Picture this–on my first day in Sweden, I try to get Swedish cash from a bank machine. No, absolutely nothing, forget it, zero–the bank machine ignores my ATM card. Hmmm–I picture two weeks in a foreign country, with only the few US dollars left in my wallet.
Then I found out–Swedish ATMs expect bank cards to have their magnetic strips facing up. Of course, this is completely upside down from what every ATM in the US expects.
Because guidebooks are written by people who don’t remember the dumb mistakes newcomers make, here are a few more tips about life in Sweden:
- Ask someone “How far?” and they answer, “100 meters.”
- Anything Swedes think is within walking distance is described as “Only 100 meters.” Of course, anything within a couple of miles of where you stand is considered to be in walking distance, so “100 meters” is very, very elastic.
- Unless you teetotal, bring wine or beer with you to Sweden.
- The cheapest bottle of rot-gut red in a restaurant costs $30. OTOH, you can get nice lasagne-and-salad for $7 in student dives.
- You have to learn less Swedish than you expected.
- Just about everyone speaks English very, very well.
- You have to learn more Swedish than you expected.
- If you want to get off your train at Uppsala, you’ll hear the announcer pronouncing it “oop-SAW-LAW.” “Gevle” is pronounced “Yev-lay.” “Dj” is pronounced like the y in yes. “Rs” is pronounced like the sh in ship.
- Zen bike riders inhabit quantum space.
- Swedish bike riders share the streets in a way kamikaze Dutch bikers surely could not. Oop-SAW-LAW has many bike riders and few bike lanes. Bike riders move through space with peaceful expressions, looking as if they are pondering higher truth. I often saw bike riders on apparent collision courses, idling toward the same bit of an intersection–then, with no fuss and no hurry, they don’t collide. I never could figure out how the heck they did it. If we could run foreign policy as they ride bikes…. sigh.
There you have it, the very few bad bits of Sweden, from A to Z. The best bits, much more important, I blogged yesterday.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Gary Farber // Sep 13, 2003 at 9:37 pm
“OTOH, you can get nice lasagne-and-salad for $7 in student dives.”
No need to be alarmed by these absurd prices! You can buy nice dried noodles around here for about $.30, and you can buy good salad makings for the same. If you’re enclined to be a spend thrift, you can buy a live salad at a deli or salad bar for about $1.50-$3.00.
It’s true these prices are alarming, but they’re much better around here! Thank goodness that artichoke hearts, corn, beets, carrots, lettuce, etc., usually costs only such an unalarming price. I’m not sure how I’d live if sald cost over $4-5/hr. And thank goodness pasta costs under $.30 a pound. 2000% increases are boggling. Though you can find that commonly in US restaurants as well, to be sure.
2 Betsy Devine // Sep 14, 2003 at 5:59 am
Hey, Gary. Yes, things were better in my student days, when I spent one winter eating veggie stir fry on rice for every meal–mostly cabbage and onions, cause those were cheap. We eked out our soy sauce by snitching packets of salt at take-out restaurants. But when you’re being put up in a foreign city by the kind minions of some university, they don’t tend to get you a hotel room with a stove, but they do tend to take you out to restaurants a lot.