What's missing?

Since I moved here, people have asked me whether I "miss" home. In some ways, I don't consider moving here to be all that different from when I moved to Maryland or to Michigan for the first time. It's a new place, it's cold, and I didn't really know anybody here before arriving. The hardest part about moving to a new place is saying goodbye to family and friends in the previous place, and this time I've actually added a lot of distance and expense to being able to go back and see people. Phone calls and email work exactly the same as they did before (aside from the time difference), so being away from "home" isn't so intimidating.

But what non-person things do I miss from the United States of America? I think a post on this can give you some ideas about the main differences I see between living in the US and living in Sweden.

First, let's talk about food. Swedish food is good, but it's not really anything new, exciting, or exotic. Swedes eat a lot of fish, which I like, and a lot of potatoes, which I'm not crazy about but will eat if they're on my plate. Swedish meatballs are really not all that common, and I can get the same meatballs at IKEA here as I could get at IKEA back in the US. In terms of fast food/restaurants, the only American chains in Gothenburg are McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, and Hard Rock Cafe, and I pretty much never go to those. Among the local fare, there are a lot of good Thai restaurants and decent pizzerias around, and then there are lots of other ethnically-themed restaurants that tend toward the more expensive side. We have a serious dearth of Mexican/southwestern cuisine (I could go for a Chipotle burrito right now), and it's difficult/expensive to find a decent burger (e.g., no Five Guys).

Another food-related difference can be found in the grocery stores. The ones I've been to here just don't have the selection that the American ones have, nor do they have brands that I was familiar with before. One thing that I always thought was amazing in the US was that if I found a recipe that called for some specific size of a specific product, the store would have it. Like, say, a 14.5-ounce can of stewed tomatoes with mexican green chilis. I'd see that on the recipe's list of ingredients and be like, "what are the odds that they have tomatoes in that style with that particular spicy accompaniment in a can of that size?", and then it's just there on the shelf at Kroger. Well, here, they don't know what an ounce is, and they don't have the same varieties of products. Unfortunately, that rules out most of the American recipes I can find on the internet, meaning I have to get creative if I want to cook (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

And it's not just food products that are different - I'm having to get used to new brands of other things, like shampoo and deodorant and laundry detergent. Even the deodorant product itself comes in a differently-shaped container with a weird applicator. Recently, I noticed that Unilever and Proctor and Gamble make a lot of the name-brand products here (both food and non-food), which probably means that they are the same or similar products as their American counterparts. Unfortunately, I never paid attention to the company before (did you know that Tide detergent is made by P&G?), so it's still all new to me - after nearly 9 months here, I still have no idea what I want when I'm shopping.

The next thing that I miss is not so much a thing as it is an atmosphere. While everyone speaks great English and my Swedish is improving, I miss not knowing the language that everyone around me is usually speaking. That's not (necessarily) to say that I want to eavesdrop on conversations around me, but it's just a different feeling to be walking around and not knowing what people are saying.

Finally, watching American sports is a lot tougher to do over here. As you can probably guess, people here don't care about baseball, basketball, or American football. During NFL season, one of the Swedish channels shows an average of one game per Sunday, and they cover up the audio with their own Swedish commentators. I've never actually tried to listen to it, but from what I've been told, these commentators don't know very much about American football. There are a couple of sports bars in town that show those NFL games (including the Super Bowl, which starts at midnight here!), but the selection at one game per week is severely limited. Other sports, like baseball, college football, and college basketball, are never on TV here, so they require some fancy internet work and are difficult if not impossible to find in high quality. This could probably be fixed by setting up a slingbox or ordering some super-fancy-special cable package (I think ESPN is obtainable, but I've never actually checked), but who has time for that?

I think I can sum this all up and say that the things I miss deal with familiarity. Familiar people, familiar products, familiar language, familiar sports. I think that if I stay here long enough I'll know lots of people, have a good idea of what Swedish products I like and dislike, be fluent enough in the language, and (ugh) start liking soccer and calling it "football".

We'll see about that last one...

Steven