Day 2303: Bus Bag Bastards

A typical Stockholm commute would not be complete without a fellow passenger taking up an extra seat on the bus or train with their bag, leg or other general item/body part. Another favourite strategy, unfortunately not captured in my picture but happening accross the aisle, is to sit in the aisle seat so that the window seat is left free.

I'm long finished complaining about people who take up two seats - I'm from London. I did not arrive late to the selfish passenger party, I was born in it. I'm from that hardy race of commuters who sees a bag or overextended limb as an invitiation to confrontation. No wait, that's wrong. Most Londoners won't even confront you about moving an offending item any more, they'll just sit on it.

Which is why I am not frustrated that the woman in the picture above has her bag on the seat. Instead I want to know where the COJONES, the BALLS, the GRIT, the INTREPIDITY of the many standing passengers is to be found?! I know they wanted to sit, they were giving "the look" to the woman and her bag. Looks 👏 won't 👏 get 👏 you 👏 a 👏 seat.

Judging by her accent, the bag lady was NOT Swedish. For all I know she was from London, just like me. She was capitalising on the native aversion to just fucking TAKING the seat which is PAID for. Swedes - we foreigners are PLAYING you in your own system. Do not be afraid to sit on a bag, loudly state that you are going to park your rumpa, or stride awkwardly and determindly over some knees to get the window seat. I know from sharing other public spaces with you that y'all are masters of the barge and the invasion of personal space, so why do these skills MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR on the bus? Seats are there, GET SOME.

And while we are at it, GÅ LÄNGRE FRAM I BUSSEN FÖR FAN.

Day 2281: Not tonight, I've got raw balls

Every cafe in this god damn city serves raw balls, even the teeny-tiny little independent hole-in-the-wall places that won't spring for real baked goods but will serve completely crap prefab croissants that come in bulk plastic wrapped boxes and are so pumped full of additives they will still be here for the eighth coming of Jesus. How can raw balls, food items named after an extremely unpleasant waxing accident, trump actual baked goods and become the food fare of choice for small businesses and vast coffee chains alike? I ask of you, internet, have you EVER met ANYONE who eats raw balls? I don't mean that one time you tried a raw ball because you were presented with a choice between it and a decades old croissant made of polycarbons. The enduring, nay, growing! rawball market is not being propped up by single, ill-advised test purchases. I am talking about a friend, relative, colleague or enemy who actively consumes raw balls on a regular basis and seeks them out as a snack of choice. Who are these people? Why are these people?

I can see how Sweden was easily seduced by the look of a few raw balls. This is a country enraptured by all things alternative, vegan, natural choice, organic, gluten free, and vaguely-PR-spun-to-symbolise-a-healthy-lifestyle, as long as these do not clash with the other strong Swedish traditional snack values of being ridiculously sugar dense and served in ball form. I'm looking at you, chocolate balls, cocoa balls, snow balls, coconut balls, and especially you, scum balls.

If I am to be perfectly honest here, I think my dislike of raw balls has less to do with their rawness (ooh, ouch. Don't touch them they're RAW) and more to do with the fact that I don't like the chocolate balls, cocoa balls, snow balls, coconut balls, or especially, scum balls that inevitably paved the way for this stupid craze. Balls are a bad shape for snacks. Counting them off on my fingers here, one, they roll around and can't be put nicely on a plate, two, they're gone in literally one bite, where is the well-deserved moment of pleasure in that?, three, they're often such poor quality, almost on the same level as the Jesus croissants, that they are essentially just cough dust when you bite into them and, most importantly, four, they are shaped like bollocks opening them up to all kinds of scrutiny. Scrotiny?

Give me a nice slice of cake, people. And for Pete's sake, just fucking OWN your snack time, you guilt-nagging shitbastard. Sugar made from crushed dates and ground dried apricots is STILL FUCKING SUGAR. If it's going to be a guilty pleasure then at least have it on a plate, with some substance and some oomph, not rolling around like a dusty, partnerless, RAW, testicle.

Day 2263: That's not tea.

I work in a lot of different places so I can say with some authority that the picture above is quite representative of a generous tea selection at the office. Some places have NO tea, some places have worse than no tea, which is Lipton yellow label, and some places look like this. All workplaces have coffee. The coffee quality might vary, I wouldn't know, I don't drink it. Nevertheless, to be a tea drinker in this country is to be eternally disappointed. Look at that picture above. I mean, really look at it. Do YOU want to drink decaffinated green tea chai? Lipton raspberry? Lipton Russian Earl Grey? Energising blueberry? Rooibos with fake chai flavour? Someone's "on-second-thought-I'll-leave-it"-Lipton teabag? No.

Who is the mystery 1% who drink enough energising blueberry to encourage the caretaker to order in 2 more boxes? If it's you then do everyone a favour and fuck off.

Last week I had an American child laugh at me because he was mocking me for being British, making all kinds of jokes about how I probably love tea and carry it around with me, only to discover that I had emergency teabags in my rucksack. Yes, I may have contributed to the perpetuation of a stereotype but I am truly desperate when a forlorn sachet of Twinings English Breakfast counts as a better cup of tea than whatever is available in the staffroom. Once somebody at work made Tetley's and it was like a miracle. For reference, I wouldn't be caught dead drinking Tetley's in England. And don't get me started on the Swedish obsession with single-use tetra pack milk which makes tea taste like, well, milk thats been in a tetra pack on a kitchen counter for a year.

What hurts the most is the fact that coffee is such a religion in Scandinavia that you are never more than 6 feet away from a good cup of coffee. I would even wager, without even drinking it, that the shittiest coffee from the shittiest machine is still a better coffee experience for the coffee drinker than the discovery of a whole cupboard of NON tea is for a tea drinker, who basically won't drink any tea in that situation. I'll have a tap water and seething, deep-seated rage to go, please.

Even cafes here have shit tea, and I don't mean the cheapo places that give you a lipton teabag, a glass of tepid water and an ice cream spoon the length of your arm. I mean the good places, even they get tea wrong. Loose leaf tea here comes in a variety of flavours, often never just plain tea, always some kind of chai-ripoff bullshit that has as much to do with chai as a castrated man in half a furry cow suit has to do with a bull. Either that or it has summer fruits, or winter fruits, or autumn fruits or some other kind of season, monsoon moonbeam or WHATEVER WHO IS NAMING AND CREATING THIS HORRIBLE SHIT. Mostly I get stuck with Earl Grey (pronounced Öörl Grej) which bears no resemblance to Earl Grey, and tastes very much like what my Yorkshire friend calls "Gandhi's Flip Flop". I have to pay £5 for the PRIVILEGE of this experience, because I am bound by the traditions of the Swedish Fika to sit with a warm drink alongside my bun. And it's always a bun, because the cake selection is nearly as thin as the tea selection. But alas, that is a rant for another day.

Day 2219: NOT THE SAME

LEGIT MISTAKES I HAVE MADE IN SWEDISH

(AND HOW TO AVOID THEM)

1. 

 

2.

 

3.

 

4.

 

5.

 

6.

 

7.

 

8. 

 

9. 

 

10.

 

BONUS 11. 

(NOT ME WHO SAID IT, THANKFULLY)

Day 2215: Dual Wield

As of April I have two nationalities, British and Swedish. I always used to envy people with two nationalities, like they were exotic. But now I am one of them it all feels a bit odd. I am an imposter! I don't feel Swedish. Actually I don't really feel British any more, either. Maybe that's what it really means to be a citizen of multiple places; not belonging neatly in any of them. Some people have three or more citizenships. I imagine this to be a bit like Voldemort's horcruxes, the more you have, the more you dilute your original self. 

Of course becoming a citizen of multiple places doesn't involve murdering people to split your soul in pieces so that the Swedish part can reside in an old goblet. It's always best not to follow the allegory train too far down the track. To the depot of surrealism. In actuality there are many positive sides to being a dual citizen, having a wider world view, meeting new people, trying a different job market, being equally as baffled by politics but this time in a different constellation, not needing a visa for some journeys, rubbing the new leathery sheen of your European passport in your worried remainer friends' faces...WHO DOES THAT?! Not me.

While the horcrux idea might sound a bit negative, becoming a dual citizen is not a happy fun time party. You have to live a long time in a country where you don't understand all the words in the sentences being said and you have to do a lot of smiling and nodding that occasionally ends with eight people waiting for a response to a question that sailed over your head. You have to leave your friends and family who know you very well and construct a foreigner personality, which is a bit like a plastic veneer that gets kind of brownish age scum over time, and latch on to other foreigner personalities who eventually turn into friends who bond with you over mutual WTF? about the new place you all live in. You have to navigate guilt feelings like a fucking rally driver every time you visit home and nobody wants you to leave. Actually sometimes you wonder yourself why you are leaving. You must endure nobody getting your joke references to 90's British TV shows. Even if you meet other British people they probably didn't grow up in exactly the same time/place bubble as you and they don't know about the time everyone thought Neil Buchannan from Art Attack was dead but it was just a stupid internet rumor or that time when Peter Andre overdosed on bananas or that time Brian Harvey from E17 ate too many jacket potatoes and ran over his own head with a car. Conversely you also start using new culturalisms in the old motherland and nobody understands why you're crooning "Jaaa. aaa. aaa. aaaa." like a seal, or wearing birkenstocks around the house, or covering your ears with your hands when a tube train approaches or an ambulance drives past.

That's not to mention the beaurocratic hell involved in being a dual citizen. Jobs and institutions don't understand your foreign education and likewise people back "home" (except it's not any more) don't understand the new paperwork from Foreignland. When you apply for citizenship it costs money and it costs what can only be described as a fucktonne, that's 2000 fuckpounds in USA parlance, of time. My application took 17 months. It should have taken longer but the Swedish foreign office panicked on the originally scheduled Brexit date in March and rushed it through. Friends from other countries are at 20 months and counting. The current time estimate for process is 3 years. Some friends who are abroad were rejected for being abroad, despite handing their application in years ago when they were not abroad. Whoever processed my application wanted a year's worth of payslips for my 6th year of residency, even though I became eligible for citizenship at 4 years. The process itself is a great mystery, the level of professionalism and expediency displayed by the foreign office suggests a great deal of divination by moose entrails and casting of 5-kronor coins into the mälaren for luck.

At the end of all the difficulty though, it is extremely rewarding to be able to dissasociate yourself from the worst of both countries by brazenly waving your alternate passport in the air and yelling "I don't live there!"

Day 2061: How to lose Swedes and alienate people

Have you ever heard someone say that it's hard to make friends in Sweden? It's a commonly held idea. Year upon year Sweden ranks bottom in international surveys of immigrants for making new friends and if you are one such immigrant it's a sure fire phrase to get a conversation going among fellow foreigners. Everyone has anecdotes about their attempts to make friends. Last month in a seminar at university, a Swedish girl told a Greek boy in the class "I saw you on the bus last week, but I thought eh, and I sat further back" which basically means "I saw you and I avoided you because I couldn't be bothered to make conversation for the whole bus journey". Now I have definitely avoided people I sort of know on the bus. But what is key, and I can't stress this enough, is that I DON'T tell that person that I deliberately avoided them.

A lot of really uninformed people get on their soapboxes and shout that not knowing Swedish is a key barrier to making friends.  One of the reasons I decided to study full time for the last two years - in Swedish - was because, at least in England, university is an excellent place for meeting likeminded people. So far I've made one firm friend, who's Malaysian. And I met her on one of the seminars that was taught in English. Sometimes the Swedish seminars were bordering on painful in terms of social interaction. Obviously some facet of Swedish sociality is beyond me. Where am I going wrong? I have a few ideas.

1. I talk "in other people's mouths" (tala i munnen på varandra)

Swedes are really, really loathe to speak on top of each other. "Att prata i munnen på varandra är sällan vägen till ett lyckat samtal," apparently. Of course, it's quite confrontational to talk over someone. If you do it at the wrong time, they'll feel like you hijacked what they were saying or maybe weren't even listening to begin with. It's also domineering, to think that what you have to say is worth overtaking another person's input. Now we're stepping on the toes of the big Swedish No-No, namely jantelagen (everyone is equal). You're not better than your conversation partner, so why are you talking over them?

Well, here's why: because you're showing that you are keen, interested, genuinely involved, brimming with ideas! Timing is key here, you don't want to completely cut off the other person mid-flow. The aim is to rejuvenate the topic as that person is coming to the end of their idea, or build upon what they've said, or supply a word they're floundering after. If the person talking has repeated themselves multiple times already and the rest of the group is losing interest, please for the love of god, cut them off and take the conversation elsewhere. At the other end of the spectrum, people, no matter what they say, do not want the conversation to lapse into silence. They don't want to be the conversation killer. Save them by picking up the tail end of what they've been saying.


2. I'm not "med i föreningen"

Actually I am. I'm in several groups. But they're not the right ones. I tried to join a badminton förening but they are all completely, completely full and frustratingly opaque about annual recruitment. The best way to join a förening is to know someone who is already in the förening. I joined, you guessed it, a (really great, by the way) badminton group full of immigrants. In my first few years here I was in a Swedish conversation group with no Swedes. I set up a French conversation group and some Swedes came, I tried to get them to stay an hour and speak a bit of Swedish; they did not. Many organisations are very insular and cliquey, often consisting of groups of people who have already known each other a while from outside the förening. As one migrant put it, 'Only in Sweden have I ever been told ‘I don't need to talk to you, I have enough friends'. Even if you are in a group and you meet Swedes there, like my book group for example, you'll most likely never see each other outside the designated group times.

3. My Swedish is rude

After the Stockholm marathon I was waiting for a train with my boyfriend when a runner wearing a medal walked past. "Grattis!" I said (congratulations). When he'd walked out of earshot, my boyfriend told me I sounded really sarcastic. Unless you put the right nuance and intonation into what you say, perhaps you are not really saying what you think you are saying.  God knows how many times I've sounded like a total bitch because of my word choice or lack of nuance. A lot of Swedish sounds completely saccharine and overbearingly false to me in much the same way that American English does to my British ears. "Åh vad häääääärligt, gud vad bra". Fuck off.

I state opinions (bad), I swear (in Swedish: bad. In English: helt ok), I talk about the class divide (awkward) and I disagree with people (social suicide).

4. I do not live in a flatshare; I do not work with Swedes

We spend a lot of time at work. We spend a lot of time at home. If you share those two places with Swedish people, the probability of you meeting some is substantially higher than if you don't. The only Swede in my workplace is my boss, who is awesome - in a professional sort of way. She's definitely not my friend. The only Swede in my home is my boyfriend and, well, he's already trapped and has nowhere to run.

5. I don't want to talk about Britain

Wow - are Swedes complete Anglophiles. Swedish people are so incredibly interested in Britain, they speak English, they read about it in the news, they watch BBC, they don't dub anything, they invite British comedians over, they take regular trips over there, they study over there in droves, they talk about London like a second home, and as soon as they hear my accent they want to talk to me in English about Downton Abbey. But...I hate Downton Abbey.  I don't want to talk about the queen, I'd rather get rid of the whole bollocks royal affair. I'll talk to you about Brexit if you really, really want...but then you have to be prepared for the rudeness I mentioned in (3). Plus, it's frankly bewildering. Do these Anglophile Swedes realise that most Brits think Sweden is Switzerland?

6. I don't know who the fuck Mikael Persbrandt is...

...And I think I wouldn't care even if I did. Come to mention it, I don't watch Swedish TV and I don't know who any of the so called "celebrities" are. Charlotte Perelli who? Parneviks what? Is Jonas Gardell even funny any more? I went to see Eddie Izzard once in Sweden and they billed me a 3 hour show, only 30 minutes of which was Izzard and the other painful hours were filled with literally THE WORST "comedy" I have ever seen, it was sickeningly, cringeworthily bad. Thank god it was in Swedish so Eddie Izzard couldn't understand how dreadful it was. One section of the show consisted of two women saying cunt over and over again to show how modern their comedy was. Still, I think I'd rather see that again that watch Melodifestivalen (the long, drawn-out preamble to the twattery that is the Eurovision song contest). When Swedes start bandying the names of Z-list celebrities around in conversation it really is time for me to get my coat. If Pewdiepie is your country's highest grossing cultural export then something's definitely going wrong in the art factory.

7. I'm neither here nor there

I'm sure many other people would agree with me when I say that when you leave one country and move to another, after a while you don't really fit in either. It becomes more challenging to maintain friendships with people who come from one place, relate to one place, speak passionately about one place and are unequivocally invested emotionally and socially in one place. Yes, that one place is important to me too, but I've got divided loyalties. I take comfort and support from other immigrants just like me who understand my divided loyalties. So, I work hard at my friendships with people in England and I keep an open mind about friendships appearing with Swedes, but more often than not the Swedes who end up with foreign friends have lived abroad themselves, and they too are two parts (or more!) of one whole. On the positive side, a recent study showed that having friends who are different from you makes you a better, more adaptable person.

Day 2026: Winter wonderland to hellish icescape

A poem about my week

A while ago there was some snow,
and prettily it lay.
But since then, a day or ten,
the ice has come to stay.

And ice is not my friend, no, no.
It isn't either yours.
It makes you slip, it makes you trip
and has you on all fours.

Snow is fluffy, snow is soft
it cushions as you sled,
but ice is solid, ice is hard
it breaks your bones instead.

Stupid o'clock is when you leave
To get to work by 8
'Cos if you don't, you'll shuffle in
broken, bruised, and late.

Don't think of running for that bus,
the fare price is a farce.
The cost is other passengers
seeing you land on your arse.

If you manage to make the bus,
or wait hours at the stop,
you'll find it less impervious 
than you to icy slop.

Neither run trains under the ground,
somehow they're broken too.
People down there are also late,
avoid the angry zoo.

Trudge like a bitch through all that shit,
the option that remains,
go walking thrice or more a day
you'll start to go insane.

Carry also a bunch of crap
that weighs a million tonne
throw off your balance in all sorts of ways.
Play on hard mode, what fun(!)

Get overtaken by old folk
with years of common sense.
They neither lose their studded shoes
nor skate around all tense.

Little children get dragged along
all happy in their sleds.
Fuck them, fuck it, fuck why aren't you
at home with tea instead?  

But home is over there you see,
while you are over here,
and between these two places lies
A deathly, ice veneer.

You may wonder as you waddle
where all the money went
that was to pay for snow free roads
and gravelled pavement.

That's a mystery for certain,
it's never to be solved.
One thing's for sure though, and that is this:
once I get home I'm not fucking going out again, no. Even if I have to concoct some weird bollocks from the dredges of the bottom of the freezer and that weird jar at the back of the fridge it's better than venturing to the shop. And I know I signed up for a class but they've got 30 people and they certainly won't notice if one person is missing. I haven't taken the bin out for about a week and it smells like old oranges but, just, I can put it outside the window for this evening. What's the temperature? It's 4 degrees that's good do some thawing, oh unless it drops to -10 in the night and freezes all the thaw into sheet ice, then I really am fucked. Right, just don't think about that now.

ONE IMAGE CAN'T DO JUSTICE TO THE ICE HELL SO HERE'S STOCK PHOTO ICE