|
Sweden – Two Years On. |
|
|
|
Written by Nigel
|
|
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 |
|
So two years on, how do I feel about the move? I can honestly say I don’t regret it. We have a life here we could only have dreamt of affording in the UK. We have ducks, geese and chickens for eggs and meat. We have the bees for honey and the goats for milk, yoghurt and cheese. We forage the hedgerows for hazelnuts, sloes and wild raspberries. We grow our own vegetables. If it sounds like an idyllic Thoreauvian lifestyle, there’s a good reason for that. For the main part it is.
 I’m lucky I love my own company as living out in the country in small village of only 400 it can be easy to feel a little isolated. Most of my neighbours are ‘of a certain age’ and we have little in common. In some cases not even language. They speak Swedish with a broad Skånsk accent that I find difficult to understand, and being ‘of a certain age’ means we can’t even fall back on English, as you can with the younger crowd, in case of emergencies There are nine million people living in Sweden, but the expat community is very small. I bump into the same people at social events and on internet bulletin boards. When expats get together we tend to make vast generalisations about Sweden and complain. This is understandable, as many English cultural values are turned on their head here. Generalising is a way of making sense of things, and people have a lot of frustrations to vent. But rather than creating a support network, I find the negativity brings me down. I don’t frequent the Lost in Sweden site on a daily basis anymore, it is still useful but I want positivity. If you don’t like the country, why are you here? I realise some things are different but isn’t that part of being in a new culture?
In places where hardly anyone spoke English and believe me there are many [why should I expect any different this is Sweden], I'd smile a lot as the other people had animated conversations around me. Because I was illiterate as well as mute during trips to the local supermarket I'd wander the aisle, lassoing shop assistants with my helplessness. I became a mime artist to describe what I was looking for, I became so good at miming I could have given Lionel Blair a run for his money. You try miming drain cleaner… Even now a slight mispronunciation can change a sentence from ‘Can I pay with my card?’ to the rather more embarrassing ‘Can I pay with my erection?’
Simple things like answering a knock at the door or even worse the telephone could be perplexing and very stressful. Sometimes I'd open the door to people with clipboards, who'd deliver sales pitches at breakneck speed, before noticing my mute incomprehension, apologising and backing away. Once it was the man who lives next door, gesticulating and talking animated [he was actually asking if he could fell some trees at the bottom of his garden into one of my paddocks] but could have been asking anything. I’ve had people turn up wanting to buy livestock, but concepts like hatch rates and fertility are not things covered in most Swe-Eng dictionaries.
I once had a man walking up and down outside my house with a table tennis bat like thing – he was apparently reading the electricity meter. He looked more like one of those controller guys that guide in planes on aircraft carriers. After eighteen months of Swedish lessons, and hour and a half a week – if Steph is in the country – I am becoming at least semi literate. Sweden is not nearly as bewildering as it used to be. I go to the supermarket and return home with exactly what I need. I hear the weather report and know it is going to rain. I see newspapers and can at least read the headlines. That’s Progress believe me.
|
|
|
