LostInTheWoods

The Place: Wolf Island, Sweden (May 2005)

The moving lorry arrived, and with amazing efficiency the hard smokin' moving guys moved our worldly goods into our new flat. When familiar items were being removed from boxes, it hit me. I am really living here now. Up until that point, I had been planning the move, but it was an abstract event, but it suddenly become very real. In the immortal words from a Paul Young song states: "Wherever I lay my red teapot, that's my home". Well, that's how I remember it.

Bright red teapots have been a continuous and stable accompaniment to my life since my tenth birthday. They are never to be contaminated with anything apart from "PG Tips" (a common British tea brand, the TV commercials used to feature chimps moving pianos etc, how we laughed), and I am currently on number six.

Anyhoo, we got settled, had to buy again all the things we sold and gave away before we left (bucket, mop, ironing board, you know, all of life's exotica), and shockingly we had to start work! This was not part of my plan, but we were living on Wolf Island after all, and I certainly wanted to keep them from MY door. I had to work on the kitchen table for quite a while for my old company, and Ren (for it is she), started here old job too.

So that completed the transition, and I was at the bottom of a very long and at times steep learning curve. I was fortunate to have lots of people around me to help with the basics of life (What! You mean I have got to pay to use internet banking!), and living a life as a "jävla utlänningar" ("bloody foreigner") has given me a totally different perspective on life.

So, some initial observations.....

Lingo: I have studied Swedish in the UK for an embarrassingly long time. I am really crap at learning languages. Even English. I cried at primary school as I did not understand past participles etc, and my mum arranged some extra tuition for me from a teacher who lived nearby.
As an adult I am confronting this head on, my Swedish is gradually getting better, but I still sound like a three year old stuck in the present tense. Swearing on the other hand... I'll leave that for another post.

Weather: We arrived in May, and it soon got very warm, and not being a great fan of the sun, did not appreciate the long sunny days. This changed after one winter here, which seems to last six months, and the temperatures often goes below -20°C at night. Dang!
During that first summer here, I really looked different and a bit out of place. Nearly all the local inhabitants were varying hues of brown. Me? Pasty British white, with brown forearms.
When the warm sun finally arrived this year I grabbed every sun beam I could. The weather here is quite extreme, and I have come to prefer the hot, sunny, shorts and T-shirt extremity.

Drink: As booze is fairly expensive, everyday social drinking is not that common. Instead, a seasonal festival or a birthday becomes a thinly disguised wall to wall piss up. "Falling down parties" a British friend affectionately labelled them. They don't happen very often, but when they do, they are usually quite eventful. What happens at a falling down party, stays in the falling down party. And, definitely no cameras.

Exploring another culture, even one similar to your own, is very interesting, and you absorb the new culture along the way. I feel about 80% British, and 20% Swedish at the moment, but this in a constant state of flux... no doubt I'll pick up on this another time.

Thank you for reading this post.
That is all.

LostInTheWoods