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!"