Day 2425: How to hoard like a Swede

Last week was all about mocking the Australians because they were hoarding toilet paper.
Well.
This week was all about imitating the Australians and hoarding toilet paper.

This week was also all about learning the Swedish verb "to hamster" (att hamstra) which means to hoard things, although you (hopefully) don't have to stuff them in your cheeks. I went on a photographic tour of my local supermarket to document the things which Stockholmers consider hamsterable. How do they compare with your local supermarket?

1.TUNA
Pros: Keeps for ages and is good protein. Cons: Too much of it will give you mercury poisoning.

2. CANNED SAUSAGES AND RAVIOLI
Pros: Canned goods can be hamstered for eons. Cons: Canned ravioli and sausage. Do I really have to spell out the cons for you?

3. MOZZARELLA AND PARMESAN
Pros: Italy is on lockdown so when are we gunna get more? Cons: You're so fucked in an apocalypse if you can't live without a bit of melty cheese.

4. BEEF OF VARIOUS KINDS
Pros: Can be frozen, so you can eke out your high carbon, rainforest destroying existence for slightly longer. Plus it has that whole manliness thing going for it. Cons: Literally any other meat or soya product is less soul and/or planet destroying.

4.5 BUT ONLY IF IT IS MINCED
Pros: Make the burgers. Cons: SLAB of beef? What is this SLAB you speak of? No SLAB only MINCE.  There will be no SLAB in the apocalypse.

4.5.1 BLOOD PUDDING
Pros: I just...I don't even know, man. This is a cultural aspect of Sweden that I have not engaged with. Cons: It's a pudding made of blood. And they store it next to the cheesecake, which is a less desired apocalypse food.

5. FUCKING CARROTS
Pros: Beta Carotene. Cons: Why are you hoarding this? Super easy to grow yourself. Plus they're from FUCKING SWEDEN so there's like, 0 chance they will be blockaded/banned/taboo.

6. NOT CARROTS IN A BAG. OR AVOCADOS.
Pros: There are no pros here. You're all idiots. You only hoard if you have to pack the item yourself, or if it is ready to eat today. You won't even hoard it if it keeps for slightly longer and is clearly on sale. Nonsense.

7. GINGER
Pros: Immuno booster. I see why you all hamstered this. Cons: At 6 quid a kilo this is some serious middle class hamstering.

8. LEMONS
Pros: Together with that ginger you're basically immune to corona virus. Cons: Bit sour.

9. NOT YOU LIMES, FUCK OFF.
Pros: More for me. Cons: I dunno, y'all hate green or summat?

10.BAG OF LETTUCE
Pros: CLEARLY healthier than limes. Cons: Lasts about 5 minutes after you open the bag. A very poor choice for the long term apocalypse.

11. DRY PASTA, RICE, BULGUR, COUSCOUS, SPAGHETTI...
Pros: Bolognese for dayzzzz. Cons: This aisle was devastated. I have lost all faith in humanity.

11.5. KETCHUP
Pros: There's plenty of non-Heinz left. Cons: Swedish people eat Ketchup on pasta. Whatever shred of faith in humanity you had, it's gone now, hasn't it?

12. FRESH PASTA
Pros: You can buy it when all the dry pasta has been hamstered. Cons: At this point, everything is a con. Especially considering....

...13. FRESH SPINACH PASTA
Plenty of that. Hamstering is a very trend specific hobby.

14.BREAD BREAD BREAD BREAD BREAD
Pros: BREAD BREAD BREAD BREAD Cons: BREAD BREAD BREAD BREAD
You hear corona zombies in the distance, what is that they are braying after? BREAD BREAD BREAD.

15.POOR QUALITY CINNAMON BUNS
Pros: When all the good quality buns are gone, these ones will outlast even your last born children. Cons: They taste mostly of additives so that they can outlast even your last born children.

16. SHIT CAVIAR IN A TUBE
Pros: Salty. Cons: Fish eggs in a tube. Just....okay. I have a Swedish passport but I am clearly not Swedish because ... I don't get it.

16.5 GOOD QUALITY CAVIAR
Pros: Is fine people, plenty of it.Cons: Where's that facepalm emoji when you need it...

17.NESCAFE INSTANT COFFEE
Pros: Now when Swedes tell you that they are the foremost nation of coffee drinkers you can point out that, when shit hits the fan, they are actually the foremost nation of shit instant granules.
Cons: If you are a Swede who hamsters Nescafe then you have some reflecting to do.

18. CHEESE PUFFS
Pros: If corona has taught us something about Sweden, it is that they are serious about their cheese. Cons: If you eat just one of these puffs, you will in fact have to consume the whole bag. Not a sustainable hamstering choice. 

19. VANILLA YOGHURT
Pros: Er...It has vanilla in it? Cons: I don't understand why this one yoghurt trumps all the other yoghurts?

20.HICKORY BBQ SAUCE
Pros: Again.....the specific flavour. Cons: Hickory will forever be the flavour of the corona shutdown, eating hickory at any later date will transport you back to this terrible time of depression and desolation.

21.SALT
Pros: A good apocalypse choice, we can't live without salt! Cons: A box of salt lasts for literally years. How long do people think they are going to be in corona isolation?!

22. BROCCOLI
can fuck right off. 

Day 1420: Beans, beans the musical fruit.

This weekend I was on salad duty at a BBQ so I made a bean salad as I often do. There's only one ingredient that is tricky to find and I usually just leave it out, but since I'm on my summer hols I actually had time for once to try and find them. Presenting;

HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER RUNNER BEANS

Runner beans are readily available in England but finding them here is trickier. Translator programs can't translate "runner bean" into Swedish because they give "löpande bönor" (running beans) which is probably helpful in an extremely specific situation. Wikipedia suggested rosenbönor as the Swedish translation, so I asked a few Swedish people if they've eaten rosenbönor and suspiciously they had not. I showed them pictures of runner beans, they had never seen them and couldn't give me a name. Brytbönor was one suggestion, but those are large green beans and not the flat runner bean. The confusion stems from the fact that all of these similar beans (green, runner, haricots, kidney, flageolet) come from the family Phaseolus vulgaris and Wikipedia lumps them all together unless you know what to search for and give a specific term.

I basically gave up after that.

But as the picture above can attest, runner beans do, in fact, exist here. They are called skärbönor (cut beans) presumably because you have to cut them into bits before eating. But they're bloody expensive and hard to find, so this supports the theory that Swedish people don't know what they are and don't cook with them. Just one of many foods that vary from place to place!

Day 901: Flat Hunting

I'm packing my bag and movin' on down to the big (er, moderately sized by European standards) city of Stockholm!

But before I can do that, there's a lot of flat hunting to be done.

I've never been in a position to buy any kind of property in London and I probably never will (I was going to do a bunch of research and give some interesting statistics about how many people own homes in London and how much it costs but I started reading and got too angry and depressed so I stopped.) Essentially what I'm writing here is not a comparison of English and Swedish life because I don't have a point of comparison having never owned anything in England. Instead it's a look at the quirks of browsing the Swedish home market.

For the past few weekends, and even some weekdays too, I've been looking at flats with my sambo to get a feel for what kinds of flats are on the market, how much stuff costs, which areas we actually want to live in and which areas suck sweaty, dirty balls.

Pretty much any house worth its bricks is listed on a website called Hemnet which, in typical Swedish fashion, also has a well made app on which you can draw the areas you want to search with a virtual pencil.

I get the impression that many Swedish people browse Hemnet and view flats just for the fun of it, after all it's SUCH a fun weekend activity for godawful couples with nothing better to do that ranks up there with "going round Ikea" and "checking out the high street". Hemnet sometimes gets over 2.5 million views a week, which is frankly astounding for a country with only 9.5 million people.

There are essentially 3 places to live in Stockholm, just like any other city; the expensive bit "inside the tolls" which extends just a bit north of the picture above, the slightly-cheaper-but-still-expensive bit just outside which has plenty of houses but not plenty of anything else, and the cheap bit with generous sizes for your money but long commutes with unreliable trains, questionable neighbours in some places and mind numbingly boring orbital towns in which the only source of entertainment is a big Willy.

No matter where you look, though, every flat has the same furniture because the seller has hired rental furniture from the estate agent, who in turn has probably done extensive research into exactly which furniture is best for driving up the price. All the houses are painted white as a backdrop for these items, I did a random search and these were the first 5 of the flats that showed up, all are white:

Apparently Scarlet Johansson's giant face sells well:

I know it's her because I viewed the flat and her face was CREEPY

as do apples:

I would browse for more spot-the-difference (or not) pictures but I just can't bear to look at flats any more than I absolutely have to. There are always candles, similar kinds of soap in the bathroom, fake fur throws on the balcony furniture, a funky coffee machine of some sort, fresh flowers, herbs and a good old HEMNES:

The whole time you're viewing, you're supposed to perform some kind of mental feat (a bit like Orwellian DoubleThink) in which you both appreciate the style of the room with the furniture in it, whilst simultaneously blanking the furniture out and replacing it with your own furniture. You have to see that the furniture and accessories exist and at the same time realise they do not exist in the house as you would have it. This, I will freely admit, is not a skill I have. I truly believe that I will have a HEMNES full of apples and posters of Scarlet Johansson when I finally live in Stockholm.

The oppressive samey-ness of the furniture, the plan layouts, the colours, the sales agents and the accents is only one part of a larger problem: the other people viewing the flats. The blandness of the flats is a symptom of the blandness of the viewers. The sales agents know what people like and give it to them. People queue up nicely, set their many shoes by the door and mill about in the hallway like so many shepherded sheep, looking at a pre-set list of values; is the wooden floor in good condition? Is the light coming from the south? How much debt does the residents association have? Is the floor layout original or have the occupants made changes? Is there a lift?

I viewed a flat last week and I really liked it. I would have bid for it, in fact. But it was not a very orthodox flat; the current owners had renovated, compromising on bedroom space to make room for an amazing kitchen with space for any conceivable size of party. The living room was not a standard square (Shock! Horror! Nightmare!) and the bathroom was not directly attached to the bedroom. Nobody was interested in this flat. There were no queues of shoes outside and no scrum of sheep inside. "Great!" I naively believed. Thinking this would mean a good price.

Actually what it means is that the flat would be very difficult to sell in the future and would not be a good investment. People don't like it because it doesn't meet their parameters of what is interesting. The absence of a lift, even in a building with just 3 floors, can wipe up to half a million Krona off the desired price for the flat on resale (another bizarre fact, given Swedish obsession with health and fitness). When starting out I really enjoyed flat hunting with my sambo and looking for that special place with a quirk just for us. I now realise that there can be no quirk, I have to conform to the ideals of the Swedish market if I want a sensible investment. And this, for me, sucks the fun out of the whole process.

Day 887: Stuff I'd never own in England

Some people pointed out I haven't written anything here for a while, that's mostly because I've been stuffing food in my face for the past month and haven't had my hands free for any other activities. Last weekend I tried to be a bit more active to atone for my recent prone-ness so I went skating on a frozen lake, as you do, in temperatures of -16C, as you do.

Understandably you can't just get off the sofa and go on the lake. It turns out you have to own a bunch of crap that I didn't even know existed prior to this trip in order to have a safe skating experience. It got me thinking about a few other items that I use here that I either didn't use at all in England, or which never even entered into my realms of thinking.

Ice Picks

You need these to pull yourself out of the water if the ice you're skating on breaks under your feet. You also have to have a waterproof bag in your backpack with dry, spare clothes, which acts as a flotation device. I borrowed mine from a Swedish person when my Swedish boyfriend couldn't find any of his 3 pairs. I think I'm justified in believing that all Swedes own these things. In fact, knowing the safety consciousness of Swedes I'm surprised I don't see people just casually wondering around town wearing them.

Reflective Accessories

Sometimes when I'm out walking in the night in winter which lasts, well, a long time, I see people with these shiny things dangling from every crevice or a fucking great high vis jacket  or ALL of these things at the SAME TIME and I think "Ugh come on, is that really necessary? We're in TOWWWWWN. I can SEEEE YOOOOU." Other times I'm a passenger in a car at night and we turn a corner and nearly hit a person in a dark jacket, dark trousers and dark shoes and I think "Ugh come on, where is your necessary reflective thingamajiggy? We're in TOWWWWWWN in a CARRRRR. We need to SEEEEE YOOOOOU" which is why I decided to wear the two free reflective thingamajiggys I got given. Also I like it when people put colourful flashy things on their dog. But not high viz jacket dogs, that's too far.

Air Humidifier

I can't believe I own this. My house in England was so damp you could have swimming championships for small insects. But up here in Sweden I'm dry as a motherfucker and I'll take all the precious water droplets I can get/make artificially.

Ice Skates

If you want to go ice skating in England you have to find your nearest ice rink and they'll have some skates for you to hire. If you want to go ice skating in Sweden you just wait for it to get a bit cold, rummage in your closet for your skates and go outside to the nearest big puddle.

Skiing Gloves

I used to use a single pair of gloves, I would start wearing them from about 5 degrees and downwards and that was that. Gone are those days. Now I have 3 pairs, and when it starts getting below -5 it's time for the big guns, er, mittens. Ski mittens are amazing, they keep my hands toasty even when the rest of my body has turned into a solid block of ice. They're also waterproof for that all-important snowman building, snowball fighting and snow sledding.

Outdoor/Indoor Thermometer

How do you know what to wear in the morning? Maybe you watch the weather or something. Not me. I have in my house, just like many other Swedish houses, a thermometer to tell me exactly what temperature I'm heading into. This is vital because putting on thermal underwear at anything higher than -3 will let you in for an extremely warm and uncomfortable journey to work. It's such an important part of Swedish life that many old houses have a thermometer as part of the window frame. It's also good for knowing if you can use your balcony as a secondary fridge.

Waffle Iron

Okay I only use it on Waffle day but still, I never used it at all before I moved here.

Wtf...

Most Christmas decorations are the same; fairy lights, tree, baubles, advent calenders and so on. But then there are some other bits N bobs that are a bit odd, like the blob of grey felt that's supposed to be Santa, the superabundance of pig bric-a-brac, straw sheep everywhere and whatever the fuck that bollocks is in the picture up there. I'm assured it's "classic" and I can look forward to Easter when the little ladies are replaced with yellow chicks. In the Swedish style, the decorations we have here will probably stay up until Easter anyway.

Vaccum with adjustable suction

Why don't we all have this, everywhere, ever? Amazing.