American Influences

During a week in which Americans are commanded by the Constitution to eat obscene amounts of food and show our gratitude for all that we have, I think I should give thanks to America and all the ways that it influences my life, as well as the life of the average Swede, here in Sweden. First off, US culture has a more significant influence on Swedish culture than I expected. Yes, they like to make fun of me for being ignorant about other countries and not speaking other languages, but this is mostly in jest and they understand that for a country the size of Europe, it's really not needed to speak another language and we have enough geography of our own to learn. I could equate me not knowing the name of the political leader of Denmark to them not knowing who the governor of Alabama is (not that I actually know or care who the governor of Alabama is, but it's kind of the same idea). Movies, television, and popular music (no country music, unfortunately) are pretty much exactly the same here as in America (i.e., made in Hollywood), and movies and television are almost always shown in English with Swedish subtitles. There are a few Swedish TV programs, but I don't think they are very popular compared to American shows. A surprising number of the Swedes that I've met have spent some time in the US studying, and as a result of this and the non-dubbed television and movies, there are a lot of Swedish people who sound very American when they are speaking English. Not being much of a cinephile myself, I usually find that the Swedish people I talk to know a lot more about American TV and movies than I do.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the American election was all over the news here, and for the couple of months leading up to it, the first question people would ask me upon learning that I'm American was what are my thoughts on the election. As an American, I'm obviously an expert on it, right? Well, this led me to want to satisfy their expectations, and I followed the election and the news coverage pretty closely. A few days before the election I learned about a "Democrats Abroad" chapter here in Gothenburg, and they hosted an election night "watch" party, which I thought would be fun to check out. I went there around 10pm (4pm ET), expecting to only stay for an hour or two, but I ended up staying all night until an hour after the networks called Ohio (like 6:30am our time). The party had lots of food and drinks, and they even had an American trivia game to help us pass the time in the early part of the night. There were probably around 25 people in attendance - they were not all American, but that night I think I met more Americans than I had in the previous six months of being here (which was probably about 5 - there really aren't many of us in Gothenburg). Most of the people who were there have lived here in Sweden for a long time and moved for a spouse or a job - there were probably 3 or 4 people around my age, but I think only one of them was actually American and the others were either very interested in American politics or were friends with other people there.

One of those people was a Swedish girl who went to college in Oregon, and a couple of weeks later (i.e., Thursday) she hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner and invited me. It was really nice - she and a friend spent a day and a half cooking and had everything one would expect for Thanksgiving. There was turkey and gravy and stuffing and sweet potato casserole and vegetables and cranberry sauce, and for dessert there was apple pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, bread pudding, and apple crumble. I ate entirely too much, and it was delicious. I think there were three of us there from America, and about 15 other people from the host's masters degree program at the local business school. So, for those of you who asked if I celebrated Thanksgiving, the answer is yes. In general, though, Swedes don't celebrate Thanksgiving, and many of them don't know much about it as a holiday.

Speaking about holidays, I should mention the Fourth of July and Halloween. No, they don't celebrate July 4th here (duh), but I certainly did. My friend Jenn from Michigan was visiting that week, and we had a little barbecue in my front yard to celebrate America. It was actually really nice - we made hamburgers and veggies on a grill and drank some American whiskey and played some patriotic music. We went out to a bar afterward and I wore my American flag and Jenn wore an awesome American flag shirt that she found at a mall in Budapest (where we were traveling previously). All in all, it felt like we did July 4th right. Regarding Halloween, from what I've heard this wasn't really celebrated in Sweden until a few years ago. Now, due mostly to American TV and movies (I think), the Swedes are starting to celebrate it, and there were a few parties around town the weekend of Halloween. I even heard about one of my colleagues with kids taking them trick-or-treating. I didn't go to any of the parties or dress up myself, but it is notable that this holiday (which doesn't actually deal with America like Thanksgiving and July 4th) has caught on over here.

Well, I think that's enough patriotism for now.  Go USA!

Steven

There's no place like Göteborg

I think it's time to write a few words about my new home, the lovely city of Gothenburg. To the Swedish, that's Göteborg (pronounced something like Yuh-teh-boorg without really enunciating the 'g'). This is really not an easy word for English-speakers to pronounce, hence the English translation, Gothenburg, which sounds like it looks. You may not have heard of the city, or you may have only heard of it because of the second and third Stieg Larsson novels (by the way, Sahlgrenska hospital is like a mile from my place), but it's one of the major cities of Scandinavia. The capitals (Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo) are bigger and more well-known, but I'll say that Gothenburg probably comes next in terms of importance and attractiveness. This claim is due to its central location (3-4 hours from all three of the aforementioned capitals), the status and location as a major port, and that it's the next-biggest city in the region (as long as we don't count Finland, which we don't). We are somewhere between half a million and a million people, depending on whether you count the city itself or the "metropolitan area". That's 5-10 times the size of Ann Arbor, and about one-fifth the size of the Atlanta metro area. It's big enough to warrant an airport and a major train station, yet small enough that it feels like a community, and I can go for a run and circle the entire useful part of the city.

The public transportation is fantastic - there are buses and trams that run all times of day, and a ride with transfers costs about 18 kronor (like $2.50 - $3, depending on the exchange rate). There are also bike lanes and sidewalks along most of the roads, and despite the facts that it's almost always lightly raining, the city is built on a rather steep hill, and in the winter it gets dark for an insane proportion of the day, people are always biking. I bought a bike a few months ago, and like almost every bike I've seen here, it has fenders, a built-in rear-wheel lock, a clip in the back to secure belongings, and a little bell to warn the pedestrians that you are about to mow down. I also bought a u-lock, a helmet, and a headlight and taillight (safety first, Mom). I still don't like riding in the rain, but I've gotten over the hills and darkness problems, and I mostly use it to get to the gym and to my Swedish classes when it's dry enough (it cuts 15-20 minute walks down to 5-8 minute bike rides). In the city, it feels like bikes and trams and pedestrians have the right-of-way over cars, which makes me really glad I don't have to deal with driving here. Speaking of which, I'm of course sad to have sold my car before I left Michigan - it was a good car and it treated me well. At the same time, I'm quite happy that I no longer have that responsibility, particularly while I'm living in a place where I really don't need it or want it.

Now, I have to mention the climate, which to me is the biggest drawback of Gothenburg. It sounded nice on paper/computer (weather.com) when I compared it to Ann Arbor - it has cooler summers and less cold winters. Seems more temperate, right? Well, the summers are actually a bit on the chilly side, with it rarely going above 70 F, and the winter started a bit early, with some rather cold weeks happening in September. This temperature is accompanied by a pretty significant difference in daylight between winter and summer. Back in late June, it got dark around 11:30pm and light before 4am. This was actually really rough for me, because my bedroom at the time had big east-facing windows and insufficient blinds, so I didn't sleep well for a few months as the sun would wake me wayyy too early. In about a month we can expect the opposite with only 4-5 hours of daylight, and I think the toughest part of that is that I'll leave for work when it's dark and go home when it's dark, but it's really not all that bad. I have a big window in my office at work, so I'll always get to see the light when it's around. The final bummer about the weather, which I mentioned before, is that it's almost always cloudy and drizzling. I don't think the streets have been dry in 3 months - it's kind of ridiculous. But, I'm getting used to it, and it bothers me less every day. Last week, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, and it was so glorious - we couldn't help but smile! I looked around, and everyone else was smiling too... weather can really bring people together!

Okay, now you may have asked yourself a few sentences ago why I didn't just buy better blinds for my windows. Well, the apartment that I started out in was only available to me for 6 months, so given the temporality of the situation, I didn't want to invest in that place. Now, you may be thinking: why did you move into a place that you'd have to leave so soon? The answer is that finding a place to live in Gothenburg is a nightmare. If you think about trying to find an apartment in New York City, it's absurdly expensive, but it's possible. Here, it's not too expensive, but it's also not too possible. This is because there are price ceilings on apartment rentals, so no matter how good the location, owners can only legally charge up to a certain amount for rent. This creates what economists call a housing shortage - way more demand than supply. There are some second-hand ways to rent apartments (similar to Craigslist in the US), but they usually come with unpredictable roommates and other situations. If you want to rent in a legit way, there's Boplats - the official, first-hand apartment rental agency. Boplats is fair and balanced - they work on a priority system, so the longer you've been in the online "queue", the more priority you have and the more likely an apartment owner will offer you a place that you've applied for in the system. The problem is that you have to be in the queue for years to get anything near the center of the city. Like, ten years. Or, you have to know somebody, in which case they might let you skip the queue and just give you the place, which of course further aggravates the ten-year wait situation. Anyway, I joined the queue in January, and between June and August I applied for about 50 apartments and didn't get any offers to see a place. Fortunately, my department was able to set me up with a place (they had also gotten me the initial temporary place), though I wasn't able to see it or learn much more than the square meterage and price before agreeing to take it. I also had to start the lease a month early and pay double rent in October, which was expensive, but gave me time to slowly make the transition.

Anyway, now I'm all moved into my new place, and I'm happy with the location, the space, and the west-facing bedroom window. I'm looking forward to all of you visiting me soon so I can show it off!

Ha det så bra,
Steven

Välkommen!

Welcome to my new blog about my travels, experiences, and life in Sweden!  I've been thinking and talking about doing this for a while, and now it's finally happening.  We'll see if this amounts to weekly posts, monthly posts, or perhaps nothing more than this post, but I think this can be a good way for me to keep in touch with my life in America while documenting my experiences abroad.  While I may have moved very far away, my friends and family in the US are important to me, and I want to keep in touch as much as possible.  This is not to say that all I have to do is send completely impersonal posts to the public internet and expect you all to treat these as personal messages - this is more a way to update you and remind you all that I'm here and interested in hearing your updates, and hopefully it'll spark more individual conversations via email, chat, phone calls, videochat, teleportation, etc.  That said, you are welcome to publicly comment on any of my blog posts or send me a personal email at hoffenson@gmail.com - whatever you prefer.

I'll start off by saying that I can't believe it's already been six months since I moved to Gothenburg.  Time is really flying by, and I wish that my progress at work and in learning Swedish were a little bit further along, but I do feel like I'm moving forward on both fronts, which is good.  I just started my third Swedish course, which is level B1 part 2.  Right now, I feel like I can understand about half of what I hear in Swedish, and maybe two-thirds of what I read, but I really don't have much practice speaking because everybody switches to English whenever we are talking (since nearly all Swedes can speak English way better than I can speak Swedish).  I'm hopeful and confident, though, that I'll be conversing fairly proficiently in another 6 months.

Just like moving to any new city, it's been a little bit tough to build a network of friends, and I think this has been exacerbated by the minor language barrier and the relatively introverted nature of the Swedish people.  I do feel like I've made some good friends through work, as well as a few through the Swedish courses and sports that I've been playing, but my social network is still much smaller than what I'm used to from my groups of friends in Georgia, Maryland, and Michigan. It probably doesn't help that I live alone, but I actually really like the independence I get from that.  Anyway, at this point I'm starting to feel pretty good about having made some good friends and finding things to do to fill up my free time, and I think that this will continue to improve over time.

My summer and early autumn were very busy times, which is part of the reason why I dropped off the email update bandwagon.  I think I should probably describe my trips in more detail in later posts, but as an overview I had 4 visitors and traveled to Budapest, Belgium, Holland, London (Olympics), Paris, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Aalborg (Denmark), Stockholm a few times, and Copenhagen a couple of times.  It's really nice how easy it is to get around Europe, and some of the flights were around US$50 round-trip!  And I know some of you are going to ask me what my favorite place was out of those trips, and I'll tell you right now to please not ask me that question.  Each of those places is very cool in it's own way, and I really hate picking favorites.

Since it's still election season, I have to mention that American politics are surprisingly well-known to a lot of Europeans, considering how little we typically know about foreign politics, and it seems like whenever I meet somebody they ask me about the election.  Almost everybody I've met over here supports Obama, and I suppose their main interests lie in foreign policy, but they are also very socially liberal over here.  The American left (liberal/democrat) is pretty far to the right (conservative side) of most European political views.  People here don't seem to understand why conservatives in the US are so against universal healthcare, which most other developed countries have.  And on the foreign policy side, they like that the democrats use diplomacy and cooperate with other nations to avoid war.  Some Americans argue that this makes us look weak, but on the other hand, it makes us look reasonable.  I know that not everybody reading this blog agrees with these views, but I think it's important to understand how outsiders view us, because it can't be a bad thing for other people to like us.  Anyway, I'll be happy when the election is over so I can read the news and learn something interesting rather than the same stuff over and over.

Okay, that's probably enough for my first post.  If you want to subscribe (i.e., get an email update every time I post something), you can do so by putting your email address in the "Follow by email" field and clicking "Submit" in the top-right corner of the page.  If you can't figure that out and want updates, just ask me and I'll send you an email every time I post!

Med vänliga hälsningar,
Steven