…with real nostalgia, by reading a few of the 300-plus list items in “You know you’ve been in Sweden too long when“:
- Your native language has seriously deteriorated, now you begin to “eat medicine”, “open the television”, “close the lights off”, “take a beer”, ”look upon everything” and tell someone to “follow with me” or “you needn’t to!” You start to say “for 2 years ago” and expressions like “Don’t panic” creep into your everyday language.
- The fact that all of the “v’s” and the “w’s” are together in the phone directory seems right.
- The first thing you do upon entering a bank/post office/chemist etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
- You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number.
- You sing bawdy drinking songs instead of Christmas carols.
- As a student, you accept and even enjoy getting dressed in formal wear to go to a candle-lit 3 course dinner where you will alternately bang on your table and stand on your chair singing songs in praise of alcohol each and every time you attempt to raise your fork to your mouth.
- You are concerned when the picture on the front page of the paper is not of some completely random person watering their garden or of a child holding an animal.