An excellent 24 hours

Woohoo! The past 24 hours have been really good for me, but the biggest piece of news - I got the job! I start on Monday, and it's such a relief because this means that the biggest obstacle has been surpassed, and everything should get a bit easier from now on. Since going to Bazaren I've been feeling a bit more negative - there seemed to be an implication from some sides that Swedish people don't trust foreign people to do the job properly, and this worried me a bit, but now I feel so much better.
I'm sensible enough to realise that things will not automatically be easy from now on, but this does make a big difference. I now qualify for a personnummer, and can start looking for a place for us to live. I could have started that previously, but I do understand that not many people will be keen to rent to a couple who've just turned up and have no steady income. Kai is still looking, but having one decent income between us takes the pressure off a bit.The most important thing is that finding this job enables us to stay in Stockholm. After reading about so many negative experiences I did worry that eventually we'd run out of options. I would absolutely hate to have to go back to England, so I'm really relieved. I realise this is just a start for us, but hopefully it's a good sign for our future. I do feel more confident now that we'll be able to build a successful life here.

In my time job hunting I've noticed that Swedish people/companies are extremely friendly and positive in comparison to England - even rejection emails are so pleasant that you almost don't mind! I'm going to be working via a recruitment company, and the two welcome emails that they sent to me were so enthusiastic and friendly that I already feel comfortable working with them. The two staff members I've been in contact with have also both been so helpful and nice. So far this experience has been really positive, so hopefully the job will also be a good experience for me.

On a different subject, the past 24 hours have also been really good for getting involved in art related things here, which as I mentioned is a massive priority for me. We were going to a private view last night at Platform Stockholm, and at the last minute I found out that there was another private view at Färgfabriken, which is just next door. We went to Färgfabriken first, and there were a couple of different shows there. The show that the PV was for was related to the fragmentation and "development" of urban spaces, and in particular we watched a really interesting film about Beirut, and the privatisation of the sea. This was a brand new concept to me, and something that I didn't even realise was possible. I was thinking about it for a long time after we left, and it was striking to see the perspectives of people in Beirut, and the changes that they had observed.
There was also an exhibition of sculptures by Julia Bondesson, and I enjoyed these even more. Each piece seemed to have its own character, these dead pieces of wood seemed to be so expressive. The rough way that the pieces were carved gave them a really interesting appearance. Each piece was very well made - they were rough but simultaneously refined.
I also really liked the way that the exhibition was set out - each individual work was presented in a unique way. Perhaps this factor helped to bring personality to the pieces. I enjoy exhibitions that are experimental in their presentation.
Next we went to Platform Stockholm, where the show concerned the themes of the body, loss, and artificiality. There were some abstract paintings I really liked that to me suggested bodily fluids. I think this is really interesting, as I think most people would associate bodily loss with amputation. 
I really liked the space at Platform Stockholm - I could see my work in that space. I'm really keen to see more shows there and see other possibilities for how the space can work.

Today I went to Kultuhuset to see work by Katrine Helmersson, which I really enjoyed. There were a lot of abstracted images of the body and body parts - I work mainly in portraiture, recently mainly images of body parts, so this was very interesting to me. The style was totally different from my own work, but I appreciate being able to see an alternative perspective. I'm also very into texture, and this show includes a variety of materials and textures, as well as some textile pieces, which are also of particular interest to me. The information about the exhibition mentions the work alluding to themes from Kristeva and Lacan, both of whom I studied in the last year of my degree. Having some understanding of this made the show even more interesting. I was not familiar with the artist before today, but now I'd be keen to see more of her work. 
So it's been a good 24 hours for me, and my only complaint is that many galleries in Stockholm seem to stay shut for extended periods of time. Or maybe I should take that as a positive that there are still so many exhibitions and spaces yet to discover.

Progress this week

Although I'm still without a solid job I feel like I've been making some progress in the past couple of weeks. Maybe my job hunting skills are improving, but I've found some more suitable options to apply for, and I feel optimistic that something will come up. I think it's easy to feel negative, and seeing people describe their difficult experiences with job hunting here on forums etc is not very encouraging. I'm doing my best to keep in mind that although those experiences are totally valid and good to be aware of, there are also non-Swedish people who come here and succeed, but they're less likely to be discussing it online. I remember when I lived in Turku I saw many discussions about the attitudes of Finnish people that were so different to my own experience, so I've learned to have a balanced view. Generally I think a positive attitude helps anyway.
The other encouraging thing is that I had another job interview earlier this morning! It turns out that my previous post, which mentioned a job I interviewed for being re-advertised, was actually incorrect. Sure enough, a day later the recruitment agency called to let me know I had not been successful, but they also told me that an almost identical job was available in a different department of the same organisation, and asked if I'd like to apply for that one instead. Obviously I said yes, was called for an interview again, and I feel that things went much better for me today. As I'd been there before and already met two of the interviewers I felt more comfortable. Last time it really threw me because the questions they asked were not what I had been expecting from an interview here, and it was nothing like an interview in England either. As I knew what they were likely to ask I thought about it more this time, and definitely feel like I was better prepared. I don't want to make assumptions or get my hopes up, but I feel far more optimistic than I did after my last interview.
After that I met Kai and we went to Bazaren job fair in Kulturhuset, which was actually a bit of a disappointment. I thought it was going to be a lot bigger than it actually was, and their website mentioned that it was possible to apply for jobs there and then. However, the only jobs that seemed to be available were sales jobs, and a lady from one of the stands who we were talking to even told us that mainly sales jobs were being offered at the fair. I've worked in sales previously, but it's not something I enjoy or want to do again.
Bazaren was advertised as helping non-Swedish people find work here, so we thought there would probably be employers working in other languages. This didn't seem to be the case at all - I noticed one single stand actively looking for English speaking people, Kai has very little knowledge of Swedish and was quite confused about why everything was in Swedish. Although my ability is more advanced, and I know I'm getting better and growing in confidence, I don't feel able to work in Swedish yet, which I know puts me at a disadvantage, and this also meant there wasn't much for me there. I also thought that the emphasis would be on employers rather than training or mentoring services, but this wasn't the case either.
That being said, we spoke to one recruitment agency and the lady working there was really positive, it's definitely something for me to look into. A couple of other people there also gave us suggestions of things to look into, so I do feel that we've come away with a few more options. However, generally I'd say that Bazaren was unfortunately not for me.
The other positive news is that I've got involved with a newly established advertising and branding agency. Unfortunately they're not yet able to offer paid employment, but I'm able to do some voluntary work with them, with the aim being that when there is a regular revenue this will turn into full time employment for all staff. That's still some time into the future, but until then the amount of work they expect is really manageable. This would also give me a chance to do something creative, and maybe move into a more creative day job in the future. I had a really positive conversation with the director and we're arranging a meeting. The previous job I mentioned within media may also still be an option a couple of months from now, depending on what they're doing and what I'm doing.
This week I've also started to look more into art opportunities and spaces in Stockholm. Whilst I need a stable job and income, I also really want to continue concentrating on developing my art career. That's the most important thing - the stable day job is just to enable me to do that, and hopefully will no longer be needed one day. I've found some cool small spaces that I'm keen to explore - Kai and I are planning a little wander to visit various exhibitions tomorrow, and we are actually going to a private view tonight. I hope this will be a good opportunity to meet new people who are involved with art here. I'm used to having a lot of friends and contacts within contemporary art in London, and I'd really like to have that here too.
The other exciting news is that I arranged to volunteer at Supermarket, Stockholm's international art fair, in April of this year! I'm really exciting to get first-hand experience of how exhibitions work in this country. It's a while into the future, but hopefully it'll give me another chance to meet people who are involved with art here, and get some more connections. I'm starting to feel like I'm making progress and have some options here. We've still got a long way to go before we're totally stable, I'm sure there are problems to come, but we'll get there.

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!

Language success, job failure

I'll get the negative part out of the way first! It appears I was unfortunately not successful in my job interview last week. I haven't heard from the recruitment agency yet, but I'm assuming this is the case because this morning I found the exact advert for the job re-posted, dated yesterday! I'm not surprised, I really didn't feel that the interview went well, but this is a new form of rejection I've never experienced before. It's a bit frustrating, but I was kind of expecting it, and actually I'm not completely sure I'd have really enjoyed working there anyway. Maybe it's for the best.

On a more positive note, yesterday I decided to watch a subtitled Swedish film I've seen a few times before, Fucking Åmål, which I really like. The last time I watched it was well over a year ago, long before I started to learn Swedish, so I wanted to see how much of the dialogue I could understand now. I thought it would also really be helpful to hear pronunciation and accents. Happily, I was able to understand a lot of sentences, and words within sentence, even without reading the subtitles, and this makes me feel more confident. I also found hearing the way that words are pronounced really helpful. I think this is something I need to work on, because I still think that understanding speech is one of my biggest problems. My confidence in speaking is growing every day and I'm so much less nervous than I was previously. It's kind of weird that this time last year I could not speak Swedish and had no intention of learning Swedish, and now I have this language in my head constantly.
Fucking Åmål is a good film with a happy ending, but I've seen other films by Lukas Moodysson that are a lot less uplifting. It's very 90s, which reminds me of when I was a kid. I'm keen to watch more films in Swedish though, as I really did find that watching it was beneficial for me. If anyone reading this has any good suggestions for films in Swedish please let me know!

Vegetarian Sweden

One thing I've noticed recently, and which I'm very pleased about, is that in Stockholm there seem to be so many vegetarian restaurants, I would say more than in London, despite being much smaller. I had previously noticed one restaurant at Medborgarplatsen, but lately when I've been looking at various areas on maps, or just when I'm walking around, I've noticed so many more. Last time I was looking for specifically vegetarian restaurants in London it was a bit of a challenge to find somewhere other than my favourite restuarant. Here there are so many really visible options. I haven't been to any of them yet but I'm looking forward to doing that sometime.
I joined another group on Meet Up for vegetarians and vegans in Stockholm. There's an upcoming pot luck event that I'm looking forward to - I love food, and hopefully the people in the group can give me some ideas of particularly good restaurants to try here.
Even in the supermarket I've seen so many vegetarian and vegan options. As well as Quorn being available in this country, there's a Swedish brand making similar products, which I've tried and thought were pretty good. Last week I bought some dehydrated soya protein products, and although they probably wouldn't be my first choice they're definitely not the worst thing in the world. The ICA supermarket near to me also has a cabinet of vegetarian and vegan products - several varieties of tofu, which has been delicious so far, various vegetarian cold meat products, and a massive selection of vegan cheese. I'm not vegan, and probably could not live without real cheese, but I think it's cool that such a wide range of products catering for vegans and vegetarians are available. I've never actually seen vegan cheeses available in a regular supermarket in England - I think that kind of product would be sold in speciality shops. I like that it's so easy and accessible here.
On the subject of food, my palate actually seems to be changing a bit here. I've always preferred savoury foods to sweet, but in Sweden I find I'm actually really enjoying sweet foods too. Someone suggested that maybe sweet foods here are less sugary than in England, and that might be the reason why. Kanelbullar (cinammon rolls) are obviously a very traditional food here, but it's not something I would ever have purchased myself. Kai bought one for me and I actually loved it! I also really like Swedish sweets - Bilar have been one of my favourites since I lived in Finland, I've loved Daim bars since I was very small, and although it's from Finland I can easily purchase Fazer chocolate here, which is something I missed in England.
I'm also very keen on Festis and Bravo drinks - the flavours are really imaginative, flavour combinations that I haven't tried elsewhere, and they're delicious. In September I also discovered that Festis is a perfect cure for a hangover!
I think I can eat extremely well here, and the best part is that I don't have to worry too much about what I eat because I've been losing weight without meaning to! I thought this might happen, as it did during winter in Finland - presumably I use up extra energy keeping warm, but I'm not complaining. If only I was taller I'd look like a supermodel by spring!

More progress

It seems that this week is becoming quite a successful week for me! As mentioned yesterday, Kai and I have begun to make some new friends here, which I think makes a big difference to feeling comfortable in a place. This morning there has been another positive development for me.

The job hunt has not been going particularly well this week - neither of us have been finding many new opportunities to apply for, and this week I've mainly been sending off speculative applications. That's better than nothing, but the chances of actually getting a job out of it are much slimmer. It's been getting quite frustrating, but we can't lose hope. Whilst I was looking for new sites that might list suitable job opportunities I had a phone call from the recruitment agency I spoke to about a particular job last week, and I now have an interview for that job tomorrow morning! Hooray!

These things make me nervous anyway, but in this case I'm extremely nervous. Getting this job would obviously mean I can easily apply for a personnummer (you can read about the trouble that caused me in September here ), and will probably make househunting much easier because we will have a guaranteed income. We haven't even started househunting yet, because we can understand that if two recent immigrants with no job between them wanted to rent from you you'd probably say no. It's not often that the outcome of a job interview affects whether or not you can be treated equally to everyone else in a country, but that kind of is the case here. So no pressure.

Obviously I'm taking this situation very seriously, and the rest of today will mainly be for research about the organisation, interviews and workplace culture in Sweden. I've already worked out how to turn my greatest weakness into a positive point, and I'm trying to take a very positive attitude, but without getting my hopes up.

Realistically I know I could do this job and do it well, I just have to make sure I'm as prepared as I possibly can be. Luckily Heli has also had the experience of coming from another country for a job interview in Sweden, and has now been working in this country for several years, so she's in a good position to give me some tips. I'm going to try not to stress too much today - I don't want to be a nervous wreck tomorrow morning. Getting this job would help us both so much, especially in terms of me getting a personnummer etc. So far we've had a really successful week, we have plans to hang out with our new friends both tomorrow night and Friday night, so I just need to trust that this success will continue tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

Making progress

It's been snowing quite a lot here over the past few days. I'm not sure how normal it is here, but the temperature seems to fluctuate quite a lot - it snows, melts a bit, snows a bit more, and goes on in this way - today is the first day in several days with no snowfall. It's quite different to my memories of winter in Finland - after the first snow that was pretty much it for the next 6 months.

Yesterday was a really good day for us. We finally got round to buying sim cards, and I had the whole conversation, which was obviously a bit more complicated than "Hej", "Nej", and "Tack", completely in Swedish, for both myself and Kai. It's only one thing but I was pleased afterwards that I'd managed it with no problems at all. I also feel more settled now that I have a working Swedish number and am no longer being charged large amounts of money to use my phone by my UK network.

Then in the evening we went out to a bar to meet a group of ex-pats from all over the world living in Stockholm. We looked at the Meet Up website - which I knew of but had never used before, and as one group I was interested in were meeting that evening we thought we would seize the day and go along. My thought was that in the worst case scenario we might not meet our new best friends, but at least it gets us out of the house, visiting a new bar, and socialising with others. 

As it was, the other people there were very friendly and welcoming, and we've been invited to a similar meeting this Friday. We met a lot of nice people, and there were also a few Swedish people there too. I'm an open minded person with friends from all over the world, but here I'm particularly interested to meet Swedish people and make some friends from this country. However, it's also really good to meet others who have moved here, and in most cases have more experience than we do of being here. I really enjoyed talking to people from lots of different backgrounds, who all ended up here in different ways. 

Even though Kai is here with me, I miss having friends around. When you live somewhere for a long time you do take for granted the fact that you have friends there and know your way around the place, here we're really starting from scratch again. I think having friends and a social life is really important, so hopefully this is the start of us integrating more.

After this experience I definitely intend to go to more meetings like this, and have joined some other groups on the website. One group I joined is a women's art group, who will be meeting to see the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Moderna Museet. Obviously I'm keen to see that, and the people in the group have been really welcoming so far. 

However, I joined a language exchange group that frankly is not very appealing because their meetings seem so strict and structured - I was looking at an event for Swedish and English, and it didn't seem very friendly at all. Going into a group of people you don't know can be nervewracking, and I'm not keen to join an event that seems a bit hostile! My Swedish ability is a lot more advanced than Kai's, and reading the description of the event made me feel like they'd chuck him out or something if I took him with me. Maybe it's only the person running that specific event who takes such a seemingly harsh attitude - hopefully I can find something similar that seems to have a more welcoming atmosphere. Any kind of social event should surely be fun, not making you feel like a schoolchild. 

Thankfully the group of people we met last night were all great, and even if we only see those people regularly in the context of that group it still means we've met some new people and are visiting more places in Stockholm. I'm looking forward to going out on Friday, hopefully that experience will be just as enjoyable.