Buying cigarettes

So just now I bought cigarettes in a supermarket for the first time, and I have to say it is a very strange process, the strangest I have come across. Up until now I have bought cigarettes and tobacco over the counter, as I am used to, in Pressbyrån or Svensk Tobak och Spel. I just came home to find that Pressbyrån was already shut, so I went to ICA to buy some cigarettes.

I had noticed before that over the tills there is a shelf of cards that look like the front of cigarette packets. I assumed that you chose the right card and the person on the till then gave you the correct cigarettes. That's not too complicated. Wrong!

So you choose your card, which is scanned and paid for. You then go over to another machine, scan the card, and are given your cigarettes. However, I thought you just needed the receipt so I was furiously trying to shove my receipt into the machine and getting nowhere. Just as the truth dawned on me and I was about to go back to the till, the member of staff who served me came over with the card and helped me.

I really do think that this country has a tendency to over-complicate things. In England you would go to the kiosk in the supermarket to get cigarettes. In Finland there is a machine by the conveyor belt of the till where you select the correct brand, it spits it onto the conveyor belt, and you pay for it with the rest of your shopping. When I lived in Finland the brands were shown on the machine, but a few months afterwards they banned this, considering it a form of advertisement, and just showing numbers instead. So unless you really knew the machine you had to ask for the correct number, or play cigarette roulette. Now I know that in Sweden I need to take the card with me, and once you've scanned it you can recycle it at the machine. But still, I find this very strange.

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.

English food

I've been back for just over 3 weeks now, and definitely don't miss England, but I've been craving some English food, some things I could probably replicate here, some things probably not.

1.) Pret A Manger

Until recently I worked in Central London, meaning that Pret A Manger was literally everywhere, and took care of my lunch most days. My last meal in England, in the departure lounge at Gatwick, was a mozzarella and tomato croissant and a cup of coffee from Pret. Maybe it's just something familiar and dependable, but every now and then I've wished there was a Pret around the corner. Perhaps I could open their first franchise in Sweden! There are so many things I love from Pret it's impossible to list them all, and I love walking into their shops knowing that there are so many options. Once I start working here I think I'll be a bit lost at lunchtime at first.

2.) Fried breakfasts

Although I'm vegetarian and therefore don't eat the traditional breakfast, cafes in England always offer at least one vegetarian fried breakfast, and on a couple of occasions I've felt like a greasy breakfast would really be perfect. I suppose this is something I could replicate quite easily if I bought the ingredients, and I noticed that The English Shop in Stockholm sells Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages, which I quite enjoy, so if I get very desperate I know what to do. I've noticed that people from outside of Britain find the ingredients of a fried breakfast quite odd for breakfast - Heli and I once had a debate about whether this meal was suitable for breakfast or dinner, but I suspect most British people living abroad probably miss this one. It's normal for England.

3.) A very particular halloumi burger

I had a strange experience one day last week where I literally dreamed about a halloumi burger, and woke up desperate for it. For a little while I thought the burger was one I ate in a bar in Medborgarplatsen during the summer, in which case problem solved! After a while it dawned on me that unfortunately the burger I'm dreaming of is from Mildreds, my favourite vegetarian restaurant in London, and possibly the world. All of their food is delicious, I've actually only ever gone there with meat eaters, and all of them have loved it, including my mum, but it's the bread that makes that burger. I don't know what kind of bread they use but it really is amazing. A halloumi burger and a Kir Royale sounds like a pretty satisfying lunch to me. I need to stop thinking about it because I want one again, my friend Elena did offer to post one to me but I think I might pass on that offer.

4.) Refried beans

I love refried beans. Any mexican inspired food I make is incomplete without refried beans, and bizarrely, the Swedish public don't seem to be into them! When we visited The English Shop I noticed they were selling Old El Paso refried beans, which seemed very odd because that brand is available in all the normal supermarkets here. A few days later when we decided to make fajitas we noticed that the Old El Paso range in the supermarket included everything EXCEPT refried beans! I've looked in more than one supermarket, and it appears that Swedish people just aren't on board with refried beans - they're nowhere to be found in Swedish food shops! I'm a bit confused by this, especially as all the other products are available here, and Mexican food seems to be fairly popular in this country. Unfortunately, until I bulk buy beans in the only shop I've seen them, probably at a fairly high cost due to being imported, it seems that my fajitas and enchiladas will be a little bit lacking. Last time we did attempt to make out own "refried beans" - they were bloody awful.

That's all I've been missing for now. As mentioned before, restaurants are good and there are a lot of vegetarian options available in Stockholm, so I definitely don't feel like I'm going without. I think that wherever you go you end up missing things from other places. I miss a lot of Finnish products, some of which I can buy here, some not. Heli pointed out to me last week that the ferry between here and Turku has no luggage limits, so I have a feeling that sooner or later I'll be getting on that ferry with an empty suitcase, and coming back with a very full one!

Fatal errors

I suppose it's only natural that we're going to make some silly mistakes whilst we're here, especially whilst we're getting used to the language. I probably made plenty in Finland too, I just can't remember them.
First mistake: Last night in the supermarket my boyfriend said "Look, they have apricot juice!" I'm not sure why I didn't question this, seeing as he can't read Swedish. I didn't know the word "kräm", and assumed it must be another word for juice. So we bought the juice, opened it at home, and discovered that we'd actually bought a litre of apricot puree! We ate some of it out of sheer stubbornness, and there was nothing wrong with it, but it's definitely not fruit juice. We were a bit confused about why anyone would actually need a litre of apricot puree, we tried to google it and it seems to be a product for baking. So now we have a litre of puree and we're not sure what to do with it. Lesson learned.Second mistake: This morning I decided to write a speculative job application in Swedish - prior to this I've been writing applications only in English. I wrote it, felt pretty happy with it, and sent it off. Every other time I've written in Swedish off the top of my head I've then checked what I've written in a translator to be sure there are no errors. You'd think this would be especially important for a job application, but for some reason I did not do this, and as soon as I had sent it I realised that rather than saying I had customer service experience I'd actually said I had experience in art dealing! So I'm assuming that the application won't get very far, but if they read my CV I hope they'll realise that this was just a language mistake. Especially as the company has absolutely nothing to do with art!

Remembering why I'm here

The weather is beautiful in Stockholm at the moment, and also the difficulties earlier this week I thought that I should spend some time actually enjoying being here. Yesterday morning someone else contacted me about a job opportunity, so I now have two meetings arranged for the next few days. After that I decided to let myself relax a little bit and remember why I decided to come here.
The website for Time Out Stockholm very helpful advised that a lot of art related stuff is in the area around Sankt Eriksplan, so off I went. It's really important to me to find art galleries and art related activity here, as this is such a significant part of my life. I had planned to visit a specific gallery, somehow failed to find it, but managed to find a large number of contemporary, commercial galleries instead. I visited a few of them, and was really pleased.
When I lived in Finland I particularly liked that I became exposed to work by Finnish artists who I may never have encountered otherwise, and it's the same case here - most of the work was by Swedish artists who I probably would not have seen in England. I saw some excellent paintings, and also some very beautiful and tactile work made using pressed leaves and flowers. The area actually reminded me quite a lot of Vyner Street or Cork Street in London. In London I regularly visit the commercial art galleries in Mayfair, so it's great for me to have found a similar area in Stockholm. Sankt Eriksplan is definitely an area I'm keen to return to regularly.
After visiting the galleries I also found some really interesting shops in the area. Stockholm Retro was really cool, with lots of crockery, ornaments, and textiles from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The prices were also pretty cheap, so I can see myself visiting that shop again when I need to buy homeware items. I also found a chocolate and liquorice shop. I'm not that into liquorice but I definitely like chocolate, so that's another shop I'm keen to return to. I'm looking forward to exploring this area more in the future.
Doing this really improved my mood, and reminded me of why I came here. Trying to find work and housing, and being separated from my boyfriend, means I've been a bit bogged down and feeling a bit negative. The job side of things is looking fairly positive for now, and although the housing situation here is tremendously difficult, like nothing I've ever experienced before, there are a couple of options with that too. I have a plan B, which is starting to look more and more appealing, and like a more sensible option. Plan B should become clearer later today, and then I can consider my options much more seriously.
I expected finding a job to be the bigger challenge, as I'm still learning to speak Swedish, but this is really not the case. I knew before I came here that there were bound to be difficulties with housing, but coming here has made me realise how bad the situation is.