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 :)