Slings and arrows of outrageous Vikings

I’ve been in Göteborg for a couple of weeks now, and though it has mostly been fun and exciting, I think that my first month in Sweden will go on record as one of the most frustrating, bewildering, and stressful ones of my entire life. Let me count the ways:

Bureaucracy
The thing about Sweden is everything remotely official – from university academics and administrators to the tax department to our landlord company – is only open for a certain two hours on a certain weekday, and different branches of the same organisation will be open at different times, and if those hours don’t work for you then that’s the way the kanelbulle crumbles. So, where in New Zealand I’d set aside a Monday to do administrative chores, here you have to set aside little bits of days over the course of a month in order to achieve everything. This has been exacerbated by the fact that in order to fulfil almost all of the bureaucratic activities required of me in order for me to become a recognised student/resident/person I need to have a personnummer (Swedish identity number), which I applied for my first Monday in Sweden and was promised to arrive within 10-14 days. It has been over three weeks now, and I have spent at least NZ$50 in phone credit waiting in telephone queues where some canned woman’s voice comes on and says in a professional and reassuring manner “you are now… sixty-ninth… in the queue. Please continue to hold, and we will be with you as soon as we can.”

Apartment
When we first arrived in Göteborg it was a Sunday, and the accommodation office isn’t open on Sunday (not much is really – Axel told me it’s out of respect for church-goers, but I reckon it’s because the unions in Sweden secured double pay for those who work on weekends), so even though we’d already paid rent on our apartment, we couldn’t pick up the keys until noon the next day. We slept over at a friend-of-a-friend’s that night, but the following day was a total saga. They couldn’t find the keys… probably the last tenant still had them… here’s the spare in the meantime… we’ll send a locksmith over to change the locks… please be at the apartment at 2 o’clock to pick up the new keys from the locksmith… And I couldn’t even help Axel move all our stuff to the apartment at 2 o’clock because it turned out...

English Exam
... I had to take a five-hour exam to prove I was competent in written English, and the only chance to take the exam was at 1 o’clock that afternoon. I arrived breathless at the exam hall hoping to find someone I could explain to that English was my mother tongue, and actually I had already finished an entire degree written in English, and did I really have to do this test? But no such luck, just a vast exam room full of people sitting various tests, and a couple of elderly people who were there to make sure nobody cheated and knew little else. I didn’t even have a chance to ask how to register for the exam before I was ushered to a seat. It was like one of those surreal dreams where you find yourself sitting an exam, and you’re not sure why or what you’re doing there. All the instructions were read out in Swedish, so I had to put up my hand to figure out if we were allowed to start yet, and which answer booklets to fill in. There were 210 questions on vocabulary and grammar, all multiple-choice. There was an additional translation section, where you were given a sentence in Swedish and asked to translate to English. This just confirmed the bizarreness of the situation – I was unable to prove my command of English in the English exam because I didn’t understand Swedish! Translation section aside, I finished in two hours, and spent another hour checking I’d coloured in the right corresponding boxes. It took me four trams to get home, once because I rode the right number tram in the wrong direction, and twice more because I couldn’t figure out how to purchase a ticket (instructions in Swedish) and had to get off the tram every time an inspector got on (or else face a four hundred dollar fine).

Apartment

When we moved in there was also lots wrong with the apartment itself, but these have eventually been sorted out, and we have a lovely shower. The only truly disappointing thing is that the kitchen is in the hallway, and the oven is the size of a toy oven, with only two elements. But it is relatively big (45 square metres), and in a good area. The view of the canal is beautiful, and it’s only a 25 minute walk to university. We have christened the apartment “Staffan”, which is pronounced kind of like “stuff-un”, so it is a fun little Swenglish word pun lame thing there. Next to the random pillar which is seriously in the way, we have a weird little room a bit like a walk-in wardrobe which we have christened “Gubbängen”, “gubbe” is Swedish for cute old man, or generic character, and ängen means “the meadow” (put it together and you get “the cute-old-man-meadow). It is the name of a Metro stop in Stockholm. The stops on the Stockholm meadow feature at least six different dialect words for meadow, and you can also find Fruängen (the wife-meadow). The way the station-names make it sound, it seems like taking the Metro in Stockholm will be a magical rainbow journey to all kinds of wacky meadows where you will encounter numerous cute old men and wives. Oh, and the Aga factory. For a picture from the real Gubbängen, see this (the title translates as "Exciting Sunday in Gubbängen").

We’re going a bit crazy in our apartment in that we have almost no furniture. We’re lucky in that we’re going to get virtually an entire apartment worth of stuff from Axel’s Mum. Her job moved to Gotland, an island off the east coast of Sweden, because that’s what government departments do in order to inject economy into dying towns – they move government departments there. She set up a second apartment there with all new things, but only went there on two occasions before deciding it wasn’t for her. She’s even found one of her friends to drive the stuff from this island on the east coast all the way to Göteborg on the west coast. But we don’t get it until late February. So in the mean time, we have some plates and knives and plastic cups, but little else. We have two single mattresses, of significantly different thicknesses, and one single duvet. I have been sleeping on the thicker, more comfortable mattress, but Axel gets the duvet. I sleep under three empty duvet covers, which is almost exactly like sleeping under three sheets. We are having picnics on the floor everyday – Axel lights candles and lays out the checked teal towel on the floor to make it a real picnic. He’s great like that.

Initially our Spartan existence was somewhat alleviated by the recycling room, where people dump furniture they don’t want in a corner next to the skips for cardboard and glass and tins. Thanks to this source, we now have a pink lamp that glows like the sunset and really changes the mood of the whole apartment; two coffee tables; one chair; one Oriental cushion; some wall-mounted shelves; three Gothic paintings of English scenery; two mosaic garden pots; one oddly-shaped mirror; one light fitting; one silver fruit bowl; one large plastic flower decoration which looks very elegant tucked into the pipes that run up one wall; and a really ugly 2004 trophy for (land) hockey. We also have a beautiful mug and bowl set with images from Tintin in Shanghai, which we got for $7.50 at the Salvation army. So now we have a mug. And we found a toaster and jug set selling for about $36 because they were the demo ones in the store. Axel's grandmother also gifted us the money to buy a nice blender, which we love. So we were sort of happy for a while, until...

Painters
... the painters came. After finally getting some stuff and making a home, we were informed that our apartment was going to be painted this week Monday to Friday, and we were required to move all our stuff into the middle of the room so that it could be covered in brown paper. We were expected to find somewhere else to sleep for the week. We struck a compromise with the painters, who have agreed to let us sleep in Gubbängen, which is big enough to fit one and a half of our mattresses. So Axel has been sleeping on the little mattress all mushed into a corner. All our clothes and furniture is under the brown paper, so we have to go foraging around trying not to disturb anything. And the foraging is done in the dark, as we have no light-switches or electrical sockets while they are painting, and we are required to leave the house at 8am (while it is still dark) and cannot return until 4pm (by which point it is dark). It is shit.



NB: Just got my results from the English exam! 119 out of 120 for vocabulary, 85 oout of 90 for grammar! The woman who told me the results said, "I've never seen anything like it!" They summarise your marks into points, so I got 20 out of 20. Easiest (if strangest) exam ever.