethic.

It Could Only Happen In Sweden No.3.

2007-10-05T15:45:00.000+01:00

In terms of gender equality, Sweden is light-years ahead of the rest of the world. There is even a law here that states that hairdresses must charge the same amount for men's and women's haircuts. I think the idea behind the law is to prevent women getting overcharged, although in reality it actualy means men get overcharged. A simple short-back-and-sides job, that usualy takes 10 minutes to do, will generally cost between $A40-$A50. But I've found a place run by an Iraqi couple who, if you pay cash and don't need a receit, only charge $A20.

So, what does an Equal Opportunities Ombudsman do in a country with practically full gender equality? They deal with cases like this.

The Perils of Live Television

2007-09-25T15:56:00.000+01:00

Swedish TV is pretty much the same as Australian TV. They show the same crap but obviously in a different language. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Pop Idol, Big Brother, etc. We’ve even got those phone-in quizzes in the middle of the night, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before.

If you want to know the full story, read this. She must love Youtube now.

The Jokers and the Thief.

2007-09-21T18:38:00.000+01:00

I’m pleased to say that work has been relatively entertaining of late. More demolition work? No, just my work colleagues.

Regular readers of this blog may remember me mentioning a guy called Peter, who I worked with at Vasastaden in June. To refresh your memories, Peter was like a half-man, half-pig hybrid. He was exceptionally lazy, even by Swedish standards. The past two weeks I’ve been working with him and his equally slack accomplice Robban. Whenever I look in their direction, they are very rarely doing any actual work, and more often then not will be standing around chatting, or finding some other fun activity to do instead. For example today Robban made a Ned Kelly-style helmet with some left over metal tubing. Yesterday Peter and Robban were having a knife throwing competition against a soon-to-be demolished wall. The two of them seem incapable of working for more then 15 minutes at any one time before getting bored and distracted. When its break time, you can guarantee they’ll be the first in the tearoom, and they’ll also be the last to leave.

My other co-worker is Bjorn, the suspected alcoholic I worked with in Eriksberg. He is not nearly as lazy. In fact he is as busy as a beaver, and I mean like a beaver. He is constantly collecting and scrounging together tools and materials to take home. Last week he was using an electric drill he borrowed from the storerooms. “Hmm, this is a good drill,” he said, “I should get one like it.” Five minutes later I see him scratching the initials of the previous owner off, and replacing them with his own. Often he can be seen rummaging through the skips picking out bits of wood or metal he thinks he can reuse. The other day he took home a whole bucket of light switches and power point sockets, as well as some curtain railings. On Monday, he even took a green plastic “Exit” sign. He reckons they’re worth 700 Kr (A$125). I imagine half his home consists of DIY renovations with second hand materials. And as of this week his back door probably has an “Exit” sign too.
Bjorn isn’t too subtle either. He tries to be and thinks he succeeds, but it’s blatantly obvious to everyone in the whole building. You know he’s up to something when he turns up to work with his large rucksack. Rest assured he’ll leave that afternoon with it looking noticeably bulkier and heavier.

Certainly Peter and Robban have noticed Bjorn’s thieving, and their not impressed. Despite hardly being role-model employees themselves, they’ve been quick to take to their moral high horse, and denounce Bjorn’s light-fingered side work. “It’s okay to take some things from the rubbish if you do it after work”, Robban told me last week, “But when you’re at work, you work.” This was followed by a brief pause, where Robban must have become aware of how much work he had actually done as he then added “And talk. Sometimes we talk, but we don’t take things like he does. It’s wrong.”
Conversely, Bjorn is equally unimpressed by Robban and Peter’s idleness. “I’ve never had to work with people so lazy,” confided Bjorn the other day, also assuming the moral high ground. “When we finish here, I refuse to ever work with them again.”
Thus this week I’ve been stuck between conflicting sides, as each cannot help but gripe to be me about the other. I have to admit I’ve enjoyed watching them bicker and argue, while being completely oblivious to their own misdeeds. I probably would have enjoyed it even more if I understood more Swedish.

Still Here

2007-09-13T19:46:00.000+01:00

Since my last blog entry, I’m afraid there hasn’t been much luck on the job front: I’m still dying of boredom in construction. I’ve applied for one other job, at least got an interview this time, but again missed out. The depressing thing isn’t so much getting rejected, but that fact there are so few jobs to get rejected from. In the past four weeks I’ve checked the newspapers and various Internet sites everyday, and still only found two positions I could realistically apply for.

So my life as a construction worker continues, with no end in sight. Although at least this week I can find solace in the fact that I’ve been assigned to one of my favourite jobs in construction: demolition. Nothing relieves stress and frustration like standing in a room with a crowbar, tiger-saw, and orders to destroy everything in sight. Sometimes I like to take the crazed psychopath approach, where I just grad a crowbar and hack away at the walls with all my energy until things start to fall apart. When I really get into it, I feel like a rock star trashing a hotel room. But it can be tiring, so other times I take what I like the call the surgical approach. This is where I analyse a structure and identify its weak points. I then cut away the bare minimum from a few sensitive areas, give the wall gently push, and watch it all come crashing down in one hit. It can be quite empowering.

At the moment, I’m working in an office block called Canon House. A company has just bought a floor of office space and wants it renovated. Apparently this is a common line of work in this industry as corporations are constantly moving premises. Often they can never accept a new place as it is, and feel the need to have it renovated to suit their needs. As a result such projects often involve renovating places that are less then a year old.
This current site is a good example, as we’re basically tearing down recently built walls, and ripping up brand new carpet. The walls I’m tearing down are almost indistinguishable to the ones that my co-workers are putting up.

In this particular office space I’m working on, one half is portioned into individual offices, while the other half is open-plan. The new tenants want us to tear down the partitions in the first half, so it is also open-plan. Meanwhile in the other half, the half that is already open-plan, they would like us to build partitions to make it into individual offices.
In the end they’ll have an office that is pretty much identical as it was before, expect facing the other direction. Then they’ll probably move, and another construction company will be called in to renovate it once again for some other company. Corporations really are bizarre entities.

It Could Only Happen In Sweden No.2.

2007-09-07T17:41:00.000+01:00

For the most part living in Sweden doesn’t feel all that different from living in Australia. But then I read an article like this, and suddenly feel like I’m on a different planet. For those too lazy to check the link and read the whole article, basically a school in southern Sweden has just banned students from wearing Swedish football shirts for its annual school photos. The principal argues that anything with the Swedish flag can be interpreted as xenophobic, and therefore racist.

Imagine a school in Australia banning Wallaby rugby shirts on the basis they could be construed as racist. Our government is making immigrants confirm to supposed ‘Australian values”. The population gets ever more jingoist and the flag ever more sacred. Even when a group of young white men dress themselves in the national flag and run round bashing anyone that looks Middle-Eastern, our Prime Minister refuses to admit they might be racist. Yet in Sweden, adolescent school kids are being accused of racism for wearing a football shirt. In complete contrast to the rest of the world, patriotism really isn’t a virtue here. Any outwardly demonstration of nationalism is generally viewed with suspicion.

The other big news story here is a small newspaper in Örebro has published some controversial cartoons depicted the Prophet Muhammad, not dissimilar to the ones published in Denmark last year. The reaction hasn’t been anywhere near as strong as that towards the Danish cartoons, but there have been a few Swedish flag-burnings in the Middle East. Are Swedes offended and hurt at seeing their national flag destroyed and desecrated on national television? They couldn’t care less. The strongest reaction I’ve come across has been mild amusement.

No Escape!

2007-08-28T19:53:00.000+01:00

Judging from some of the emails and comments I’ve been getting, I’m worried some of you are under the impression I somehow enjoy my job, or at least find it tolerable. I just like to get the record straight: I hate my job. I really, REALLY hate it.
I know its slack and easy going, and the idea of being paid to stand around with your hands in your pockets does sound appealing. But it is also excruciatingly boring. Most jobs I do get assigned are basic menial tasks, well within the capabilities of anyone with half a brain cell. On some occasions I feel like they’re just inventing jobs to keep me busy.

Things have improved at this new site in Eriksberg (pictured above, the site I work at is just right of the big orange crane). Bjorn, the alcoholic who was supposed to be showing me what to do, has been sick for the past week. Thus I’ve been left completely alone and unsupervised, to build internal walls inside this apartment block. About once every two days the foreman has checked up on me to make sure I’m okay, but otherwise I’m just left to my own devices. In a very short period of time I’ve gone from not being trusted enough to do anything more serious then chip away old tiles off the floor, to actually building stuff. Most importantly the best part is actually having some to do. Now an 8-hour shift actually feels like 8 hours, not 8 days.

But it won’t last forever, and I fear soon I’ll be back to sweeping floors or sorting 3mm nails from 5mm nails. And as the days get shorter and colder, the prospect of working outdoors looks less and less appealing. Thus I’ve stepped up my attempts to find another job. As I’ve said previously on this blog, finding employment is hard work in Sweden, especially if you’re limited to English-speaking jobs. Many multinational corporations based here employee English speakers, but generally only skilled workers such as accountants and engineers. Having done an Arts degree, and only worked in retail and hospitality, there aren’t many jobs I’m particularly qualified and/or experienced for.
But last week I found a job advertised in the paper that looked perfect. It was a customer service/office admin job, for a company that sold cycling/skiing/outdoor clothing online. It practically looked identical to my job at the Hill of Content Bookshop, and after sending off my application I even got an email saying it looked good and that they’ll be in touch.
Naturally I was feeling pretty confident, and took it for granted that I’d at least be called in for an interview. But then last Friday afternoon I got an email saying they had received a lot of applications, and as good as mine was, too many other applicants were deemed more suitable.

This was really quite depressing. It was the first time I’d found an English-speaking job that matched my work experience so perfectly, and considering how I fared, how well can I expect to go when applying for other jobs less suitable. The fact I couldn’t even get a look in has made me realise I’m going to be stuck in construction to quite some time yet.

Last night I was retelling my recent experience to a friend of Ankie’s. She is a disciple of the self-help book, The Secret, and started telling me that maybe the reason I didn’t get the job because of a lack of belief on my behalf. I told her I was pretty confident of at least getting an interview. “But it’s not enough to be confident, you have to believe it’s already yours. Think of your dream job and tell yourself it is you job, act like it already it your job, and it will become your job.”
In desperation I’ve decided to take her advice. From now on I’m an international playboy, living off the assets of my vast business empire. We’ll see what happens.

Work? I’d Rather Play Chess: The Death of Ingmar Bergman

2007-08-19T10:15:00.001+01:00

Bergman, Bergman, Bergman. That’s all that’s been in the Swedish media for the past fortnight. For the first week every night on television was either another documentary, or an old interview, followed by one of his films. Last Friday night they showed his five-hour Fanny and Alexander. There was even one particular documentary that was screened three nights running. Every newspaper had pages of coverage, and had finally been able to rehash all the obituaries that were probably written twenty years ago. The King and the Primer Minister both gave tributes, as well as every actor and director in Sweden. But with his funeral yesterday, maybe the Swedish media will get back to what they do best: reports on teenage binge drinking.
I was certainly shocked by his death: I thought he died years ago. For me, Bergman’s genius lay in his ability to capture the Swedish attitude towards work, and their susceptibility to procrastination. Just watch this:

In Sweden, even Death is happy for an excuse to avoid doing his job.

Back From Holidays, Back To "Work"

2007-08-17T17:25:00.000+01:00

I’ve just come back from my holidays. It was tough but I’m back to work now so I can take it easy again. Unfortunately I’ve been moved away from Karl Gustavgatan, and now I’m at yet another different site. This time it’s in Eriksberg, an area once encompassed by Gothenburg’s massive port, but now being transformed into a colony of ultra modern apartment blocks. Barely a single building in the whole area would predate 2004. Every block is either a recently built apartment building, or a construction site for an apartment building. Unfortunately in their haste to construct so much accommodation, no one seems to have thought about things like shops, public transport, and other services, but they do get great views of the city and the river. Think Docklands in Melbourne, but spread over a 2 km stretch of the Yarra, and not quite as accessible to the CBD.
The biggest difference from every other site I’ve worked at, is that it is much more like what you’d expect a construction site to look like. Everyone wears a hard-hat, lots of huge cranes, forklifts, scaffolding, and all that sort of thing. Every other site I’ve been at has essentially been renovation work inside an already existing building, whereas Eriksberg consists of six brand new buildings built from scratch.
The work pace at Eriksberg isn’t as relaxed or as easy-going as Karl Gustavgatan, but only in the same way that say, scratching your back takes more effort then scratching your head. I’m now forced to make do with half-hour breaks every two hours. The good part about this site is that I’m getting a lot of opportunities to learn new things and develop my skills. I’ve basically been assigned to be an assistant to another more experienced carpenter called Bjorn. There are no dull cleaning chores, just following Bjorn around and listening to everything he tells me. Although I’m also starting to suspect that Bjorn might be an alcoholic. While not 100% sure, I’m pretty certain I could smell booze on his breath the other day, and he does have a habit of disappearing for a suspiciously long time just to do something simple like get more screws. He certainly seems to be prone to addictive substances. Not only does he smoke a pipe during breaks, but he also regularly smokes cigarettes during shifts, AND still constantly has a lump of snus under his upper lip. That’s three different ways of absorbing nicotine, all used concurrently! No wonder he needs the odd drink.

Pole-axed II: Scotland

2007-08-17T17:23:00.000+01:00

On my week off, I spent a few days in Edinburgh, to catch up with old friends and work colleagues. Not much has changed there (Edinburgh is the sort of city that will always look the same: its too old to change now), but one of few differences I did notice was the sudden abundance of Polish cafes, delicatessens and other Polish businesses.

When I first moved to Edinburgh in late May 2004, Poland had only just joined the EU three weeks previously. The hostel I was staying in was full of eager Poles who had just arrived, and looking for work. Within months, it felt like nearly every kitchen in every restaurant was full of Polish workers. By the time I left in November 2005, many of these Polish were starting to speak fluent English and really starting to settle down and integrate into Scottish society. One guy I worked with was about to get married and buy a house. A Polish pub had even opened.
When I went back last weekend for the first time in nearly two years, it was immediately clear the Polish population had continued swelling.
While happy to hire Polish and other Eastern Europeans in the kitchen, none of the restaurants I ever worked for would ever consider hiring a Pole as a waiter simply because of the language barrier. But at both restaurants now, not only were nearly all the kitchen staff still Polish, but so too were many of their floor staff. And of course, there are now all those Polish-owned businesses I saw.
One of my old supervisors told me that there is a constant stream of Polish moving into Scotland. Of the newer arrivals, many are relatives of those who came in the first wave, and use their family connections to get jobs. Consequently many restaurant kitchen staff not only share nationality, but genes too. Meanwhile those original Poles who migrated in 04, will now qualify for British social security, as they’ve lived in the UK for more then three years. Consequently it’s expected (or feared by tabloids) that many will start claiming the dole, or take out student loans and enrol in university.
In Sweden, the Polish workers generally stuck to themselves, and didn’t mingle with the Swedes, and/or Swedes didn’t attempt to mingle with them. But in Edinburgh, many Poles seem to socialise with their other work colleagues, have Scottish friends, and just generally seem far less segregated then in Gothenburg.

It is incredible how quickly the whole demographic of a city has changed in such a short period of time. It is particularly incredible considering that, as far as I could tell, it has taken place with very little dissent or opposition. In contrast to Sweden, nobody I spoke to had any hostility towards the Polish. This is despite the fact that the migration into Edinburgh is on a much larger scale then in Gothenburg. This might change when more Poles start claiming welfare, but in the meantime, many can at least see the economic benefits of having so many willing workers. One of my old managers thought it was great: They’re hard-working, obedient, do all the chores that you’d never get a Scot to do, got no aspirations for promotion, and whenever you’re in need of new staff, they always happen to have a cousin who needs a job.
Not the most puritan of motives for embracing your new European kinfolk, but I’m sure Poles prefer that then getting sacked with two days notice.

Photos from Edinburgh

2007-08-17T17:18:00.000+01:00

Edinburgh Castle and the Old Town, from Arthur's Seat.

Scottish Parliament House, and Calton Hill.

Trollhättan

2007-08-14T18:10:00.000+01:00

Last week I went on a day trip to the town of Trollhättan, about an hour north of Göteborg. It has traditionally being an industrial town, and important for its hydro election power plants, and its locks which help ships pass along the Göta Alv river. It also has a very scenic location, right on the river with forests and steep cliffs on both sides.
More recently, Trollhättan has reinvented itself as both a centre of tourism, and movie making. It now hosts Sweden’s largest film studio, where Dogville and Dancer In The Dark were both shot. Consequently, Nicole Kidman features heavily on all tourism promotions. A lot of the old industrial buildings now act as tourist attractions, and film sets. But for me the highlight was walking through the forests, and looking at the great views of the Göta Alv and surrounding countryside.

One of the locks.

The Göta Alv south of Trollhättan.
What used to be a factory, now a tourist attraction and potential film set.
Trollhättan's big attraction is its waterfalls. This is when the hydro plant diverts some of its water by opening up its dam doors , and flooding a section of the river that is practically dry. The picture below was taken before the doors were open. The ruins on the right are from old factories from the 18th and 19th century.
This is the same area five minutes after the dam doors were open.

An Easy Days Work Never Hurt Anybody

2007-08-03T21:45:00.000+01:00

I didn’t think this was possible, but I’ve reached a new low in idleness at work. I’ve just been transferred to a new site, this time in Karl Gustovgatan. In terms of laziness, it has surpassed all other sites I’ve worked at, and makes The Avenue look like a sweatshop.

Part of the problem is that it’s a large sight, with lots of rooms. It’s easy for people to hide and slack off. There is only one foreman, which is unusual for a site this big, who cannot possibly keep an eye on everyone and keep them accountable.
But the main reason why it is so relaxed is because of the apathetic and equally lazy foreman, Tony. When I first arrived, I started asking around for him, so I could introduce myself and find out what I should be doing. No one seemed to know where he was, and I was forced to trek throughout the building, trying to track him down. I felt a bit like Captain Willard looking for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. As I was searching I could tell things at this site weren’t quite right, that strange twisted things had taken place here. There were people everywhere, yet no one was working. Materials and tools in every room, yet everything was only half finished.
Finally I found Tony. I then spent the next half hour following him around the site, while he tried to think of something I could do. All around us people continued to slack off, not even offering pretence of doing work, yet Tony said nothing. We walked into rooms and saw workers lounging around like it was happy hour in Club Med, and he thought nothing of it. In fact he often joined their conversations while I stood on the sidelines still waiting for some instructions.

Trying to get Tony to assign jobs was a constant problem. Over the week, whenever I asked him for something to do, he would sigh and give me a “why-are-you-asking-me-for?” look.
Eventually Tony told me to find a guy called Aba, and help him out with whatever he was doing. The problem with that plan was that Aba wasn’t really doing much. He spent practically the whole day standing around chatting. He made sure he was always holding a broom, so if Tony did walk in he could just start sweeping, although I don’t know why he bothered. Whenever I tried to do anything, he gave me a disapproving look. “Take it easy. Don’t stress,” he kept telling me, “We need to stretch this out until 3.30.” He also showed me a way of sneaking onto the roof, where we could go to hide from Tony. He then told me of the time he went up there and feel asleep. When he woke up two hours later, he just climbed down, went back to work, and no one even noticed he was gone.

During our long chats throughout the day, we started talking about all the Polish workers. As with The Avenue, this site had up to 20 Poles working there at one stage, but again nearly all were sacked quite recently. Aba had a whole list of disasters at the site directly (and indirectly) caused by the Polish. “They’re useless,” he told me when we were sitting on the roof, “They don’t do any work.”

To give you some idea how slow it is at Karl Gustovgatan, I’ve written up a plan of what an average working day should entail, and a rundown of what I actually do on an average shift.

My Day As It Should Be

6.45: Start work
8.45: Breakfast
9.15: Back to work.
11.15: Coffee break
11.30: Back to work.
1.30: Lunch
2.00: Back to work
4.00: Finish for the day.

My Dad As It Is.

6.45: Arrive at work. Begin the day with a coffee in the staff room while I wait for everyone else to arrive.
7.15: Finally everyone has arrived, so we make our way onto the site. Ask foreman what I should be doing.
7.30: Find tools/materials, and set up my work area.
7.45: Have a general discussion with colleagues about what it is I’m doing, and how I’m going to do it.
8.00: Discussion gets side tracked into a completely irrelevant conversation.
8.15: Actually start working
8.30: Stop for Breakfast
9.15: Return to the site, and resume working.
9.30: Someone starts telling amusing anecdote. Everyone stops to listen.
9.45: Back to work.
10.00: Stop for a cigarette break, or in my case, a stand-outside-and-get-some-fresh-air break.
10.15: Suddenly realise I’m missing a tool. Go to storage to get it.
10.30: Back to work until I run out of screws. Back to storage.
10.45: About to resume working until I discover I’ve got the wrong screws. (5mm flat heads on gips and plywood? What was I thinking?) Back to storage.
11.00: Decide my workspace is a little cluttered so go and get a broom to give the floor a quick sweep.
11.15: By the time I find a broom it’s time for our coffee break.
11.45: Back to work, resume sweeping floor.
12.00: Get distracted by a work colleague showing me funny videos on this mobile phone.
12.15: Another fresh air break.
12.30: Back to work.
12.45: Work colleague starts asking me questions about life in Australia.
1.00: Lunchtime.
1.45: Ease our way back into work with another discussion about what we are doing, what still needs to be done, and how we are going to do it.
2.00: Two co-workers start play wrestling. Everyone stops to watch and egg them on.
2.30: Stop, stretch, and stand around with my hands in my pockets for a while.
2.45: Realise how little I’ve done so work solidly for 30 minutes to make it look respectable.
3.15: Start packing up.
3.30: Sweep the same floor repeatedly to kill time, or alternatively go hide on the roof.
3.45: Try to sneak out early, until I bump into the boss. He’s sneaking out early too, so I drop the pretence and just go.
4.00: Already on the tram home.

Pole-axed.

2007-07-31T20:11:00.000+01:00

In just about any city in the world, the construction industry is a haven for migrant workers. It’s physically exhausting work, and not particularly well paid. Most tasks require little formal education or experience. Demand for workers is also often high, as few local people will do it if at all possible. It is the sort of work that people only do if they have no other choice. Employers are desperate for workers, and the workers are desperate for employment. No matter where you’re from or what language you speak, as long as you’ve two arms and two legs, there is work for you.

Ever since Poland joined the EU in 2004, there has been an exodus of young Poles into Western Europe, and not surprisingly many have ended up working in construction. Sweden is no exception, and my company has plenty of Polish too.
The first Polish workers I meet were at my first site in Hammarkullen, where we had three. Whenever something went missing, it was blamed on the Polish. “Have you seen my cigarettes?” someone once asked me. When I said no, he turned to his friends and with knowing nods said, “The Polish guys must have taken them.” If the foreman noticed something wrong with a wall or something, and made enquires, the general reply was, “Weren’t the Polish guys working on that?” And so on.

Then this week nearly all the Poles got sacked. The reason given was that there is no work for them. Most worked as bricklayers or stonemasons, and all that type of work is finished. In fact the whole site is nearly finished and there is increasingly little to do. We could all see this and knew the work force would need to be reduced. But we also assumed people would just be transferred to other sites. If they couldn’t keep us on, surely they’d tell us in advance. But the Polish guys were sacked with two days notice, without any warning. The company will start work at another site in September. Some of them might be reemployed then, but there is no guarantee, and even then it still means at least six weeks of unemployment.

Whatever excuses the company might provide they don’t hide the fact that all the sacked workers were Polish, and no one is even pretending this is a coincidence. All the stone and brickwork might be finished, but many of Poles have showed themselves willing and able to do other work too. In fact, some of the guys sacked hardly touched bricks and mortar. I can see why the company needs to reduce its workforce, but there are other workers (such as myself, but shhh) with less experience. We’re all keeping our jobs. It’s pretty clear that nationality played a big part in the company’s decision, and is reflective of the general view management have of Eastern European workers. They must have known they wouldn’t need its Polish workers earlier then last Wednesday, yet they allowed them to keep working falsely assuming they had jobs.

After the events of this week, I suddenly find myself feeling far less secure about my own job. If work does dry up over the next few months, I could also just as easily lose my job due to no fault of my own. In my mind, my co-workers should feel the same way, and see the whole episode as an example of how disposable we are. But instead most have expressed sympathy and support for management’s decision, and now the anti-Polish prejudice is epidemic. All of a sudden everyone is complaining about the fact the Poles couldn’t understand Swedish or English, or about their shoddy workmanship.

The way many Swedes talk of Polish workers suggests they should be grateful for the opportunity to work in Sweden, as opposed to people prepared fill job shortages, and do work that many Swedes refuse to do. As I often hear people say, it might be low pay but it’s a fortune in Poland. If they don’t like it, they can always go home. Short-term employment is better then no employment, and as long as they are in our country, they should be happy with whatever they can get.
This of course goes against Sweden’s image as a tolerant compassionate country, yet some Swedes still manage to weave this image into their arguments. So often I’ve heard people complain without any sense of irony “We are a trustworthy and generous country, and immigrants exploit that”.

Note On The Swedish Language

2007-07-21T08:38:00.000+01:00

After four months of living here, it’s time to evaluate my Swedish. While I’m gradually picking it up, progress has been very slow.
Part of the problem is that everyone speaks excellent English. A couple of times now I’ve tried to memorise a few questions or requests when I’m buying something. But more often then not, after clumsily muttering my request, I get the reply “Sorry, what do you want?” in perfect English.
Native English speakers also speak Swedish with a distinct accent, which Swedes find hilarious. It doesn’t do much for your confidence when everyone you talk to starts giggling.

As far as learning a second language goes, I suspect Swedish is easier than a lot of other languages. There are lots of words which are either the same or very similar to their English equivalents. This is mainly because of the close relationship between the two languages, but other English terms have creped in over recent years. As far as I can tell, any new word or term that has come into existence since WWII has just entered the Swedish vocabulary exactly as it is in English. No one has bothered updating the language or invented any new words. (Only one Swedish word has managed to make the journey in the opposite direction and become an English word: Smorgasbord. In Swedish it means Sandwich-table.)
Although while the spelling of many words might be identical to English, pronunciation can be very different. Swedish has more pitch and tone, and some letters symbolise completely different sounds. For example, many Christian names used in English are used here too, with the same spelling, but again pronounced differently. Jonathan is pronounced ‘yun-a-tan’, and David is ‘Dar-vid’.

Consequently I’ve found it much easier learning to read Swedish. When I can see the words, and go at my own pace, I can often work it out. But when people talk, I can barely catch a single word. Often a term will register in my mind, but by the time I can recall what it means, the person talking is already 10 words ahead.
Whenever I attempt Swedish in shops and cafes I’m worried about what I’ll do if the person serving me asks a question or attempts a conversation. One factor working in my favour is that Swedes are typically very reserved and uncommunicative. So I can go into a shop, ask for what I’m after in Swedish, receive, and leave. No small talk or chitchat: just the bare minimum service.
Conveniently for reserved Swedes, Swedish happens to be a very economical language with a comparatively small vocabulary. Some terms can be used in place of three or four English terms. Sentences are also very short, and direct. If I’m watching an English-speaking show on TV, the Swedish subtitles will often use two or three words to translate a whole sentence. A whole passage of dialogue can be condensed into a few sentences. This of course can really kill any poetic artistry in film or literature. It's hard to capture the same emotion and feeling of a well-thought out piece of writing when it has been reduced to the minimum number of words needed to convey its literal meaning. Someone once told me that Shakespeare doesn’t work when translated into German. I can now understand why.
I'm not sure if Swedes are reserved because of their language, or their language is economical because Swedes are reserved.

As a migrant, I am entitled to free Swedish lessons. However the first level of classes are only offered on weekday mornings, making it difficult to work as well. Only after 23 weeks can I qualify for evening classes. Many expats I’ve meet enrolled for the first few weeks, but dropped out soon afterwards. They all complained about classes moving at a very slow pace, and most claim they’ve learnt more Swedish in their jobs anyway.
So instead of taking classes, I’m been reading Pippi Longstocking books in their original language. Soon I’m planning on moving on to Tintin. He helped me read English, so maybe he can help me read Swedish.

Ladies’ Day

2007-07-12T21:25:00.000+01:00

Exciting times at The Avenue this week: we had a woman work at the site. But before I elaborate, firstly a quick run down on the prevailing attitude towards women in my workplace.
We’re all familiar with the popular image of construction workers whistling and harassing women walking past. Well from my experiences the image has strong grounding in fact. This is precisely how my work colleagues act. It’s particularly embarrassing when I just happen to be the one standing closest to the targeted woman, who in turn automatically glares accusingly at the closest male in work cloths.

Until this week, the only women I’ve seen at any of the sites I’ve worked at have been clients checking up on their properties. My work colleagues are always polite and courteous in front of them, but as soon as the woman in question leaves the room, they all start to smirk, giggle and exchange knowing glances. Not unlike 14 year-old school boys.
The company that supplies us with storage containers and skips, have also very kindly given us a calendar of topless women, which adorns the walls of our coffee room. The highlight of every month, after payday, is changing the calendar page and seeing what’s next. Once we see the new page we all look on in amazement, as if a picture of yet another topless woman was the last thing we expected to see. We then all discuss what to do with the page we have just ripped off. Should we just chuck it out, or is it worthy of displaying on the wall so we can continue to stare at it for months to come? So far, after seven months, our hall of fame consists of five pictures, meaning we could only bear to depart with two.

In short, the opposite sex is an exotic novelty, and source of much amusement. So when a team of workers showed up on Monday to install the lift, and one of them was a woman, I naturally expected her to have a pretty tough time. I should point out that she wasn’t some big butch lady with tattoos and a crew cut, capable of rearranging a man’s face before he can finish saying “Get us a cup of tea love’. She was a tall, slim, very attractive young woman, who during breaks liked to braid her long blonde hair and reapply her makeup. She looked completely out place amongst thirty grotty uncouth men.
I expected her to be subjected to the same whistling and jeering dished out to passers by, as well as constant stares and bad pick up lines. Only she wouldn’t have the option of walking away and would have to endure it all day. But in actual fact, my work colleagues were on their best behaviour. She did very little work as whenever she attempted to do anything, someone would step in and offer to do it for her. She just had to stand back, flutter a smile, and relish all the attention. Despite all the grease and dust inherent in our line of work, at the end of the week her blue overalls were still immaculately clean.
Of course once she left, everyone descended back into chauvinistic misogyny. We argued about which one of us had the best chance to pick her up. We speculated on her sexual past, and finally we collectively fantasised about her sexual desires.

The bigotry doesn’t end there either. My co-workers are as equally racist and homophobic. I’d be lying if I said these situations presented a personal dilemma, as I’ve never even considered doing anything other then keeping my mouth shut. The last thing I’m going to do is stand up and deliver a lecture on political correctness, as you can imagine how popular that would make me. But it is still quite alienating. One of the hardest things about this job is the fact I feel I have very little in common with any of my work colleagues. Last week, after I spent the day shovelling rocks into a wheelbarrow, one of my work colleagues quite sympathetically said to me, “I bet its days like this you wish you went to school?” Most people in this industry have been working since dropping out of school at a young age. I wasn’t quite up to telling him that not only did I go to school, but I also spent five years at university and have two degrees. Oh yeah, and last year I won the Walkley Foundations Student Journalist of the Year Award. Don’t get me wrong, most of my co-workers are friendly, helpful, and I generally manage to get along with them. But we come from different worlds, and I don’t mean Sweden and Australia. Whether I like it or not, I’m quite clearly a politically correct, inner city, latte-sipping, middle class university student, and there aren’t many of my kind in the construction industry.

PS. I found the photo above through a google image search and originally comes from a website that sells erotic costumes. A few of them seem to have a ‘construction worker’ theme. I’ve heard of school uniforms and nurses, but construction workers?

Money, Money, Money. (IT IS funny to live in a rich mans world)

2007-06-29T18:50:00.000+01:00

Another eventful week as a builder has just passed, seeing me work at yet another different site. This time I worked on a millionaire’s holiday home on the coastal summer resort of Marstrand (Note: photos below not taken by me).

Marstrand is the beginning of the Bohuslan coast, the region between Gothenburg and the Norwegian border. Just like the Southern Archipelago (see previous post), the area is dotted with traditional fishing villages that have been converted into summer resorts.
Marstrand occupies its own island that can only be reached via a short ferry trip. It’s a very old town, with lots of heritage-listed buildings, cobbled streets, and a large castle as its centrepiece. It has always been a popular holiday spot for the rich and famous, most notably Sweden’s King Oscar II. Further up the coast, Ingrid Bergman once had a holiday house too. Today it hasn’t changed, and is still the exclusive domain of the super rich.

The house I was working on had just had a Kr 20 million (A$3.6 million) renovation. In total the whole property was valued at Kr 50 million (A$9 million). It was not the most lavish house I had ever seen, but it was certainly the most extraordinary. The owners had gone to a lot of trouble to maintain a traditional fishing village aesthetic. All the furniture was antique, and slightly dilapidated. The floorboards were slightly cracked and uneven. All the electrical appliances were modern, but retro looking in design. From a distance, the stove looked like it needed to be stacked with wood and lit manually, but actually had a modern hot place inserted on top, and oven inside. There was incredible attention to detail, with even coat hooks and door hinges made to conform. Instead of light switches, they had porcelain knobs.
Despite the house’s rustic appearance, it actually cost an incredible amount of money. On the day I was there, the plumber was installing antique-looking steal taps and shower fittings, with porcelain handles. They cost Kr 75,000 (A$ 13,000)!
But the best bit is that this was just a holiday house. The owners stay here for three weeks every summer, and the rest of the year its completely empty! Imagine what they spend on their regular house. It’s the sort of wealth and extravagance that borders on the obscene. It is just incomprehensible to me how people can live like this.

I don’t think the urge for class warfare is ever stronger than when your literally on your hands and knees scrapping tiny specs of paint off the floor for minimum wage, while your employers are spending the equivalent of six months wages on shower fittings. I was very tempted to assist them with their efforts to develop a rustic old-fashioned ambience by relieving them of their plasma TV and DVD player. (But I didn’t!)
In the end I just had to remind myself that there are many people a lot worse off than me. Such as these guys.

Photos from the Southern Archipelago

2007-06-29T17:17:00.001+01:00

Here are some photos from Gothenburg's Southern Archipelago. These islands are very close to the city, accessible via public transport and make for an easy day trip. They can only be reached by boat, and most are completely car-free. Traditionally these islands have been home to fishing villages and retirees, but more recently they’ve been taken over by summer holiday homes for wealthy Gothenburgers. Some people even live here and commute to Gothenburg each day for work.
Even in the middle of summer, when the area is teeming with tourists, the archipelago is large enough to still find small quiet places. There are so many islands I can always explore somewhere new. This is where I often go when I've got a day off and the weather is good.

Only in Sweden

2007-06-27T18:35:00.000+01:00

A man in Sweden has just been granted disability payments from social security based on the fact that he is addicted to heavy metal music. He has successfully argued that this ‘disability’ means he is discriminated against in the workplace as many employers won’t tolerate loud music, or employees missing work because they slept in recovering from a rock concert the night before. So rather than look for a job, he is now free to live his heavy metal lifestyle, and the Swedish government will pay the bills. If you don’t believe me, read the full article here.

I know I say this in every blog entry these days, but I still can’t believe what Swedes can get away with. Surely it doesn’t get better than this.

Another Day, Another Kronor

2007-06-20T18:46:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow is Midsummer, one of the biggest days of the year second only to Xmas. In most countries, a public holiday would suffice. But this is Sweden, where public holidays are so common you could hardly call them special occasions. So a day like this gets two public holidays!
This is also my final week at Vasastaden. As we’re nearing the end, the bosses from Astor have been paying more regular visits, and so our break times have started to correspond closer to what they’re supposed to be.
Yet everyday I still see new instances of Swedish slothfulness. For example, I’ve noticed no one seems to use the toilet during one of our designated breaks. After all, why would you waste a toilet break when you’re already on a break? Far better to wait until you’re back at work and take an extra break. My favourite is the smoking break taken five minutes before finishing for the day.
Yesterday, Peter told us with great relief that we’d been given a week’s extension, “…so we didn’t need to panic anymore.” Panic? If the past three weeks have been panic, than what will things be like when we ease back into regular work pace? Two hour breaks after every 15 minutes of work?
Chris reckons if he started up his own company and brought a dozen of his old work colleagues from the US, they’d get things done so much quicker than the Swedes that he’d have TA out of business in no time. I know Americans like to boast, but I find his claim believable.
Once again I have to stress this is not unique to the construction industry. It appears to be a part of Swedish mentality. Last weekend I offered to help Ankie’s father Jan-Erik, move apartments. He had hired a big truck, and was moving a distance of 500 metres. It required two trips, and should have taken three to four hours. Instead, I was there all day and we still didn’t finish it all. The slow work mentality is great when you’re getting paid by the hour, but not so great when you’re giving up your free time. The whole day Jan-Erik kept stressing that “we had to take it easy” and insisted on regular breaks. His theory is that life is too short to stress and worry, and that it is far better to do things at a leisurely pace. “I think we must have time to smell the roses”, he often tells me ever since he first heard an English phrase to describe his philosophy. I felt like telling him that my idea of living isn’t sitting in half furnished apartments drinking instant coffee from plastic cups, and that I’d far rather we got this moving done as quickly as possible so I could enjoy the rest of my weekend. But as usual I only ever think of saying these things long after the occasion passes.

PS. I didn't take the photo above. I don't know where it was taken, but it's the sort of thing a Swedish worker would do.

Photos of Gothenburg

2007-06-09T18:37:00.000+01:00

Here are some photos of my new home town. The first one is of The Avenue, the city's showpiece street, and location of one of the site's I've been working on. It was taken from the top of the street, and includes the Poseidon stature, the closest thing Gothenburg has to a recognisable landmark. The other three photos were all taken around the canals in Gothenburg's old town.

Imorgon, Imorgon!

2007-06-09T18:21:00.000+01:00

Broadly speaking there are two very different stereotypes of Europeans. On the one hand, there is your Southern European with their relaxed view of life, best demonstrated by the Spanish 'Manana, manana' (tomorrow, tomorrow) mentality. The laid-back sorts, who would rather take a siesta or sit around drinking wine, than make any effort at actually doing their job. On the other hand, in complete contrast you have the Northern Europeans, dedicated to an earnest humourless life of efficiently and hard work. Of the two stereotypes I had always assumed Sweden would fit closer to the later rather than the former.
But since gaining employment here six weeks ago, I’ve been forced to radicaly revaluate this perception. Swedes actually share more with the laid-back Italians than the industrious Germans. At risk of sounding like a right-wing radio shock jock, there must be something about a strong welfare state that makes people lazy.

The past fortnight has been a busy one, seeing me transferred to three different sites. As stated in my last blog entry, I was first sent to The Avenue. However after a few days I was sent to a site in Onsala (a very posh part of town near the beach), and then only a day later to my current site, Vasastaden. After my first site in Hammarkullen I was already under the impression Swedes didn’t work very hard. But from each of these proceeding sites, I’ve only had this suspicion confirmed.
When getting a lift to Onsala, Marco (the other guy working there) intentionally took the back roads rather than the quicker, more-direct route via the highway. By the time we got there, it was nearly time for our first break. “Look, it’s Friday,” Marco told me as way of justification, “It’s been a long week, so I think we should just take it easy today.” Just as we were due for our lunch break, Marco than says, “Would it be okay with you if we left early today, and just didn’t tell anyone.” We agreed to work another hour, before leaving and signing off on eight hours anyway. “It’s Friday!”, claimed Marco.

I was supposed to be in Onsala for a week, but on Monday I was transferred to another site in Vasastaden, back in the city centre. There is only one other person working there, Peter. He immediately started the day by complaining about how much work needed to be done, and how little time we had. He then told me he had to get rid of the last person because he didn’t do any work. Initially I wished I were back in Onsala, anticipating four weeks of high-pressure backbreaking labour. But I needn’t. If Marco knew how to slack off and cut corners, Peter takes it to a whole new level. Despite all his complaining about workloads and deadlines, he works with absolutely no sense of urgency. Even when he moves, he doesn’t so much walk, but reluctantly inch forward. Some of the guys I worked with in Hammarkullen and The Avenue liked to push the limits by slyly extend their breaks by 5-10 minutes. This is kid’s stuff for Peter, who likes to take an extra 15-20 minutes. We spend nearly as much time in the barracks drinking coffee than we do on the actual construction site.
Last Wednesday was a public holiday for Sweden’s National Day. (I should point out that this is the third public holiday we’ve had in the six weeks I’ve been working. And we’re due another two, Midsummer’s Eve and Midsummer’s Day, in two weeks time.) To mark the occasion, on Tuesday Peter decided we should just go home at lunchtime.

This isn’t just something that is epidemic in the construction industry either. One of my teammates at the Berserkers works at a furniture removalist, and regularly talks of 30-minute jobs being extended into a whole 8-hour shift. Ankie also has friends who complain about being ‘stressed’ and ‘exhausted’ having worked a 40-hour week.

The best part of this leisurely working culture is that it is easy to impress employers. Anyone who can turn up and complete a minimum workload within reasonable time wins Employee of the Month. But it makes me wonder about the people who get sacked. This is the second time now I’ve been brought in to replace a sacked employee. If even someone as lazy as Peter gets rid of you on the premise you’re not pulling your weight, you must be as lazier than Jabba the Hutt!

Sweden't Most Wanted Floor Sweeper

2007-05-30T17:03:00.000+01:00

Things at work are progressing very well. In fact last week a rival company attempted to poach me from TA. As I said in an earlier blog entry, TA had rented me out to another company called Astor. For the past three weeks, I had basically been doing all the cleaning at one of their sites. Anders, one of the senior hotshots at Astor, often gave me the odd compliment on my work, and let it known he was quite happy. But then last Wednesday, he started asking me questions about my wages, and how much TA were paying me. My initial thought was he was trying to work out what sort of commission TA had been extorting out of him. But then he started saying he was very interested in me, and that the company were always looking for good people like me. My first reaction that was “I think you got me confused with someone else, I just sweep the floors here.” As it turned out, he did mean me, and the conversation ended with Anders promising to get back to me after he spoke to his seniors. As it turned out, nothing more was said on the issue, which suited me fine. I didn’t really feel comfortable switching companies so soon after joining TA, and found the whole thing quite awkward. But it was the first time I had been headhunted as such, so quite flattering too.
I'm starting to get the impression that people in Sweden don't work too hard. I didn't think there was anything particularly impressive about my work rate, but it must look good compared to most Swedes. I certainly notice a lot of people just standing around, and progress is very slow. There is a lot of attention to detail, and many of my co-workers are real perfectionists who take a lot of pride in their work. But this also means nothing gets done without a long discussion about it taking place first. Last week, despite a looming deadline, five of us spent a good 15 minutes discussing the best way to cut a single piece of wood.
Breaks every two hours also slows things down, and on top of this most people like to nick off 5 minutes early and return 5 minutes late. Officially we're supposed to have 1 hour 15 minutes of breaks a day, but in reality we have close to 2 hours.

The Astor flats were completed last week, and as of Monday I’ve been working at a new site right in the city centre. This time its luxury flats (one is worth 10 million Kronor (A$1.8m)) right on Goteborg’s showcase street, The Avenue. Word has gone through to head office that I’m a pretty hard worker, so I’ll no longer be cleaning. Instead, I’ll be trained to be a carpenter. My changed status has been noted with some news tools. I now have a knife, and later this week I should get a hammer and screwdriver.
The Avenue site is also where Chris works, and in general has a more international feel. I’ve been working with a guy called Simon, who is originally from London, and wouldn’t be out of place in a Guy Ritchie film. There are also Lithuanians, Polish and Estonians, and in time I’m sure I’ll discover even more nationalities. Unlike the last site in Hammarkullen, English is used just as often as Swedish.

Swedish Rules Footy

2007-05-29T17:35:00.000+01:00

We have finally got our broadband internet connected at home. For the past two months I've been using internet cafes and libraries to update this blog. But with our own connection at home, I can update more often.

But first things first. I believe I still owe you match reports and an update on my football career with the Berserkers. We played our first game of the season four weeks ago, at home against Karlstad. The match was 12 a side, and played on a Rugby pitch with small posts set up on either side of the rugby posts. Along the boundary, we set up a sign explaining the rules for any curious onlookers. Goal umpiring and time keeping were done by interchange players, and four Australians (including myself) rotated umpiring duties each quarter.

It was Karlstad’s first ever match, having only been established earlier this year. A news crew from the local Karlstad TV station turned up to cover the event, obviously curious at the novelty of such a small town producing a team in such an obscure sport. (In fact Karlsatd have been getting a far bit of media coverage. You can read about them in a local Swedish newspaper here.) The team was nearly as multicultural as East Brunswick, consisting of Australians, Swedes, Germans, and even one Jamaican. But in the end it was the experience of Goteborg (who have played three games in its entire history) that prevailed, 134 to 61. You can read a match report here, and if you're really interested you can read the match stats and another report here. I scored one behind.

Statistically I did better than my East Brunswick days, even losing count of my disposals. (I'm pictured right, number 13) Yet I still feel dissatisfied. As an Australian there is an expectation that I play particularly well. After all, I’ve grown up playing this game, while my team-mates (some as young as 17) are still learning to handball properly. In theory I should dominate, but in reality I was at best an average player. To be honest, the game was far more physical than I expected. Maybe its because I hadn’t played for 10 years, and the last match I played was against 16 year-olds, but I just wasn’t used to the tackling and hip-and-shoulders.

I have a theory to explain it. When you talk about Aussie rules in Sweden, the most obvious question is why would a Swede want to play? What does Aussie rules offer over other mainstream sports like soccer or handball? The answer is physical violence. Time and time again, when I ask Swedes how they got involved in football, the answer is they were looking for a more physical sport. Not the marking and kicking, nor the pace or athleticism of the game: just the tackling. Many of the Karlstad players had previously played Rugby and Gridiron, and were recruiting on the premise that Aussie Rules allowed full-on body tackling. Thus many Swedes see Aussie Rules as an opportunity to run round flattening people, and do so with relish. I felt vindicated by the fact that a number of other Aussies also complained about not getting many kicks, and I did notice that towards the end, a few were conveniently sidelined by cramp and dodgy ankles.

Our second match was against Skåne, the region covering Sweden’s southern tip. In contrast to Karlstad, Skåne are a much more experienced side. The area is very much the birth place and centre of Aussie Rules in Sweden. In was here in 1993 that the very first team was established: the Helsingborg Saints. Today, they have there own league with teams in Helsingborg, Landskrona and Malmo. The team we were playing was supposed to be a combined side from the whole Skåne league.

Football in Skåne is strong partly because of its very close proximity to Denmark. Malmo is only a short drive over a bridge, and is practically an outer suburb of Copenhagen. Helsingborg is a 15-minute ferry trip. The Danish Aussie Rules Football League is the biggest and strongest league in the non-English speaking world. They’ve even set up a Premier League. Skåne’s close location means that teams can play often and regularly against much superior Danish sides. The Helsingborg Saints have since become the South Sweden Saints and along with Port Malmo, compete in the Danish Premier League. The Skåne clubs act as feeder clubs for these two, and so some players have played football for as long as 14 years, raking up over 200 games. The Goteborg Berserkers on the other hand, are lucky if they can find time for three games a year.

Thus, we made the trip down south expecting a hiding. The match was played in Landskrona, a small town between Malmo and Helsingborg, and about three hours drive from Goteborg. The town doesn’t have much, but it does have one of only two Aussie rules football grounds in Sweden, with the right goal posts and proper boundary lines. We also managed to bring down 20 players, the biggest turn out in the club’s short history, so we played a proper 18 per-side game.
When we arrived, we discovered that the South Sweden Saints were scheduled to play against a Danish side on the same day. Consequently many of Skåne’s more experienced players were rested, and a second-string side was fielded against us instead. Only one Aussie, and lots of Irish. In the end, despite all our anxiety, we managed to beat them by an ever bigger margin than the Karlstad match: 123 to 55.
Again, a complete match report can be found here, and stats here. I’m in the first photo (number 13). I’ve now got my own profile on footyrecord.net, which can be seen here. I’ve also discovered that Swedish footballers have a role model in the Adelaide Crows defender Kris Massie (pictured right). He is the first and only Swedish born player in VFL/AFL history.

The Unwritten Laws of Construction

2007-05-21T18:17:00.000+01:00

I know it’s been a long time since my last entry but rest assured I haven’t abandoned the blog. Since starting my new job at the construction site, I’ve been flat out. I start at 6.45 every morning, and by the time I finish, I’m absolutely exhausted. I miss being unemployed.

So far, it has been quite an experience. For one I’ve fast had to learn the interact web of internal politics and unspoken etiquette on which construction sites seem to run on. As the new guy I was immediately assigned the job as cleaner. Basically I spent the day sweeping floors and carting off any rubbish to a large container outside. On construction sites, the cleaners are the equivalent of kitchen porters in restaurants. You do all the dullest, hardest and dirtiest jobs, and receive the least amount of respect. But it is something all employees do when they first join the company, regardless of experience and competence. It’s a form of initiation, where the foreman can access your reliability and dedication. The longer you spend cleaning, the more your peers begin to respect you, and accept you. On my first day, hardly anyone said a word to me, but as the weeks pass, more people seem willing to chat as it becomes increasingly obvious I’m not about to flee.

The idea is to prove yourself, so you’ll be shifted away from cleaning, and given more stimulating work. After a week, I thought I was making progress as I started getting allocated other tasks, such as chipping tiles off a wall, or covering newly laid floor boards with plastic. Yet these were just temporary jobs, and I was always expected to resume cleaning when they were completed. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing wrong, and worried I’d be cleaning for months. Then Chris told me that to break free from cleaning duties, you need to take the initiative yourself and attempt to break into something else. You should watch other people, try to learn what they are doing and how they do it, and if you see an opportunity to help out, do so. From there you should gradually weasel your way in, and than hopefully before you know it, another new guy is brought in to do your old cleaning duties.
This isn’t always so easy. Just like a kitchen porter, the job of the cleaner is still an important one. When they are not doing their job, it becomes obvious by the mountains of rubbish that can quickly accumulate. If you attempt to work on something else, you have to make sure you’re on top of the cleaning too, otherwise it reflects badly on you.

The site I’m working at also has its own system of internal politics to content with too. The company that has employed me is called TA Bygg, but the site I’m working on is being run by another company called Astor Bygg. Basically I, along with a few other TA guys, have been rented out. Thus I’ve kind of got two bosses. Firstly there is the Astor foreman, Hassie, and Astor’s owner, Anders, who pays regular visits. Secondly, there is Andres, an old TA employee who is responsible for all the other TA people, and reports back to Head Office.

Keeping my job relies on keeping both happy, but sometimes I’m worried that the interests of each conflict. The thing is that on some days I have problems trying to look busy. The site I’m working on is only couple of flats in Gothenburg’s outer suburbs. It’s a pretty small space, which doesn’t take long to clean. After an hour just about everything is done, and it won’t need another clean until the end of the day. As I’m new, it doesn’t look good to be seen loitering, so I’ve tried to use these moments to demonstrate my strong work ethic. I always ask Hassie if there is anything I can do, and usually he can find some menial task. But last Friday, he had nothing, and suggested I just keep cleaning. So I basically had to spend the morning walking around in circles, looking for any piece of rubbish to chuck out. At our morning tea break, I approached Andres about this, as I didn’t want him to see me shuffling around, and report back to TA that I was slacking off. I explained to him that I had asked Hassie for work, and that I happy to do whatever was required. But he didn’t seem bothered at all at my idling. In fact, he than asked if I could do any overtime the following Saturday. When I said I was reluctant as there was so little for me to do, he suggested I come in anyway, take it easy, and just sign off after a few hours. As it was overtime, I would also be paid double!
At first I couldn’t understand it, until I remember who Andres was working for: TA. They had rented as out, and whatever Astor was paying us in wages, no doubt a bit extra was being paid to TA. It is therefore in Andres interests to get as many TA people working as many hours as possible. It makes him look good, and means extra profits for TA. At first I felt I bit cheated. I was doing all the work, yet someone else was sitting back in an office on the other side of town making even more money than me from this arrangement without even lifting a finger. But this ended up being my way out of cleaning. Andres had to keep me looking busy to justify overtime, so he got me to help him out installing doors and windows into the flats. This is much better work. It’s a bit like playing with Lego, but on a bigger scale and you get to use power tools. It also means I’m learning new skills, which makes work more stimulating. When I got home, I found myself inspecting all the door frames in our flat, trying to determine if the builders did a good job or not. (I can tell you now there are some very dodgy door frames in Gothenburg.) Chris says he can never walk into a building without inspecting every surface. Cleaning was really getting me down, but if I can do a bit more of this sort of work, I might just be able to find this job tolerable.

The final unwritten law of the construction industry is that one’s standing within a company is measured by one’s tools. On my first day I was given nothing but a pair of work boots, trousers, T-shirt, and gloves. But as you move up the hierarchy and you start doing more serious work, you’re gradually given more tools and equipment. This morning, Andres presented me with my own fold-up ruler and pencil, with my name written along the side of each. He handed them over unceremoniously, with a casual ‘Here you are, these are for you’, but gave me a look that said ‘Welcome to the next level. You’ve still got a long way to go, but you’re on your way to being one of us.’

Happy Valborgsmässoafton!

2007-04-30T12:29:00.000+01:00

Today is Valborgsmässoafton (or Walpurgis Night in English). It’s a public holiday here in Sweden. The custom is to hold a large parade through the streets at night and light large bonfires, meanwhile teenagers loiter in public parks indulging in a bit of underage binge drinking. (I’ve noticed fears of underage binge-drinking is a constant theme in the Swedish media.) Today is also the King’s Birthday (pictured right). As an aspiring son-in-law, I made sure I sent him a card.

In some brighter news since my last blog entry, it looks like I’ve got a job. On Wednesday I’ll start work at a labourer at a construction company. Five years at university, and soon I’ll be sweeping floors at a building site. But you know what they say about beggars, and from what I gather, anyone in Sweden looking for work is a beggar. Last Saturday at the Berserkers football match (we won, match report to follow shortly), I was chatting to some of the other Australians living here, and the consensus is that finding work in Sweden is exceptionally hard. Some had been looking for 2-3 months, and all talked of going through a stage of depression where they were convinced they’d never get a job.
Language is of course a big barrier. Some of the ads I was looking at, which were for menial jobs like washing trams or lifting boxes, still required applicants to speak good Swedish. But language is not the only barrier, and many Swedes will also testify to the difficulties of finding a job. Unemployment is high, and the competition is intense. Last week there was an article in the local paper about Zara, a chain of clothing stores. They’re about to open a new store in Göteborg, and received over 1000 applicants for 85 positions as sales assistants. Last year the main conservative party got elected to government because of the wide-spread discontent over unemployment. Their first act was to slash taxes for high-income earners, and increase fees for union membership.

People I’ve been talking to seem to think unemployment is high because of the high taxes, as it is just so expensive for a company to hire anyone. One friend of Ankie’s reckons that what a company pays in an individual’s wages, they’ll have to pay again in taxes. The upside of this is that the work conditions are unbelievably good. Life might be tough if you’re unemployed, but it seems that once you do get a job you’re just showered with money and perks.

I got this job through Chris (Ankie’s sister’s fiancé), who moved here from America two months before I arrived. He tells me they get breaks every two hours, sick pay, holiday pay, all work cloths provided, and transport costs covered. They also help out with Swedish lesions, and hold regular social events. The company is also a major sponsor of the local football team, IFK Göteborg, and often gives employees free tickets to matches. Chris also says he’s often pulled aside by the foreman concerned that he is working too hard and told to take it easy. Compared to Chris’ work conditions in America, it is practically a dream job.
The company, TA Bygg, is run by a guy called Niklas, who is attempting to build up an international workforce. At first he seemed a little reluctant to hire me as I had no experience or skills, but in the end I suspect he did so because I was Australian and he didn’t have any other Australians working for him. At the interview, he said he’d spent some time working in Gold Coast a few years ago, and loved it. Claimed Australians were very friendly, and it was the second best country in the world after Sweden.

For me, finding a job is a big relief. I can still look for other work on the side, but it’s not so urgent and I’ve got time. It’s also good to get out of the International School, as some kids had taken to calling me ‘The Hangman’, because they knew that’s what they’d be playing if I took over their class. I’m also hoping to write freelance on the side too. Ohh and I’m still hopefully of convincing Princess Victoria to marry me.

Red Tape in the Welfare State

2007-04-24T11:07:00.001+01:00

I have now been in Sweden for a month, and I am still without a full-time job. Finding work in a country with high unemployment was always going to be hard. Not speaking Swedish or having any vocational qualifications also obviously limits my options, but I’ve also been hampered by Sweden’s love of red tape.

Despite a reputation for efficiency, I’ve noticed a lot of things in Sweden are actually very slow and very bureaucratic. Ankie and I are still waiting to be connected with broadband internet, having ordered it eight weeks ago. We’ve called them up numerous times but each time get a different story. The first time they claimed we were already connected. Another time they offered to re-order it, meaning we’d have to wait another 2-4 weeks. This was also going to mean we could no longer claim the special deal that they were advertising when we first ordered broadband. After a while we decided to use the threat of cancelling and switching to another provider. But the operator just called our bluff claiming, “Well, if that’s what you want do.” Customer service is typically very apathetic, with no sense of urgency.
We have also been trying to subscribe to the local newspaper. After three weeks we were yet to receive a single copy so we gave them a call this morning. Turns out we haven’t been receiving the paper because the name printed on our door isn’t us, but the previous tenant, and we hadn’t got round to changing it yet. Would we get a refund for the past three weeks? No, because despite the fact we haven’t received a paper, the delivery boy has actually been calling into our apartment block everyday with our newspaper since our subscription started. But until we change the names on our door, he is not going to actually deliver it. Did they think to contact us? Maybe a phone call, or get the delivery boy to ring our doorbell since he is there anyway? ‘No, that’s not really our problem.’

Yet despite this inefficientcy, Sweden does strike me as a very orderly society. I’ve noticed Swedes love queues, with every single shop having long patient queues outfront. There is an ice-cream stand near the Central Station that I walk past nearly everyday, and every time there is a 15-20 metre queue out-front. And everyone just stands there patiently, seemingly unperturbed at having to spend half their lunch break waiting for an ice cream.
Those machines issuing numbered tickets are popular, with even the smallest business insisting all customers take a ticket before they can be served. Last week Ankie and I went into an electronics shop, where Ankie had to get a ticket not only to speak to a sales assistant to ask for advice, but later on in the same shop had to take another ticket to be served by a cashier afterwards. The upside is that when you’re just browsing and really don’t want to be hassled by a sales assistant, staff won’t touch you unless you get a numbered ticket.
Every purchase requires a receipt, no matter how small. The other day I was given a receipt after buying a take-away coffee from a cafe. Why? I am I expected to claim it back on tax? Or return it if I’m not happy with it?
Things are so orderly that everything is calculated in very exact measurements. If you want a hamburger, it’s not a choice of small or large, but 90g or 150g. Beer doesn’t come in pints or pots, but in 40cl. I was even watching an American film on television where one of the characters said something like, “it’s hot, it must be 100 degrees.” So what do the Swedish subtitles say: “It’s hot, it must be 38.6 degrees.”

As for job hunting, it isn’t as simple as just sending in your CV and waiting for a reply. Often I’m asked to register my details on a database, providing every detail of my life to date. Then I can submit my CV, only to be told that someone might contact you in regards to the job in 3 - 4 weeks time. These aren’t applications for big corporate jobs, but basic menial jobs. Even when I handed out my CV in person to pubs and restaurants, I was generally told I might be contacted in a few weeks.

But I’m making some progress. I now have a Personal Number, which is integral for doing anything and everything in Sweden. I’m now on the population registry and in the system. In the eyes of Swedish bureaucrats, I now exist. Finally I can enrol in Swedish classes, borrow books from the library and set up a bank account. And it only took four weeks!

Sun and Snow

2007-04-18T12:48:00.000+01:00

Today it is 18 degrees and sunny. Every spare patch of grass has been taken over by a half-naked Swede soaking up sun rays. In fact it has been sunny ever since I arrived here. Cold, 3 degrees sometimes, but still sunny. However, last Sunday week was an exception, as it was cloudy, and rained all day. Then suddenly it started snowing. Withing an hour eveything was covered in snow. Then just as suddenly, all the snow melted and by the following morning it was sunny again. The took this video from my kitchen window:

If it hasn't uploaded, just use the following link: http://s154.photobucket.com/albums/s278/nictownsend_photos/?action=view¤t=Snowoutfront.flv Otherwise, below are some photos.

Good Ol’ Göteborg Forever.

2007-04-13T16:02:00.000+01:00

My football career to date is best described as pitiful. I played two seasons with East Brunswick Under 14s, and two seasons with Moonee Valley Under 16s. My personal highlight was once scoring a goal, 10 metres out, right in front. In another game, I once made it to three kicks. Although to be fair I was better known around the club as the kid who burst into tears at training after being hip-and-shouldered. My trophy cabinet has three Encouragement Awards, as my coaches always admired my persistence. Not many kids would happily tolerate being left on the bench every weekend. As an acknowledgment of my perseverance, I was allowed to play the last five minutes of the Grand Final, in the forward pocket when our team was down 15 goals.
By my final season at Moonee Valley a combination of factors (i.e. gradual improvement of skills, strength, and absence of more competent team mates) I finally became a regular starter on the halfback flank. I even stopped counting all my kicks and handballs. But by this stage I was 16, had my first job, improved social life, and started evaluating how I was spending my time. Then early one Saturday morning in the middle of winter, as I stood in the mud and rain in ridiculously short shorts, watching another team hammer us by 10-20 goals, I had a good long think. I thought about all the other things I could have been doing instead.

But now I’m back! As of last week, I’m playing football again, this time with the Goteborg Berserkers. I’m told games are played with reduced numbers and rarely 18-a-side, and our home ground is actually a Rugby pitch. But it is still an Aussie Rules football club, in a place where most would expect to find none. And not only do cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö have teams, but so too do smaller towns like Helsingborg, Borås and Karlstad.
Training started this week, with a healthy turnout of 15 people. Contrary to expectations, most of the team are not Australian ex-pats, but are actually Swedish, who have never even been to Australia.

Our coach and founder is Martin Språng. After seeing a glimpse of an AFL match on Swedish TV, Martin started looking up the game online, and from there he started up his own team. (He has written up a complete history on the web site, highlights including the day four people turned up to training, rather then the usual two.) A big portion of the team is made up of Martin’s friends and extended family. Others have joined after seeing recruitment posters (pictured below) throughout Göteborg.
At training Martin comes up with the same catch phrases heard at any other Australian football club training session (e.g. “More Talk”, “Keep it tight”, “Bring it in boys”) but in a Swedish accent. From what I gather, he spends most of his spare time downloading AFL matches off the internet, and watching them all. Before training, everyone sits around talking about the weekend’s AFL results. For the non-Swedish speaker it sounds like incomprehensible Swedish broken up with terms like “Sydney Swans” or “Chris Judd”. It’s pretty surreal.
Our first game is one April 28, vs. the Karlstad Dragons. Karlstad is only a small town (pop. 80,000) in central Sweden, but since Martin’s younger brother Joel moved there, they too now have their own footy team. Just in case Channel 7 and the Herald Sun forget to cover the big match, I’ll make sure a complete report is published here on this blog.

www.garfc.se

Brazil v Chile in Sweden

2007-04-02T12:58:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday week I went to see Brazil play Chile here in Gothenburg (I don’t understand the logic behind it either). It was quite surreal watching players like Ronaldinho. It was hard to believe that the guy we’ve all seen so many times in Nike and Pepsi commercials is the same little man running around in front of me. I took the following video of Ronaldinho scoring a goal from a free kick, although he looks like a blurry yellow dot. This is an exclusive to My Life As A Swede, and you won’t find it on You Tube. For one, the videos on You Tube are much better quality.

(Note: I've tried to insert the video into this blog entry, but if it doesn't appear, just try the following link: http://s154.photobucket.com/albums/s278/nictownsend_photos/?action=view&current=RonaldinhoGoalvChile.flv)

Those that can't...

2007-04-02T12:55:00.000+01:00

Apologies for not updating this blog for a while, but I haven’t had internet access. Since my last entry, Ankie and I have moved from her mother’s place, and now living in our own flat.

I’ve also started working as a substitute teacher at the International School. The place seems really disorganised. Last Tuesday I got a phone call, and with only 30 minutes notice, was asked to take over some classes from a sick teacher. No interview, no request for my CV, and no background check. Despite having no previous experience or training as a teacher, I was put in charge of 30 teenage kids. It didn’t help that the teacher I was taking over didn’t have a chance to leave a class plan. Karin, the woman responsible for finding substitute teachers, suggested I just ask the students what they were studying, and take it from there. The problem with this plan of course is that students know it is not in their interest to inform me of what they should be doing.

As any one can remember from school, kids see a substitute teacher as someone to take advantage of. I tried asking them what they were up to, but naturally they claimed they didn’t know. Most of my time was spend just getting them to sit down, turn off their phones and keep quiet. When I finally calmed them down, they just looked at me expectantly and asked what they were supposed to do. When all I could do was shrug and say I didn’t know, they just started talking to each other again.

At first it was quite stressful, but part of my problem was that I assumed I was expected to take over from where the regularly teacher left off. I thought I would be accountable if classes didn’t progress through their normal curriculum. In short, I thought a substitute teacher was expected to actually teach. However, after a couple of days I came to realise I was basically a glorified babysitter. Karin and the other teachers couldn’t care less what I did with the students, as long as I kept them in the classroom, and kept them quiet and occupied. As Karin said to me herself, “If you don’t know what their doing, its not your problems. Just wing it.” With this in mind, my last few lessons were just spend playing hangman and celebrity head. Another great trick was having a quiz. I’d get each student to write a question about the class’s topic, accumulate them together, read them out to the whole class and have a competition to see who got the most right answers. This kept students occupied, and gave the appearance of doing something educational and relevant. When I was in school, whenever the teachers broke up the day with a game of hangman, I saw it as a rare act of benevolence. I now know it was always out of pure apathy.

It’s an interesting experience, and a pretty easy way to earn some money. The only problem is the irregular hours, as I can only work when someone else is sick or away on holidays. At most I might do 3-4 hours on any one day, but often spread over a 6-7 hour period. Breaks are never long enough for me to do anything in that time so essentially its full-time hours, but with part-time pay. And of course there will be no work during holidays, with summer holidays lasting two months. It will be fine short-term, but I’m still going to need some other work.

The Adventure Begins

2007-03-23T12:30:00.000+01:00

I’ve now arrived in Sweden, and have been here a little less then 40 hours. Its 3 degrees, with fierce cold winds from the arctic. But its also sunny, so for most Swedes, its summer.

In the 30 hours it took me to get her, Ankie’s sister Maria gave birth to a baby boy. In the last phone conversation I had with Ankie before leaving, she told me that Maria had called her mother, worried she was about to give birth. Ankie’s mother dismissed this as Maria just being overly anxious, as she wasn’t due for another three weeks. At Tullamarine airport I got a text message saying Maria was giving birth, and when I finally arrived, young Adam had been born. Although at that stage he wasn’t called Adam yet, as it was only yesterday that Maria and Chris agreed on a name.

In the short time I’ve been here, I already feel overwhelmed by the Swedish language. I can understand some signs, and certain words, but when people speak, it just sounds incomprehensible. Yesterday, when I sat down on a tram, some guy started yelling at me. I thought I had done something wrong, and was trying to explain to him I didn’t speak much Swedish. Then I noticed he was slurring and struggling to stand up. Turns out he was just a drunk who was yelling at anyone who would listen to him.
Maria’s fiancée Chris says in the two months he’s been here he’s learnt enough Swedish to have simple conversations. If I can get to that stage in two months, I’ll be rapt, but right now I feel there is so much to learn that I’ll forever be a mute. Everyone speaks excellent English, but not speaking Swedish is still a hindrance. For one I can’t read the paper, or watch the news. I’m starting to appreciate just how hard life must be for people who are illiterate, or migrants who don’t speak any English at all.

Open Letter to Princess Mary

2007-03-16T09:17:00.000+01:00

With only days left until I arrive in Sweden, I’m getting increasingly anxious about my work situation. Which got me thinking: Maybe I should contact other Australian expats for advice? We’re always being told that Australians like to stick together, and help each other out. With this in mind, I’ve decided I should approach Princess Mary Donaldson of Denmark, and see what advice she can impart.

Court of TRH The Crown Princess of Denmark
PO Box 2143
DK-1015 Copenhagen K
Denmark

Dear Princess Mary

My name is Nic, and I’m a young Australian who is about to move to Sweden. I, like many Australians, have been inspired by your riches-to-riches story. Not a day goes by that I don’t marvel at your lifetime of achievement. My friends and I will spend hours talking about you, with our admiration often reducing us into stunned silence. Whenever I meet other Scandinavians, your name often comes up, and every time I’m proud to tell them: “Mary and I were born under the jurisdictions of the same state!”
Many have said you’re a role model for all young Australian women. But as the most successful Australian living in Scandinavia, you’re also a role model for me. Thus I am attempting to follow your example, and currently in the process of wooing Princess Victoria of Sweden, in the hope that I too can marry into royalty. As one Australian expatriate to another, I seek your help and assistance.

No doubt you know Princess Victoria personally. In fact you’re probably even related. (We know what you royals are like: nearly as incestuous as Tasmanians!). So I was wondering if it was possible for you to introduce us? I’d prefer to avoid a one-on-one meeting, as I fear that could be awkward and uncomfortable. I was thinking about something subtler, like a nice informal dinner party at your palace in Copenhagen. That way we could meet and chat casually. Maybe invite some of your close friends, and “randomly” sit Victoria and I next to one another.
I might also need your assistance in facilitating conversation, so as to avoid any uncomfortable silences. Maybe slip in a few fixers such as “So Nic, tell us about your new yacht,” or “I can’t believe you were voted Most Eligible Batchelor of the Year again!” And every so often try a “really Victoria, what a coincidence, Nic also likes to watch movies. You two have so much in common!” I take it as given that you’ll also fain laughter at all my jokes.

I’m sure you’re a very busy woman (those ceremonial ribbons don’t cut themselves) but I’d really appreciated it if you could make this a priority. As heir to the Swedish throne, Princess Victoria is obviously quite a catch, and I fear she will not remain single for too long. Thus, time is of the essence, and I’m quite keen to get the ball rolling on this one. So, if you could get back to me ASAP with the arrangements, I’d be very grateful.
Yours faithfully,
Nic Townsend
PS. Would it also be possible to stay at your palace while I’m in Copenhagen? If this isn’t convenient, can you recommend any good backpacker hostels?

Job Hunting

2007-03-02T09:47:00.000+01:00

Hi, and welcome to my blog, My Life As a Swede. Less then two weeks now, until I arrive in Gothenburg. At this stage I feel a mixture of excitement and anxiety about moving to Sweden. Excited by the prospect of living in a new country, and all the opportunities it presents. But also anxious about the uncertainty ahead, and how/if it will all work out. In the short term, my biggest challenge will be getting work. From all accounts, the Swedish job market can be difficult at the best of times, and will only be compounded by my lack of Swedish.

So of late I’ve spent much of my spare time coming up with creative ways for supporting myself in one of the world’s most expensive countries. Below is a list of possibilities.

1. Crown Prince

To date the most successful antipodean in Scandinavia is easily Princess Mary of Denmark. By getting herself hitched to the Crown Prince, she has become an ‘inspiration’ and ‘role-model’ in the eyes of many. Without doing a day’s work, she has set herself up for a life of extraordinary privilege and obscene wealth.
She is certainly an inspiration for me, and I could do no worse then follow in her footsteps by marrying into a royal family. Conveniently enough, the heir to the Swedish throne just happens to be the young unattached Princess Victoria. To date the 29 year-old is still looking for Mr Right.

2. Furniture Designer

Thanks to Ikea, Sweden is synonymous with cheap designer furniture. Like French chiefs, Italian sports cars and Brazilian footballers, nationality immediately equates to a perception of excellence. Perhaps moving to Sweden is my opportunity to start a designer furniture business? To capture the image-conscience yuppie market, I could change my name to Nik Tøunsen, and give all my designs fancy Scandinavian names, with lots of å and ø.
On the surface, my lack of design skills might make my furniture look crude and primitive. But I prefer to label the process as stripping away the destructive forces of excessive materialism and superfluous extravagance, and getting back to a basic functional minimalism. Complicated instructions could hide my shoddy designs. What’s that, your Kønå coffee table has collapsed? We’ll obviously you didn’t put it together properly. Nothing to do with my craftsmanship, I’m a creative genius.

3. Crime Writer.

Swedes love their crime writers. Henning Mankell, Kerstin Ekman, Ake Edwardson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, to name but a few. In fact Sweden has the highest population of crime writers per capita (possibly?). Despite exceptionally high living standards, few social problems, and one of the lowest crime rates in the world, Sweden seems to be a popular setting for gritty gruesome crime thrillers.
Maybe it’s the absence of crime that causes this proliferation of crime writers? Why else would a nation that has been free of warfare and social upheaval for generations, find violence such a curious novelty? Or maybe Swedes are sick of their goody-goody image, and enjoy novels that can convince them that towns in rural Sweden are on par with South Central Los Angeles?
I'd like to explore the niche market for True Crime: Novels about criminals and major crimes that have actually taken place in Sweden. Such as Lars Lindqvist's unpaid library fine, Jonas Larsson the jaywalker, as well as the notorious cartel of school kids and their stolen sweets. It’s the real Sweden, like you’ve never seen it before. Behind the squeaky-clean wholesome image discover ...the squeaky-clean wholesome reality. Forget it Jake, it’s Swede-town.