Work permit extension

As my work permit will expire at the end of August, I posted my application for its extension today. The Migrationsverket (Sweden's immigration office) apparently wants to pick a fight with foreign researchers. In the application form for foreign visiting researchers, one field to fill in is entitled:

Permanent address in Sweden

I moved in April of 2009, June of 2010, and September of 2010. I'm moving next month, at the end of July, and next May. What is my permanent address in Sweden?

(If you don't understand why I --- and most foreigners in Sweden --- have moved, and will move, so often in Sweden, see this post.)

Why making friends in Stockholm is difficult for foreigners

Foreigners in Stockholm often say it is difficult for them to make friends with Swedes. Oft-mentioned reasons include the shyness of Swedish people and the closed nature of their community (e.g. they hang out with their high-school friends only).

My view is different. It's probably more about the difference in views of the world between the two sets of people. Whenever the survey on people's happiness is conducted across the world, Sweden is always one of the happiest countries. This seems particularly true in Stockholm: 96 percent of the city population like Stockholm. Grown up in such an environment, one would acquire an optimistic view of the world.

Foreigners coming to Stockholm are more or less those who aren't satisfied with their own country. Otherwise why do they live abroad? Grown up in such an environment, they would acquire a rather cynical view of the world.

People become friends because they enjoy being together. They enjoy each other's company because they feel relaxed in the presence of each other. They feel relaxed because they share their views of the world.

So foreigners moving to Stockholm and Swedes grown up in Stockholm won't feel comfortable with each other and thus don't become friends.

That is my scientifically-unproved conclusion.

A quote from The Rough Guide To Sweden

"The other Nordic nations love to make fun of the Swedes. Witness the joke about the ten Nordic men stranded on a desert island. On day one, the two Finns have felled half the trees on the island for firewood. On day two, the two Norwegians have constructed a fishing boat from some of the wood to catch fish for supper. On day three, the Danes have set up a co-operative to organize all the work. On day four, the Icelanders decide to lift everyone's spirits with tales of the brave men of the ancient sagas. And on day five, the two Swedes are still waiting to be introduced to each other."

National Cinnamon Bun Day

October 4th is the National Cinnamon Bun Day in Sweden. The cinnamon bun is the most common baked good, found in almost every cafe in Sweden.

And I don't like it at all.

Housing in Stockholm (again)

After 3 years of living in Stockholm, reading a news article on the rental housing market in Stockholm like this one doesn't make me feel anything. Otherwise you as a foreigner won't be able to feel happy in this city.

But when I read that new arrivals from foreign countries to Stockholm University are camping in the campus because they fail to find an apartment to live, this sounds too much.

As far as I know, none of the political parties in Sweden ever mention this issue in the upcoming elections.

I'm moving (again) later this month. I was lucky to find a Swedish PhD student who studies in the US for a year from this autumn. Which also means that I have to find yet another apartment after he comes back next June.

That's life for foreigners in Stockholm. If you plan to live in this city, be prepared.

Göran Lindberg and Sweden's dark side, by The Observer

A friend of mine living in UK told me about this article on Sweden by The Observer, a Sunday newspaper. It's a long article, but worth reading if you wonder what Sweden is like.

"Normalization" of Sweden

The general election is approaching in Sweden, and the incumbent government ministers are proposing what I would call "normalization" of Swedish society, presumably with an aim to win votes in the election reported to become quite close a race.

Two days ago, the minister in charge of immigrants' integration to society proposed to allow low wage jobs for refugees, by saying, "There is a difference between a well paid job and one that is poorly paid. However, the difference between having and not having a job is much greater."

Yesterday, the education minister proposes to allow smart students to take advanced classes in high school rather than to wait their fellow pupils to catch up, by referring the current Swedish education system as following the Jante Law, the key word to understand the Scandinavian societies.


For someone living in most other countries, it's hard to understand why these two policies are just proposals rather than the reality. But that's Sweden, cherishing the equality of its citizens more than anything else.

Jante Law

1. Don't think that you are special.
2. Don't think that you are of the same standing as others.
3. Don't think that you are smarter than others.
4. Don't fancy yourself as being better than others.
5. Don't think that you know more than others.
6. Don't think that you are more important than others.
7. Don't think that you are good at anything.
8. Don't laugh at others.
9. Don't think that any one of us cares about you.
10. Don't think that you can teach others anything.

HT: Andaje

Sweden's downfall?

Tyler Brule bashed Sweden on his FT column last weekend.

Laundry room surveillance

And another news article that can become news only in Sweden.

If you just stop the practice of sharing washing machines among apartment residents, this problem will go away.

Gender equality in Sweden

I'm rather surprised to learn that Church is the one to promote gender equality in this country.

But if a woman prefers to be "given away by her father" at the wedding, why should we discourage her from doing that? Yet another paternalistic attitude of the Swedish authority...

But this is the country where women are denied entrance to university because men are underrepresented (and these women sued)...

A Japanese hairstylist in Sweden

For every fashion-conscious Japanese person living in the West, the biggest headache is haircut. Even top hairstylists in the West cannot really handle with the thick, black hair of Japanese people. A hairstylist in Tokyo once told me about the lecture delivered by Tony & Guy's (or perhaps Vidal Sasoon, I forgot) top hairstylist visiting Japan. After the lecture, she and her fellow Japanese stylists talked to each other, saying, "If you do what he told us to Japanese people, the hair style would be horrible." You cannot imagine how many young Japanese girls cried after their first haircut experience in the West.

I was lucky enough to meet Yumiko-san while I was in London. Here in Stockholm, I haven't been lucky enough to find my favorite hairstylist. Being Japanese is not enough. Being Japanese and stylish is the key.

Now in Göteborg, Sweden's second biggest city, a Japanese hair dresser opened her salon this month. Judging from the web design and the self-introduction emphasizing her experience in Tokyo, London, and New York, she appears to be the one I've long been looking for ever since I moved to Sweden.

But why Göteborg, not Stockholm?

I guess I will soon make a train trip to the difficult-to-guess-its-pronunciation second biggest city of Sweden (its English name is Gottenburg, by the way) to have my hair cut by her. I wanted to visit the city pronounced like "yo-tebory" anyway, to put Stockholm in perspective.

Saturday in Stockholm

What I don't like about Stockholm is Saturday.

I had to work today. I went to my workplace, and left by 5:30 pm. I needed to buy a loaf of bread at Gateau. Bread is in general not very good in Stockholm, and outside the city center there are essentially no bakery. It's impossible to walk a bit in your neighborhood to buy a tasty loaf. Gateau's grand blanc is one of my few favorite loaves. But I have to visit Gallerian, a shopping center at the heart of Stockholm.

By the time I arrived, it was past 6 pm. Two girls were busy closing down the shop. I saw three leftover grand blanc loaves in the showcase. But they just told me, "We are closed."

If you live in Stockholm, working on Saturday just makes you feel more miserable.

Small-sized retail stores close at 4 pm. The state alcohol monopoly seller Systembolaget even closes at 3 pm (to discourage alcohol consumption). Even the department stores NK and PUB close at 6 pm. As far as I know, the shop opens until the latest is Åhlens City, which closes at 7 pm. What's worse, those small-sized stores (including my favorite Japanese food stores) and, of course, Systembolaget close all day on Sunday. If you need to do shopping, you have to do it on Saturday by waking up early in the morning.

This is one example of why the harder you work, the harder your life gets in Stockholm. Working too hard on weekdays makes Saturday the only day for shopping, but if you work too hard, you don't want to wake up early on Saturday, do you? If you work hard over weekdays, you don't have time to plan ahead whether to shop on Saturday. When you realize you need to buy something on Saturday, it's pretty much too late.

What's worse, it's likely that you have to do laundry over the weekend in a pre-booked time slot (see this entry on doing laundry in Sweden), because booking the laundry room in the evening on a weekday is pretty much impossible and you can't do laundry in the morning or afternoon on a weekday if you work hard.

So I've stopped working on Saturday since long before. Today was an exception, and that reminded me of how stressful life in Stockholm can be for a person in American or East Asian style.

The Local, Sweden's only English newspaper

I don't know why I feel depressed every time I read Sweden's only English newspaper, The Local. Today's top news reports about 40 percent of apartments in Stockholm are sublet illegally. As I now need to move out of the current sublet apartment and find it difficult to find a desirable one to move in, it just makes me depressed. (For the stupidity of rental apartment market in Sweden, see my previous post.)

Then this article reports a proposal of banning cash in small retail stores so that shopkeepers won't face a threat of robbery. Why does the Swedish authority love banning everything such as paying in cash to the bus driver (which has already been enacted, leaving the bus travel inconvenient to tourists), the sale of alcohol in the private sector (because Swedes drink too much), electric socket converters (because Americans in Sweden used it without knowing the difference in voltage between Europe and America, resulting in explosion), drinking bottled mineral water for employees in the municipal government of Göteborg, Sweden's second largest city (because tap water in Sweden tastes good and bottled mineral water is a waste of resources)?

Then The Local's guide to moving in Sweden begins with how to recycle what you want to throw away when you are moving. A very noble-minded way of starting the preparation of the moving... But the immediate concern for any mover is something else, isn't it?

The remaining articles talk about a benefit fraud (Sweden is a welfare state), child sexual abuse, and a serial killer incident.

But The Local is the only source of information on what's going on in Sweden for those foreigners who do not speak Swedish. I still have to read it every morning...

Restaurant J

To be fair to the Stockholm dining scene, I should write something here on this blog when I do encounter good foods.

With my colleagues, I have an Easter dinner at Restaurant J tonight. Although the Easter menu itself doesn't sound very tantalizing (some of us indeed went for the usual menu instead), the actual dishes are very good.

According to the English menu, the starter is "smoked salmon served with spring salad and egg". This doesn't sound very tempting. But the Swedish menu says a bit more: varmrökt lax på vårsallad med kokt ägg, which means hot-smoked (not cold-smoked) salmon on spring salad with boiled egg (not just egg). The actual dish is even more. The hot-smoked salmon is actually a chunk (rather than slices) of smoked salmon fillet with a pleasant smell of smoke. Some of the leaves in spring salad taste earthy in a good way, making me feel spring (which hasn't come yet in Stockholm). And the creamy greenish dressing sauce (which is not mentioned in the menu at all) is properly done. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Then the main dish is "herb and lemon filled roast lamb served with garlic sauce, vegetables ragout and new potatoes" in the English menu. The Swedish menu says the garlic sauce is actually roasted garlic sauce. This sounds better, because when roasted, garlic tastes different, and raw garlic sauce reminds me of the one on kebab meal at one of the lunch places at my workplace (which is of course pretty bad). And the lamb and vegetables ragout that is actually served is more sophisticated than I expected. In other words, it tastes very good. The lamb is served in a French style rather than in an English style, and the vegetable ragout is not a collection of dices of vegetables (which I don't really like because of the rough texture) but white asparaguses or something (I'm not really sure what it is, but if it tastes fine, it's fine). And new potatoes. Even though I'm fed up with potatoes that always come with the main dish in Sweden, eating new potatoes is a very refreshing experience. I love them.

The dessert is citronfromage in Swedish. Lemon cheese? No, in Swedish, citronfromage means lemon mousse for whatever reason. And, very unusually for even good restaurants in Stockholm, this dessert is great, if not superb. The texture is right. The degree of sourness is right. Not too sweet and the right amount.

I learn one thing. It is essential to learn Swedish words for restaurant menus, because the English version (if available) doesn't precisely translate the original menu, which may make your choice wrong. If I didn't know that the smoked salmon was not the usual smoked salmon or that garlic sauce is actually roasted garlic sauce, I would have gone for other dishes. (Even the Swedish version of the menu of Restaurant J says too little about the dish, though.)

And that's what I have been doing: learning Swedish words often used in the menu. I browse the menu of a good restaurant in Stockholm online and translate each term by using not only tyda.se (the online Swedish-English dictionary) but also the Swedish wikipedia (and then clicking the link to the English version for the same item) and Google. Google helps me to find out a recipe for a particular dish in Swedish, and then I can translate it with Google Translate to see what kind of dish a particular Swedish term refers to.

The result is this. I'm still learning, but it seems to start paying off.

Oh, the price of the Easter 3 course meal is 360 krona (about 36 euro). It's not cheap, but this is the price to motivate Swedish chefs to cook properly.

Sweden's Easter

The traditional Easter week in Sweden lasts from Thursday to Monday, and kicks off with a trick or treat-like candy hunt. Children dress up as påskkärringar (Easter witches) with long skirts, headscarves, painted red cheeks and freckles and go from house to house wishing people happy Easter. They get sweets in return for a drawing or song. Legend has it that the witches fly to Blåkulla (Blue mountain) the same night to meet the devil. (From SWEDEN.SE, the official gateway to Sweden)

I didn't know this even though this is the third Easter in Sweden. For the past two years, I lived in a foreign student colony hard to be accessed from anywhere in Stockholm (so there's no Swedish child around at all).

Children just showed up at my apartment today. As I hate candies, I don't have any. When I tried to give them some cookies (from Japan) as a compromise, they didn't accept them and went away.

Swedish children are very strict to the rule.

And perhaps the best example of the fact that I'm not part of the Swedish society at all (sigh).

Social Democracy

The concept of social democracy, quite popular in Sweden (some people often sing the anthem of social democracy in a party occasion), is something very unfamiliar to me. I know what it means. It just doesn't sound natural to me. It sounds very foreign to me. I now understand why.

After the Second World War, the Japanese politics was dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party, a conservative, right-wing party. The main opposition party was the Japan Socialist Party. This party, unlike those social democratic parties in Europe, did not abandon communism. While social democratic parties in Europe supported the US in the Vietnam War, the Japan Socialist Party criticized the US. The party was always close to Soviet Union, mainland China, and Eastern European countries during the Cold War.

In a nutshell, the political party who was supposed to bring the idea of social democracy to Japan failed to do it by sticking to the ideal of achieving socialism via violent revolution.

As a result, the concept of social democracy is quite foreign to Japanese people including myself. If you have a Japanese friend, ask him or her what social democracy is. I bet you won't get any answer.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so perplexed by Sweden where the social democratic party had been in power for a long time.

It seems I should learn the history of social democracy in Europe.

Souperb

Souperb is a ready-meal provider in Sweden. As its name suggests, it tries to offer superb soup. But they also produce some non-soup ready meals.

Last Saturday, I had to go to office to get some work done. On Saturdays, there are no restaurants open around my workplace. I had to buy some ready meal at a kiosk next to the nearest station, even though I know ready meals in Sweden taste pretty bad.

I happened to find Souperb's Wallenbergare med Potatismos, which looked rather nice. And it tasted better than I expected, even though green peas got some wrong taste for some reason.

Slightly encouraged by this experience, today I finally tried one of Souperb's offers that I've always avoided ever since I moved to Sweden: Sweet Beef Tokyo. (Remember I am from Tokyo.) I looked at it, and I had to leave the kiosk once, because it didn't look really right. But I didn't want to end up with meatballs again, which is the only decent lunch dish around my workplace. I took courage to buy one and had it for lunch today.

It's worse than I expected. Remember my expectation wasn't that high. I've never had something like this in Tokyo. One thing that's completely wrong is red chili. We Japanese never ever put chili into what Souperb calls sweet beef. Plus, umami is completely absent. (If you don't know what umami is, look it up on Wikipedia.)

Here's the real recipe for what Souperb calls sweet beef. It seems the sources of the trouble are finely chopped onions and leeks (so they lose the texture; in Japan, onions and leeks are only sliced for this dish so you can enjoy the soft but still crunchy texture) and, most importantly, the failure to simmer beef in Japanese sake or white wine and to add mirin to the sweet soy sauce. Japanese sake or mirin is hard to obtain in Sweden. But why don't they even use white wine? Perhaps they prefer drinking it.

Using the name of Tokyo for this ready meal is derogatory to the superb dining culture of Japan's capital. (I'm serious.)

Souperb also offers Hot Chicken Bangkok, but I wouldn't try, especially because Thai foods in Stockholm, which is quite popular, almost always get something wrong.

A Quote of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe

Some years ago at an international writers’ meeting in Sweden, a Swedish writer and journalist said to a small group of us Africans present: “You fellows are lucky. Your governments put you in prison. Here in Sweden nobody pays any attention to us no matter what we write.” We apologized profusely to him for his misfortune and our undeserved luck!

... which is quoted from Chris Blattman's blog

mjölkchoklad-pannacotta med blodapelsin

Do you think it's a good idea to mix the tastes of milk chocolate and bloody orange? I don't think so, but a pâtissier at my neighborhood organic supermarket does when he or she makes panna cotta. I'm not very impressed. Each portion (milk chocolate panna cotta and bloody orange jelly, respectively) tastes good. But when they both are put into my mouth, it tastes awkward. Bloody orange may work well with the bitterness of dark chocolate, but not with the sweetness of milk chocolate.

The Wikipedia entry on Swedish cuisine characterizes it as "contrasting flavours; such as the traditional dish of meatballs and gravy with tart, pungent lingonberry jam (slightly similar in taste to cranberry sauce)." It's nothing wrong with contrasting flavours. It could work like magic. But not always, of course. And, for some reason, Swedish choices of contrasting flavours rarely result in magic to my taste...