Differences

Here is a list of a few differences between Sweden and England that I’ve noticed recently.

Public transport etiquette during rush hour

For the past two weeks I’ve been using the pendeltag to travel to work each day. I’ve had a lot of amusing experiences on the pendeltag, including completely ignoring someone who tried to speak to me and strolling out of the station, before realising that that person was a ticket inspector, and witnessing a man who had a separate seat next to him for his sandwich. Experiences like this have given me a great love for the pendeltag.

However, having moved over the weekend I need to take a slightly different route to work now, and Monday was the first morning I used the t-bana to get to work. It was certainly busier than the pendeltag, and I had to stand up for some of the way, as I would expect at that time of the morning. I did, however, notice one big difference between going to work on the t-bana, and going to work on the tube in London. In London if there’s a free seat it’s often very competitive over who gets to sit down. Here, each time a seat became free, everyone seemed to ignore it or just look slightly confused by it. I’ve noticed that commuters here look less like their souls have been destroyed than in London, which is nice to see, so maybe in London people are more desperate for a small comfort, such as the option to sit down.

Cigarettes

This, in particular, is something I find odd and a bit annoying here. It’s really difficult to buy the necessaries to roll your own cigarettes. In England some people smoke pre-rolled cigarettes, some people do not, and that’s all there really is to it. Until after I left Stockholm in September I primarily smoked Marlboro Lights, since then I’ve smoked rollies, and now I find smoking pre-rolled cigarettes a bit unpleasant. However, it’s sometimes quite difficult to buy the relevant materials for this, possibly because I’ve been told that smoking in this way is typically associated with using drugs here. Maybe it’s just really unpopular and so fewer shops actually stock rolling papers etc.

As an example, on Friday morning I needed to buy Rizla, so when I got to the train station I went to the Pressbyran shop, which is a chain of newsagents here. They didn’t have Rizla – not as in they were out of stock, as in this is a product they didn’t stock at all. There is another Pressbyran shop outside the station I was getting off at, so I decided to try there too, expecting they also would not have them, and when I couldn’t see them behind the counter I just bought Marlboro instead. Pressbyran is a major chain, so it doesn’t fill me with optimism that they don’t sell them. There is also a 7-Eleven quite close to my workplace, but when I went there previously to try to buy filters they didn’t sell them at all, so I’m doubtful that they would have papers. In Hagsatra the local Spel & Tobac sold everything we needed, in Hogdalen the local shop is a Pressbyran so this puts us in a slight pickle. These items seem to generally be confined to specialist tobacconists, but obviously there isn’t one of those on every street corner. To moan even more, slim filter tips and papers don’t seem to be usual here, and the tobacco isn’t quite the same, so we end up with fat, slightly unpleasant cigarettes. I know I should probably use this as encouragement to quit smoking, rather than encouragement to moan.

Dagenslunch

This I love. A lot of restaurants offer lunch inclusive of water or juice, coffee, salad, and the main meal! It seems that a lot more is provided for your money here, although I’ve encountered the salad bar thing in Finland too. In restaurants in England you tend to sit down and stay put, but here it seems more normal for people to be wandering about helping themselves to some things. It’s normal enough that a lot of places don’t even tell you to do this stuff yourself – when we went to Greasy Spoon on Saturday we ordered coffee and had finished it by the time the food was brought to us. We asked for two more cups of coffee, and were told the coffee was round the corner and we could help ourselves to as much as we liked! When you love coffee as much as I do that’s obviously a good thing to hear, and also makes your coffee even better value for money! In England if you want something other than tap water you’re paying for it. I’m getting to like the restaurant culture here, especially as there seem to be a lot of good restaurants to try in Stockholm.

Hot dogs

What is going on with Swedish people and hot dogs? They love them! I suspect this may be a Nordic thing rather than a specifically Swedish thing, as I once spent a month in Iceland and learned that the establishment voted the best restaurant in Iceland is a hot dog stand in Reykjavik. I even walked past it once! Hot dogs are so popular here, Pressbyran frequently advertises the hot dogs they sell, and I’ve even seen advertisements for their hot dogs for breakfast! Hot dogs are literally promoted as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack! Sausages are a legitimate element of an English breakfast, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised by this suggestion, but it’s not something that would ever have occurred to me. I’m even being influenced by this big love of hot dogs – last night I bought vegetarian hot dogs for myself, and meat ones for Kai, and we had a hot dog night, which is not something I’d ever done before, but I’d definitely do it again.