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 :)