This place though...

So for our first ten days in Sweden we stayed in an AirBnB in an area of Stockholm called Nacka. At the end of our street was a little park, with a hill going up above the lake. Esther had been there pretty much every day since we got there, and apparently the park was pretty amazing. Apart from the usual slide, climbing frame, swings, etc., it had two big trampolines, which instantly promoted it to Best Park Ever, for the kids.

I finally made it up there a couple of days before we were due to leave. Of course, it instantly became vitally important to the children that I play on the trampoline with them. Of course, this ended with all three children ending up in tears because a 193cm 100kg (6'4" 15st10lb for my metrically challenged English readers) man has no place being on a trampoline with three small children, no matter how much he loves them and desperately wants to avoid hurting them.

I'd say we learned our lesson, but the next evening we went again, and the children begged and begged me to go on with them, and I stood firm for a little while, even reminding them that it ended with everyone crying last time, but my refusal just ended up with them crying, so it didn't seem to do a lot of good. In the face of crying children, I caved and got on and bounced with them very carefully, but they still all got hurt and ended up crying with twisted ankles and bumped heads on the way home.

The third night (our last in the house) I actually learned my lesson and didn't give in, even when they cried. Instead I walked up to the top of the hill the park is on. And wow, was I ever rewarded for my resolve this time.

I am really bad at photography. I think this is well established by now

I couldn't do it any kind of justice with my phone camera of course, and this is one time even words won't do it. To people used to the area it was probably a fairly ordinary but nice enough evening. To me though it was just amazing. The colours were beautiful, and looking out over the forest in the last pink light of the evening was spectacular. The lakes were so serene, and mirrored the colour of the sky with a calm faithfulness. I could look over and see the buildings in central Stockholm as well, shining in the evening light. It was just such a beautiful, peaceful moment. 

This country is beautiful.

Skansen

Once we knew that we were coming to Sweden, and I'd got the job with Mirado, the focus of our research changed. Before it had been frenzied searching for any information to try to glean whether we'd like it, whether we could afford it, and just how much greener the grass is in Sweden compared to England:

A totally accurate and not at all photoshopped or idealised or miscaptioned photo of the land border between England (foreground) and Sweden (background).

Now, with the move most definitely on, we shifted. First up was housing, which you'll hear more about in another post, but straight after that was all the awesome stuff we could do.

Top of my list was Skansen. Skansen is the world's oldest open-air museum, running since the 1890s. I've been to exactly two open-air museums before: St Fagan's in Cardiff, Wales, and Ste. Marie-among-the-Hurons in Midland, Ontario. Both have been amazing, so I was super-excited to see the originator of them.

Skansen is basically a collection of Swedish history. As in, buildings that were picked up, moved from their locations, and dropped off on an island in Stockholm. Then the staff of the museum adopt roles and play their historical parts, so it's a really immersive experience, with history coming to life, and all sorts of horrible cliches like that.

So it ended up top of our list to go to, and on our first actual free day, off we went.

We got their by commuter boat, because of course you would. The pier is about 5 minutes walk from the train station, which goes through an actual cave. The kids loved it. Actually, I say the kids loved it... I mean that I loved it, because I'm a big kid, and they tolerated my getting excited showing them stalactites and rock formations.

The boat journey took us to the island of Djurgården, which Esther was very disappointed with, because she argues it's a misleading name due to the fact that it looks like it's called "Animal Garden". I argue that she's wrong, and will submit evidence in the form of terrible photos later herein. I'm sleeping on the sofa tonight if she reads this before bed... ^{but I'm totally right though}

The ferry took us past Gröna Lund, which in hindsight, probably wasn't the best place to take the kids past on the way to the history museum. Gröna Lund is basically what happened when you played Roller Coaster Tycoon on a really small plot, so ended up with a park that built everything on top of each other and in the same space. Very high density roller coasters, so a lot for the kids to see and get excited about. They're good kids really, though, so the complaining only lasted a little while. Once we were on the island, we made our way straight to Skansen. Here we had our second brief brush with Swedish bureaucracy, and it nearly ruined our day.

The first had been the day before, when I tried with Piroz's help to get Esther a phone contract, and discovered that such is completely impossible without a personnummer, which is the number you're given when your name is written into the Swedish Population Register. The second was when we bought a year's pass to Skansen. Even for that we needed to provide a personnummer, and it caused some consternation to the poor lady taking our details that we didn't have them, forcing her to fudge the form. Bureaucracy is apparently a thing here.

Still, we got in, Skansen card in hand, and promptly looked for lunch (because I'm sure the biggest tourist trap in Stockholm is totally a reasonable place to buy lunch out, right?). The map listed a bakery called Flickorna Helin, as a nice place to get lunch, so off we trekked, most of the way across Skansen, only to discover that the cafe is outside the gates, so we'd have to go all the way round again... We regretted it almost immediately.. the cafe was little and pokey (sorry, "cosy"), all the signs were handwritten in chalk (and therefore even harder to read than most Swedish for us), and a slice of cake cost 90kr. Inexplicably, the kids chose this moment to climb on the chairs and dance around. Never have I had a more stressful two minutes in a cafe. I was desperately trying to process all the information I had to figure out how to manage this place for Esther's sake, but wishing we could just go, and it turned out she was feeling the same. So we beat a hasty tactical withdrawal, and went and ordered hot dogs from the stand outside Skansen.

Still... I get to feel proud of myself in this story, because I only went and ordered the hot dogs in Swedish! Entirely. It was an actual, bona fide, two-way conversation with a Swede, in Swedish. 5 different orders (2 french hot dogs, one with onions ketchup and mustard, one with just ketchup, a normal hot dog with fries and juice, and two chicken nuggets meals with fries and juice, two pear juices and a strawberry), a queue of people behind me, a noisy environment, kids constantly checking I was ordering right, and I still ordered the whole thing in Swedish. I was so pleased with myself...

Having got into Skansen again (without bureaucratic clashes this time) I was really excited to finally see all the history. It was only at this point that I learned I was the only one who cared in the least for the history. Everyone else was in it for the animals. Elk, reindeer, wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, seals, otters, rabbits, and native Nordic breeds of sheep and goats.  I've must confess, that's a pretty cool selection of animals.

I tried to take photos of most of them, but I also tried to get us in all of them, because otherwise it's just a picture of an animal and my skills on my phone aren't any match for what I can find on Google Images, so I don't really see the point of pictures unless it's to record the context of you seeing the animals. Unfortunately, it's a very silly philosophy, because the result is just terrible pictures where you see, as Kristofer tactfully put it on Monday morning, "Pictures of your family with teeny tiny animals far away somewhere."

Fair comment:

There's an elk (moose) somewhere in this picture

Bears... (this is probably the best of the terrible animal pics)

Different bears

And the worst one (although Elanor's smile redeems it I think) - there's a wolf in this picture (other than the two on Elanor's ears and the one in her hand).

After the animals, of course the children had spent ages not playing in the play area, so now they totally needed to play, and so we went to the playground. On the way, Esther bought this:

If I look grumpy it's because I'm on my way to the park instead of the historical stuff, Elanor has stolen my sunglasses and I'm getting a headache, and we'd just given in to an expensive tourist trap. It has nothing to do with the weird reindeer thing I'm eating which is totally delicious

It was the most tourist-trappy thing imaginable, and cost 90kr, but I guess sometimes it's ok to give in. It's reindeer meat, with wild green salad, lingon (rhymes with Klingon) berry jam, wrapped in an apparently Swedish flatbread. It was jättegod. As a freebie extra, the lady who sold it to us was lovely, and taught us how to say, "Jag skulle vilja ha..." ("I would like..."). Almost everybody is absolutely lovely here, especially when you try to speak Swedish with them. If Swedes have a reputation for coolness and unfriendliness, it's the most undeserved stereotype ever.

I sound really grumpy here, but please don't take it too seriously. I will readily admit to overuse of snark in my writing and as anyone who's heard one of my technical presentations can attest, I use it there too. But I genuinely had a really nice day. Skansen is beautiful, and I got to see a few cool old buildings, and even a grump like me will admit that seeing wolves and elk is a fantastic experience. And most of all, I got to see my kids really enjoy themselves and spend a really happy day. Plus, we've got the year's pass, so I can go back and see log cabins and stave churches and rune stones whenever I like.

So, after an hour's play in the park, where I had an enjoyable half hour chat with an English guy who once worked at Thales, we headed for home, tired, several shades more pink than we left, and even more in love with Sweden than before.

Bluebells and Simbelmynë

Before subjecting you to my terrible animal pictures again, here's a terrible picture of some flowers:

Esther loves bluebells. They're (almost) her favourite flower. One of her favourite things to do in May is go to places like this:

You can accuse England of many things, but being ugly in Spring isn't one of them.
Also no, sorry, I don't know where this is. But pretty much every deciduous wood in England is like this in May.

She likes them so much that it was one of the things we researched before we came here. Unfortunately our research was somewhat... inconclusive. Daffodils are a big thing in Sweden, as are tulips, but not so much on bluebells. 

So I found myself on my way home with a bag full of groceries (blissfully unaware that the milk I'd bought was the consistency of slightly-set paint), and I see the picture above. I excitedly snap a picture in the gloom (it was nearly 11:20pm so it was starting to get dark...) and send it to Esther and we excitedly message each other about how there are bluebells here.

What's the point of this story? Well... I just actually looked at the picture in preparing this blog, and observed that they're not even close to bluebells:

Seriously, who takes a photo of his wife's favourite flower for her from point-blank range without first checking that it's actually that flower?

So the upshot of this is... Sweden doesn't appear to have bluebells. This is the first actual negative thing about Sweden I can think of. Don't get used to me finding fault with Sweden on this blog though... Finding fault with Sweden is like criticising cake, or hugs, or Christmas. Besides, all the woods here seem to be just as thick with a white flower that I've never heard of, so I've taken to calling it simbelmynë, because I'm a massive Lord of the Rings fan, because this place is basically Middle Earth anyway, and because the flowers look just like it:

Sorry, this picture's from the film, not Sweden. Your blogger failed to get a picture of the real thing. But I promise it looks similar...

Sorry if a post on Nordic silviculture wasn't what you were looking for in this blog. I'm pretty much writing about anything I find interesting or nice or weird (relative to England) about Sweden. Flowers and forestry included. 

Immigrants

OK. I have to start this post with an apology. I'm really bad at animal pictures:

If you squint and look really carefully you can see a buck and a doe hanging out in someone's garden

I win at grocery shopping

So, I'd been panicking a little over the cost of living in Sweden. In two trips to ICA (the supermarket local to our AirBnB) we'd spent about a bajillion kronor. Well, about 800 anyway. Although it's not terribly accurate, when working out prices in our heads we work on an exchange rate of roughly 10kr:£1, so 800kr in 2 days was a bit scary, especially as we hadn't bought any real meals, and hadn't bought more than we needed for those two days... 

So Friday night I took my first trip to ICA (pronounced ee-kah) on my own, determined to see if I could make a shop cheaper. 

At the end of our street I saw this pretty lady watching me suspiciously:

I caught the photo as she turned to run

As she ran down the hill I ran to the edge of the hill to see if I could still see her, completely expecting not to. But I got to see her, and her gentleman friend too:

This is the best animal photo in this blog post, almost all of which is animal photos. I did already apologise...

It may have been a good omen. I took an hour at ICA (Google Translate on Android is amazing, by the way), but I came away with enough food to last us through the weekend and for breakfast and lunch on Monday, all for 450kr. Expensive by English standards, but it took us from the realm of rice and water diet being the only financially sustainable option, to actually having a fighting chance to be able to afford to live in this country.

I think the difference was  that without the time pressure of shopping with Piroz and Kristofer, or our poor bored children, I could really hunt the deals. Just like in a shop in my native language. But I also did a much better job at figuring out what I was really looking at. Swedish supermarkets are crazy. I mean, I'm sure English ones are to Swedes, but this was just insane. They have two aisles for skinka (ham), a two aisles for ost (cheese), and two aisles for knäckebröd (no translation provided... j/k it's ryvita). I could figure out which specifically Swedish foods might be accepted as substitutes for English favourites. This, for example, might be an acceptable substitute for jaffa cakes:

It wasn't

This, on the other hand, would not be an acceptable substitute for tuna:

Fortunately I knew enough not to try this one...

"Filmjölk"

So here I am having taken an hour to get a small basket of food together. It's 10.55pm, and the shop closes in 5 minutes and (gasp) it's nearly getting dark outside. I need only one more thing, and it's an easy one, and I even know the Swedish for it: I need some milk (in Swedish: mjölk). So I head over to the large, well-stocked milk section. I want whole (full fat) milk, because that's what our family is used to. For a bit more context (for my Swedish or other non-British readers) in Britain milk is colour coded, and everyone is more or less settled on the same colour standard. Red is skimmed (1%ish), green is semi-skimmed (2%ish), and blue is whole (4%ish). I see a blue carton and my eyes just go for it. It's next to the "mellanmjölk". "Mellan" I know means "between" so I infer (and confirm on Google Translate) that "mellanmjölk" is semi-skimmed milk:

Semi-skimmed milk

So, nearby the nice, green, semi-skimmed milk, I see this:

Perfect. I genuinely didn't rely on the colour... I'm not naive enough to assume that, but I think it contributed to the confirmation bias. Knowing that many Swedish words are similar to their English cognates but with a vowel or two changed, it wasn't too crazy to assume that "fil" meant "full", and that "full milk" was a reasonable way to express the concept of milk without any of the fat removed. So I grabbed two cartons and paid and left. 

Next morning,  I make the kids breakfast, and I pour the milk on their Weetos. It comes out of the carton in a motion I can best describe as a "goop". I smelled it, and it smelled... kinda funky. I couldn't place my finger on it exactly at first, but it certainly wasn't milk. The kids weren't too impressed with my attempted breakfast. 

Only then did I google "filmjölk", and learn that it's fermented milk. Sour milk. There's not a direct English translation, but it's basically milk which is past the prime of its life and is into the stage with arthritis and forgetting what it came into the room for. 

Apparently it's mostly used by Swedes for cereal, funnily enough, but the kids didn't fancy it. I was kinda chuffed to bits though. I feel like every expat needs a silly-immigrants story, and I'd got mine after two days. Nice.

Skansen

When I started writing this post it was intended to be a post about our day-trip to Skansen, with a brief mention of my first successful shopping trip. Then the shopping trip turned into a pageful, so Skansen became a footnote. I couldn't let Skansen be a footnote on an entry about Skansen, so instead Skansen gets its own entry :) 

A busy few days

"We'll have a few days off in Stockholm when we get there... it'll be like a nice little holiday. We'll go to Skansen, Vasamuseet, go on a boat tour... it'll be lovely."

So Thursday morning rolled round. We'd sort of settled into the place we'd call home for the next 10 days. And I had to set my alarm for 6.30 to go to work.

Every Thursday morning, Mirado has a company breakfast. One of the challenges of running a consultancy company is that all your consultants go away to work in their separate assignments, and never see each other. So Mirado makes a special effort to keep the company bonded by arranging regular get-togethers. The most frequent is the Thursday morning breakfast.

Everyone goes to Mirado HQ, and eats breakfast and shares knowledge. Each Thursday, one or two people volunteer to present, and give a presentation on something, in order to spread and share knowledge around the company. This Thursday the theme was "Test/QA". In my time at Thales I did a lot of work in the area, and I felt like I really had a lot I could offer, so even though I knew I'd be shattered from the journey, I couldn't resist volunteering to present.

So I found myself up bright and early on a cold and frosty May morning, doing my commute for the first time. It was a stunning morning... the sun was up and bright even at 7am, but everything was all white with frost on top of the hill where we were staying. It was really spectacular, and standing in the sun at the train station waiting for my train I laughed out loud at how beautiful it was. It really helped me feel better after the night before.

Sunlight is bright

The Presentation

I'd stayed up the night before (confession time) putting the presentation together, and when I did my final runthrough at 2am it had gone awfully... I rambled, I struggled to coherently put my thoughts together, and I generally did a terrible job of it. I really regretted volunteering to do it.


Meeting everyone at Mirado helped. Everyone was super friendly, and even seemed genuinely excited to meet me and to have me on board.

When it came to the actual presentation, I felt like I nailed it. I spoke well, clearly, and managed to get across some passion and excitement on the topic. I managed to pitch the snark and sarcasm just right, to make it funny and engaging, without sounding like I hated the stuff I was presenting on. In questions and answers afterwards, we developed an idea for a way the content could be genuinely useful in future.

So that was awesome.

The Interview

On the day we moved all our stuff out of our house in Mere, I'd had a phone call from Piroz, asking about some aspects of my skill set, for a possible assignment. By Wednesday evening that had turned into an interview on Thurdsay afternoon, and a mentoring meeting with Jonas (another of the founders of Mirado), to coach me on some of the technologies that would be useful to know about for the interview. 

So I went back home, spent a little while with Esther and the kids, then we had to get straight back on the train to get me to the interview in time. We went on the train together, and got most of the way to where I needed to be for the interview, but then I took a wrong turn. Most of the streets in central Stockholm are pretty grid-shaped, and with the traffic on the other side of the road, I found my bearings worse than normal, and we took a couple of wrong turns. In the end I had to rush to my interview, and leave Esther with the kids in a back street somewhere in Stockholm!

The interview itself went great. I felt like I really clicked with the interviewer, and my answers to all his questions flowed really naturally and I asked some pretty on-point questions too. The company was a company called TingCore, who make all sorts of Internet-of-Things type devices in the world of energy. The project I was interviewing for was called Charge and Drive, creating the software that runs networks of electric car charging points.

Mirado HQ

When I got back from the interview, I met up with Esther again, and we went to Mirado HQ. I was pretty buzzing after the interview, and I was pretty excited to tell Piroz how it went. Then the kids finally got their chance to eat sweets and play PS4 at the office. Seriously, I think of all the things we've talked with the kids about going to Sweden, the PS4 at Mirado is the thing James has been most excited for.

The office is really nice. It's basically like a big lounge (vardagsrum), with sofas and big comfy chairs... a big long bar table with stools, and a rather large drinks cabinet at the back :D Apparently they occasionally get people trying to come in thinking they're a new pop-up bar or something. There are a couple of big TVs each with a PS4 (one of which comes with full VR stuff), and it's just generally a place to relax and have fun.  

The moment James had been living for the previous several months...

William enjoyed it until the shark started chasing him

Everyone in the office has been great with the kids. It was just Kristofer and Piroz that evening. I kept feeling like they're my bosses, so I have to maintain some professional decorum, even when my kids are being monsters, but Piroz helped them with the PlayStation, and they were both super relaxed with them and just generally really nice. 

By that evening I learned that I had another interview lined up the next day, for Discovery (as in the TV network). 

Day 2

Thursday was supposed to be a nice relaxing-settling-in-day, before we knew about the interview. Friday was supposed to be a getting-stuff-done-day, before we knew about the second interview. We had planned on going shopping, going and registering on the Swedish population register, and sorting out my requests for laptop and phone from Mirado. If we got time, we figured we'd go and see the Vasamuseet in Stockholm.

Just like the first day, it didn't really work out that way. In the morning I went with Piroz to buy a phone (one of these) arranged to meet Jonas again for more mentoring for the second interview, which was perfect because he's consulting as a senior architect at Discovery. He's got a great style, and he really knows his stuff. Also, he took me out for Asian food for lunch, so that's always good :)

While at lunch I got the news that Joachim at TingCore wanted to take me on, which felt pretty good! I felt confident that I'd enjoy the job at TingCore, so I went into the interview at Discovery knowing that I didn't have everything riding on it.

This amazing church is in a plain old backstreet on the walk between Mirado and Discovery

Ironically then, I felt like the interview didn't go so well. I slipped on a couple of questions, and at one point had to give up on answering a question because I just couldn't remember. Maybe I was feeling too relaxed!

Apparently it hadn't gone so badly though... by the time I got back to Mirado HQ Piroz told me that Discovery liked me too and now I had the choice of which assignment to go for! By then I'd picked out the laptop I wanted too, so we sat down and put in the order for it. 

The Friday evening atmosphere at Mirado was great, I had two job offers to choose from, and a laptop on the way... there was a lot to feel good about! 

It wasn't quite the first two days we had planned, but they were pretty good! For me at least... poor Esther had basically been stuck with the kids in a foreign country, and we were really missing each other! So the next couple of days were just what we needed!...

The AirBnb

For the first 10 days in Stockholm, we stayed in an AirBnB. We got the taxi from the airport (when it snowed) and arrived at our new home (for a week and a half) in Nacka, Stockholm.

We got into the house, and saw this:

Elanor ponders her new life ^{(actually she's on Esther's phone chatting to one of her friends in England but that kind of ruins the image a little so I'm just going to pretend she's "pondering")}

That's the view from the back of the house we stayed in. The rest of the house was nice, but this location was stunning. Also, the picture isn't doing it justice (a common theme in all the pictures we're taking in Sweden).

The interior of the house felt very Swedish. Lots of nice old wooden furniture, and lots of Ikea (of course). Where it really started to feel different was looking in the kitchen drawers - the types of utensils they had were not the same as we're used to... about 8 wooden knives, but not a single wooden spoon. The tin openers looked like this:

Does anyone even know what the hook on the top is for?

And there was at least one knife in the drawer that I'm pretty sure would be illegal in the UK. Of course, the sockets were different, and (shock!) there were light switches in the bathrooms. The washing machine lived in the bathroom too. An interesting thing was the drainage plumbing... there was a drain in the bathroom floor, and the plughole from the bath just led to a PVC pipe ending above the floor drain. Apparently this (like a lot of stuff in this list) is normal for Swedish homes.

The hosts were absolutely lovely. They met us there, and told us all about the house and the locality. They'd done all their research and printed everything out in English for us, and had left a bottle of Cava in the fridge for us, as well getting in a nice box of fancy Earl Grey for us. It was a lovely sentiment, but it was sad not to be able to use it (as we don't drink alcohol or tea...). In the course of the conversation, we learned that we were their first guests, so we naturally felt very honoured.

Moments of terror

Soon enough the hosts left, but Piroz and Kristofer (two of the five owners of Mirado) had come to meet us there. More Swedes being lovely! They had come to help introduce us to the hosts (Mirado was paying the rent, after all!) and then to take us shopping so we didn't have to face the first shopping trip alone, and get us sorted with travel cards and such. 

During these events, Esther and I both found ourselves experiencing moments of horror - when Piroz and Kristofer and the hosts were chatting to each other in Swedish, Esther suddenly felt very alone and like she was in a foreign land. Then my moment came a bit later at the supermarket, when I realised that i didn't really recognise so many of the foods. Even buying bread, I had no idea what sort of loaf to get, because most of them were so different, but most shocking was how expensive everything was. We knew that Sweden was expensive of course, but I bought just a few bits and pieces to get us through the first day or two, and managed to spend about £40. I suddenly found myself terrified that the whole thing was a ridiculous idea and that we'd never be able to afford life in Sweden... 

When I got back to the house and Kristofer and Piroz left, Esther and I just held each other a little, and it started to sink in that it was real. 

Scary.

We travelled to another country. And we didn't buy a return ticket.

A couple of trains, a hotel, a plane, and a taxi, and we found ourselves at our AirBnB in Nacka, near Stockholm. No big deal, right!?

It was a lot of fun on the journey - all three kids were so fun to be with. Even William was talking excitedly about going to Sweeeeeden! They were really good for the whole journey too - it was over 24 hours of travelling, and they stayed bright and chirpy throughout.

Waiting at Gillingham train station

The plane leg of the journey was obviously the highlight. Elanor got singled out for a full-body scan, which wasn't her favourite... she got pulled apart from the rest of us, and found it all a bit intimidating, but she recovered soon after. Even waiting around the airport for ages, the kids managed to have fun and didn't get upset about the wait. I don't even recall hearing the words, "I'm booooorrred" while we were there.

That thing is going to throw itself at the sky with us in it

The whole journey was a little surreal. It didn't feel at all like we were leaving permanently. I don't think it helped for me that I'd taken that exact train journey many times before for Thales training, so it didn't even feel particularly out of the ordinary. We'd planned the journey really thoroughly - Esther might take exception to the "we": I may have been planning the journey when I should have been cleaning the house... Woops. Still, I can argue that the planning paid off because we basically didn't have any hiccups. The train was quiet, so we had plenty of room even with all our cases and whatnot. We didn't miss any connections or anything, and we found where we needed to be to get to our B&B at Gatwick.

The few lessons we did learn though (like getting stuff ready for the security screening before you're standing at the front of a long queue of people...), Esther and I kept saying to ourselves, "On the way back we'll have to..." It was strange having to keep catching ourselves and remembering that there won't be a way back. At least not for a good while.

Me with a super-excited face and everyone else politely smiling. May be a recurring theme.

After we landed, and immigrated, we got a taxi to our AirBnB. So, in the weeks leading up to moving, I repeatedly asked the kids what they were excited for and nervous about. Snow and winter came up a lot. All three kids are seriously keen to see a real winter. We had assumed, travelling as we were in May, that we would be well into Spring by the time we moved to Sweden, and it would be six months or more before the kids had a realistic chance of seeing any snow. And then, during that taxi journey, we got to drive through a bona-fide snow storm. Elanor was about as excited as I've seen her in her life. James, surprisingly, wasn't so much. Turns out he was also excited for summer, and was worried that winter was forever in Sweden. William was asleep...

Elanor thinks Sweden is soooooo amazing

It's a moment that will stick with me for a long time. Apparently this has been the coldest spring in over 50 years, and a week after we arrived the temperature got up to the mid 20s. The timing was just perfect.

A snowstorm especially for us, to say, "Hej, och välkommen till Sverige!"