FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013
Overtime
My
American friends and family members are blown away by my five weeks of
paid vacation. But that’s just the start of it. Perhaps the most
amazing thing about working in Sweden is that for every hour of overtime
I work, I get an extra hour of vacation to be used at my discression
(as long as I’m not deserting my co-workers at deadline time or such).
Because of all my train travel back and forth between my firm’s Göteborg
and Stockholm offices, I have already racked up a few days’ worth of
overtime hours.
At
my firm in the US (and at all my architect-friends’ firms, too), you
could work 60 hour weeks for weeks on end and get nothing but a pat on
the back. 70 hour weeks for months on end might warrant a long weekend
after the big deadline. A series of 80 hour weeks might warrant a long
weekend and a giftcard for dinner for two at a fancy restaurant. But
you never got all that time back. In Sweden, the land of fairness, you
do.
This
benefits the employee in two ways. First and most obviously, the
employee gets a needed break after working extra. Secondly, the
employer is encouraged to give their employees reasonable workloads. It
does not benefit the employer to have its employees disappear for two
weeks after a stressful deadline; instead, it benefits the employer to
put a little more manpower on the job and to keep each person’s workload
in balance. Even in Sweden it’s inevitable that an architecture job is
going to require overtime now and then, but here, the amount of
overtime is minimized. And what overtime you do give to the job, you
get to take back at a 1:1 ratio at a later date.
Genius.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013
Vacation Pay
Not
only do I get five weeks of paid vacation, I also get paid a ”vacation
bonus” when I’m on vacation. Crazy that I get paid EXTRA to NOT work,
but it’s true.
I
don’t really know the history of the vacation bonus, but Carl and I
think that it is similar to why everyone gets paid on the 25th and then
all bills are due on the 1st (see First Swedish Paycheck! below)—on some
level, Swedes don’t trust themselves to save up and account for their
own money. Because vacation costs more than daily life, it’s more
convenient to get paid extra while on vacation than to save up ahead of
time.
The
vacation bonus isn’t regulated by law, so everyone has a slightly
different system for how/when it gets paid out and how much it ends up
being. These matters are usually part of the union agreement that each
industry has agreed upon (I’ll write more about unions later…super
interesting…). I don’t know how this number was settled on, exactly,
but the architects’ union agreement is that an employee receives an
extra .8% of their monthly salary for every day of vacation. So the
bonus for each individual day isn’t so huge, but added up over a three
week vacation, you can buy a fairly expensive plane ticket.
I just love that I get paid extra to not work. Priceless.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 08, 2013
Vacation Time
Carl
and I are recently returned from an adventurous two-week vacation in
Norway. I was also on vacation the week before we left for Norway,
showing my friends Chad and Tom around town.
You’re probably wondering how I got to take three weeks of vacation when I’ve only been on the job for five weeks…
The
legal minimum paid vacation that a company can give is five weeks. By
law, three of those weeks must be allowed to be taken consecutively.
Taking three weeks off in the US is nearly unheard of—first of all, many
people don’t even get three weeks off in a year, and second of all,
taking so much time off in one stretch is just considered outrageous.
Sweden recognizes that it is hard to truly get a good rest and to truly
turn you work brain off, and that doing so requires more than a week’s
vacation.
Most
people tend to take most of their vacation during the summer,
especially during July. It is not uncommon for people to be away from
the office for four, five, even seven weeks at a time. Generally,
people go to their summer cottage (see post “Sprucing up our "Summer
Cottage"” below). The typical Swede will also go to an all-inclusive
resort somewhere on the Spanish, Turkish, or Thai coasts for a week or
two sometime between the beginning of September and the end of
November. I get the feeling that travelling to other European cities is
usually a long-weekend activity, and while Swedes seem to generally
enjoy camping, it’s rare to hear of someone being so crazy as to go
backpacking or kayaking. Of course there are Swedes who do things
differently, but this seems to be the stereotypical pattern.
It
is generally acknowledged in the working world that no real work will
get done between the middle of June and the middle of August. No
deadlines are set during this time, and clients have complete
understanding that you will be away from your desk and not checking
email for a month. What a wonderful world I live in!
Most
office jobs have flexible vacations, but you might be encouraged to
take your long summer vacation during July when everyone else is away,
too. My company, however, completely shuts down for three weeks in
July. I know that this is a common practice in Italy (albeit in
August), but in Sweden, I get the feeling that it is mostly
manufacturers that completely shut down the line for the month of July.
I believe that my desk job with a mandatory three week vacation in July
is a bit of an abnormality. But anyway, that’s how I was able to take a
three week vacation just five weeks after starting my job!
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 07, 2013
Second Stockholm-aversary
Today
is my second Stockholm-aversary. Considering that I am sitting in
first class on a high-speed train travelling between my company’s two
offices, I feel pretty good about what I have accomplished in these two
uber-short years! Not only have I become mostly fluent in Swedish, but I
have managed to secure a great job with a well-respected architecture
firm. Said firm trusts my language and architectural abilities enough
to send me to job-site meetings with the client alone, without any other
architectural representative.
Not
only have I started in on a great job, but I feel like I’m a capable
and knowledgeable part of the Swedish system. By this point, I can
usually give directions when someone stops me on the street. I usually
know where to turn when a medical problem turns up. I have a pretty
good understanding for how the education, tax, and political systems
function.
On
top of language school and jobs, we have squeezed a lot into our two
years here. We have fully renovated an apartment and rebuilt a
kitchen. We have bodysurfed back in the US, skied in the French Alps,
hiked a large stretch of Sweden’s King’s Trail, skied in Sweden twice,
walked along Amsterdam’s Canals, kayaked Norway’s Lofoten Islands, taken
the ferry to Tallin, looked at art in Berlin, visited friends in
Hamburg, and scoped out Helsinki. Not to mention closer-to-home
adventures such as winter camping in a charcoal burner’s hut, camping
out on an island in Stockholm’s archipelago, canoe camping in a national
park, sailing through the archipelago, and kayaking around the
archipelago’s numerous islands. And then there are the frequent day
trips to visit palaces, cross country ski new trails, hike in nature
reserves, visit nearby towns, and see traces of Viking life.
Even
so, there is so much in and around Stockholm that we haven’t seen and
done yet. There are numerous day and weekend hikes on our list as well
as visits to museums, towns, and palaces that are still beckoning to
us. Getting around to actually doing the things on our list is a little
bit complicated by the short summer season—many of the museums and
palaces and such are only open for 60 or 80 days. Visits by 5 family
members and 9 friends have also kept us occupied. I am certainly not
complaining about our visitors—we LOVE having our friends and family
come to stay with us, and we LOVE sharing our beautiful city with you
guys! And we hope that those of you that haven’t visited yet come and
stay with us in the coming year or two.
I
like that our to-do/see list grows. I like living in a place that has
an unlimited number of interesting places to check out. I like that we
will be entertained in Stockholm for years and years to come.
I
like living here. At this point, it’s hard to imagine moving back to
the US. Life is just easier here. You don’t have to drive a car
everyday. I don’t have to worry about losing my job and thus losing my
access to healthcare. With five weeks of vacation, there’s plenty of
time to see the world (although I’ll always want more!). At this point,
Carl and I don’t know if we’ll be here for 5 years or for 10 years or
for forever, but as of today I wouldn’t mind if we lived in Stockholm
for forever.
Since
we moved here, I don’t think a single week has gone by that Carl and I
haven’t talked about how thankful we are to live in Stockholm now
instead of Texas. We certainly miss our Texas friends, and sometimes
our Texas jobs, but overall, life in Stockholm is worlds better than
life in Texas. Stockholm just fits us better, and we are so much
happier here.
SATURDAY, JULY 13, 2013
Squirrels |
| squirrels in Sweden are quite beautifully red |
Last week, I was at
the Göteborg office and had several informal meetings with co-workers.
Three times the meetings came to a stop when someone spotted a squirrel
in the grass outside the office window. “Look! A squirrel!” I was
kind of stumped by this behavior. I mean, in San Antonio, squirrels are
like pigeons in Venice or sea gulls in Atlantic City—you have to watch
your lunch and shoo them away! But then I realized that I really have
only seen a very few squirrels in Sweden despite a good amount of time
spent in parks and on forest trails. Apparently, they are relatively
rare here, and seeing one is kind of like seeing a hawk in Texas. You
see them occasionally, but the frequency is low enough that you say,
“Look! A hawk!”
I like the name for squirrel in Swedish: ekorre. “Ek” is “oak,” so the word for squirrel evokes both its habitat and its diet. An orre
is a grouse, so that part of the name doesn’t quite make sense,
although grouse, like squirrels, do hang out under trees… I guess the
word for squirrel in Swedish directly translates as oak grouse. That
just makes me laugh.
(the squirrel image came from Swedish Wikipedia)
FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2013
Foraging: Smultron
Smultron,
or wild strawberries, are a national obsession in Sweden. They are
probably an obsession because they are hard to come by—they have yet to
be successfully cultivated, and they are the berry version of
Goldilocks—the conditions need to be sunny but not too sunny, dry but
not too dry, and the soil has to be juuuust right. They are also highly
coveted because of the intense burst of flavor. Despite being tiny at
the size of your pinky finger’s pad, smultrons’ flavor is so intense and sweet that they almost taste like fake strawberry candy.
Usually, you find a smultron here and a smultron there when you walk through the forest. This year, however, seems to be the Goldilocks of years with extraordinary smultron
conditions. Carl and I did a day hike last weekend and sections of the
path were practically lined with ripe berries. There were so many
berries that we started collecting them in a container to enjoy with our
Sunday balcony brunch. Yum!
Because smultron are usually hard to find, Swedes rarely reveal where their favorite smultron-picking places are. The term “smultron ställe,” or “wild strawberry spot,” has come to mean more than just a secret place to find berries. These days, your smultron ställe
is the secret spot that you go to when you need to relax or get away
from it all. It could be a favorite rock to sit on in a forest glade,
your summer cottage, or even a beloved café. I don’t know that I have
found my smultron ställe in Sweden yet. We have discovered many
lovely spots, but we rarely return to the same place again—we still have
so much to explore here! Perhaps one day, after we’ve seen it all (is
that even possible?), we’ll start returning to our favorite spots and
honing in on our smultron ställe.
THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2013
Balcony Part II
Now
that we have finished planting the containers on our balcony and now
that they have filled in beautifully, I thought I’d share a few more
photos.
In
the antique grocery boxes, the arugula, lettuce, and strawberries have
taken off like wildfire! The shot below is after Carl made arugula
pesto, so just imagine how full the box was before the harvest. I am
surprised that the strawberries get enough light to flower, but we have
several hot pink blossoms and we have even shared our first red
strawberry! (I have never seen strawberry plants with pink flowers.
Cool!)
In
the boxes above the strawberries and arugula, herbs are thriving. It’s
super fun to make salads with the watercress or mint juleps with the
mint picked right outside our kitchen window.
Carl’s
mom has loaned us several large pots, and in those, we planted a couple
of shade flowers. Interestingly, the half-shade flowers that we found
were all purple/blue or white while the full-shade flowers were all
pink. Now even the floor of our balcony is verdantly growing and
blossoming.
To
screen the view of the parking lot, we planted sweet peas and strung up
a bunch of strings up to the balcony above ours for them to climb on.
They have grown incredibly well and are even flowering and producing
deliciously sweet and crisp peas against expectations. Now the
balcony’s view is fully focused on the green leafy trees behind our
building and the parking lot is out of sight when we sit at the table.
The
flowers in our planter boxes are beginning to pass their prime, but the
greenery is still pleasant. Perhaps we’ll change out the plants for
new, late-summer blooming plants after our summer adventure.
Our
balcony continues to provide a supremely relaxing place for lazy
weekend mornings with brunch and a book as well as for long
conversational dinners. Our summer cottage didn’t require much
investment but the return is huge!
Update:
I wrote this post a week ago but hadn’t had a chance to choose photos
and post it yet. Since that time, our view has sadly become much less
green. See the post “Swedes can be Stupid and Shortsighted, Too” below.
TUESDAY, JULY 09, 2013
Foraging: Elderberry Flowers
 |
| the blossom harvest |
Elderberry trees blossom extravagantly here in Stockholm, and the flowers flavor the whole city with sweetness. The recipe and process for making elderberry juice is much like the lilac juice that we made a few weeks ago (see “Foraging: Lilacs” below). To make the juice, we went to the park next door to our apartment and cut about 80 flower heads (the recipe calls for 30, but the flower heads that we found were smaller than normal). We then boiled up a sugar water mixture, added two sliced lemons, and then added the flowers. We let the mixture stew in the fridge for a week, stirring once a day.
After the flowers fully permeated the water with flavor, we filtered the mixture through a kitchen towel to remove all of the organic bits from the juice. We bottled about 3 liters of concentrate, half of which is now in the fridge, and half of which is waiting in the freezer to brighten up winter weekends.
 |
| Carl and I reuse whiskey bottles as well as spaghetti sauce and jam jars for our juice storage needs. |
To serve the juice, you mix about 1 part concentrate to 4 parts water or fizzy water. Add gin and tonic instead of water for the adult variety. Or champagne if you’re feeling especially festive!
 |
| Cheers! |
MONDAY, JULY 08, 2013
Swedes can be Stupid and Shortsighted, Too. |
| These photos were taken within a week of each other. |
Carl caught the city workers in action as they chainsawed through the bushes and 12 inch diameter trees. Upon asking what they were doing and why, Carl learned that the city (Solna, not Stockholm) decided that they needed to “clean up” the strip of land between our apartment building and the school.
Carl and I are so, so bummed. And angry. And stupefied. We can’t think of one good reason why the city would want/need to cut down so much greenery.
I’m pretty sure that the value of our apartment has gone down measurably. Instead of an incredibly unique view of dense, green, flowering foliage, our apartment now looks upon a wasteland.
Not only that, but we can now see every person that walks by. And they can see into our apartment. Before the devastation, our apartment was completely private, even without curtains, during the summer months. Sadly, we are now on display in a fishbowl.
I cannot express how disappointed I am. Not only at the waste and the loss of our green view, but at the simple fact that Swedes have the ability to be this stupid, too.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 2013
First Swedish Paycheck!I have received my first paycheck in kronor! Although Carl was of course extremely supportive while I was learning his language, it feels great to be making my own money again. Everyone keeps asking me what I plan to do with my newfound money, but I can’t think of anything in particular. I haven’t been longing to buy something—I’m generally not much of a shopper and I’m definitely not one for gadgets and gizmos. I can imagine that Carl and I will allow ourselves a slightly more luxurious travel budget, but we generally hope to start saving more. While we were able to live remarkably well on one salary, we didn’t manage to save all that much, so the time to save has come.
In Sweden, pretty much every company pays their employees on the 25th of every month. Since all bills are due on the 1st, there’s not much time to dispose of your money before your mortgage and bills need to be paid.
Despite the intentional timing which is meant to encourage bill paying, the national payday means chaos in the stores the first weekend after the 25th. There is even a noticeable upswing in the number of shoppers in the grocery store right after payday! Marketing campaigns and sales are geared toward the monthly influx of cash, and the concept of “payday” generally has a much more tangible impact here than in the US.
In the US, Carl (an engineer) made exactly twice as much as I did. In Sweden, the gap is only 25% (and will probably only be about 12% once I have proven myself as an architect here in Sweden). It really is true that Sweden is an “equal” and “middle class” society—the income gap is miniscule compared to the gap between rich and poor in the US, and occupations are valued much more equally in Sweden. Even waiters and hairdressers make a living wage here, and there is very little talk of needing multiple jobs in order to support oneself. I don’t think anyone lives luxuriously on a hairdresser’s salary, but they are able to afford a decent apartment and vacations abroad (I know because I have asked my hairdresser about all this!).
Another indication of Sweden’s equal view of occupations is Swedish chic-lit. American chic-lit tends to feature women who have jobs with glamour potential. Like maybe an editor at a large publishing house, for example. Swedish chic-lit, however, features “everyday” people with “normal,” unglamorous jobs. The heroine in the bestselling novel Små citroner gula, read by more than one in four Swedish women, is a waitress. Not a struggling actress/waitress, but a waitress-for-life waitress. In Sweden, it’s ok not to have aspirations to be a doctor or a lawyer. There is a real sense that not everyone has to be a doctor and that plumbers are just as important to society. Everyone and their contribution is valued, even if the contribution isn’t prestigious.
Perhaps related to the fact that plumbers and doctors are more equally valued here is that Swedes generally seem to be much more content with life. I am sure that Swedish people want more, just like Americans. However, that desire for MORE isn’t an all-consuming factor that drives all factors of existence. The rags-to-riches myth holds very little weight in Sweden, and people seem to be more-or-less content to have enough instead of constantly struggling to obtain more.
While I really appreciate the fact that the person serving me coffee doesn’t have to work three jobs in order to support himself, I do have some mixed feelings about some of the unintended side effects of Sweden’s occupational equality. If there’s no need to aspire higher, why struggle to accomplish more? Why study like crazy for years to become an engineer when you can live comfortably on a hairdresser’s salary? There are certainly many Swedes who do want to be doctors and lawyers and engineers and architects and rocket scientists, but the fact is that the Royal Institute of Technology has recently had to expand their international quota in order to fill the classrooms. There simply aren’t enough Swedish students who want to study/are qualified to study technical subjects.
This is not good for Sweden. Engineers play an obviously important role in today’s society, and without them, not much can happen in the post-industrial information age. Sweden’s current answer to the problem is to import engineers and doctors and others with an education that matches up with Sweden’s long-term shortage list. Not only does Sweden offer easy-to-obtain residency permits to immigrants with these professions, but they also offer many other benefits once you get here like intensive language courses geared toward your profession. My language course was one of these intensive programs aimed at getting professionals integrated into the workforce as quickly as possible. And it worked! While it took a little longer to receive my first paycheck than I had expected (everything moves more slowly in Sweden), my 20 month immigration-to-job gap was far shorter than the average (in Sweden) of 5 to 7 years.
Maybe this does call for a little shopping celebration, after all! I just might treat myself to a new archi-dorky book.
MONDAY, JUNE 17, 2013
Foraging: Lilacs
First, you pick a whole bag full of lilacs. We tried to pick the blooms with the strongest scent, thinking that they would produce the most flavorful juice. You then strip the blooms off the stems and add a few lemon slices. The lemons help counteract the syrupy sweetness of the lilacs.
Next, you pour boiling sugar water over the blooms and lemons. You then cover the concoction and let it “stew” for most of a week in the fridge.
The last step is to filter out the blooms and pour into jars or containers. The concentrate lasts for several weeks in the fridge and practically forever in the freezer. When you have a hankering for lilac juice, you dilute it with water, sparkling water, gin, or champagne and enjoy! Preferably the sipping happens on a beautiful, flower-covered balcony like ours.
We were surprised that the purple blooms produced such a pink juice, but regardless of the color, the juice tastes exactly the way lilacs smell.
THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 2013
Swedish Keyboard
At first glance, the keyboard probably doesn’t look all that strange except for the three extra Swedish letters å, ä, and ö. Upon closer inspection, however, you’ll notice that all the punctuation is in all the wrong places. The quotation marks are on the 2 key, and the question mark is at the top of the keyboard instead of on the bottom. The plus is its own key and doesn’t require you to press shift first. The ä is where the apostrophe usually is, so every time I try to type I’m or don’t or it’s I get ”Iäm” and ”donät” and ”itäs” instead. The shift key is much narrower so every time I want to capitalize something, I get ”<i” instead of ”I.” Of course the dollar sign isn’t of greatest importance in Sweden, so you have to press a funky ”alt gr” key to get to it. You also have to press that same funky ”alt gr” key to get access to the @, so typing email addresses is a little extra challenging. All of the parentheses are in different places. The equal sign does not have its own key but is on the 0 key. The back and forward slashes are in funky locations, too, as are the dashes. In short, all the punctuation has been completely rearranged, so it takes a little extra time to type. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it eventually, but then I will be completely confused when I’m at home using my own American computer instead. So it goes.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2013
Quotation Marks
I personally find this confusing. In English, we’d type:
“And then she told me,” Hilda continued, “that they broke up.” She then began to tire of the conversation and turned away.
The Swedish version would look like this:
-- And then she told me, Hilda continued, that they broke up. She then began to tire of the conversation and turned away.
Is it the speaker, Hilda, that turned away? Or is it the person about whom Hilda is speaking who turned away, and Hilda is recounting the movement? The English version makes it entirely clear who did and said what, but the Swedish version is a bit ambiguous.
Swedish publications have started using quotation marks instead of the dash to indicate speech, perhaps due to this ambiguity. All of the older Swedish books that I have read use the dash, but contemporary literature seems to be divided—some books use the dash system while other books use the quotation mark system. I’m curious about how that decision is made nowadays. Is it the author who decides when he/she sits down to write? Or does the publisher intentionally decide to be more “Swedish” or more “international?”
TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 2013
BenefitsI plan to write more later about the ”meatier” benefits that come with a job in Sweden, but for now, I’m going to write about a couple of the more amusing and/or interesting benefits.
The first is friskvård, or ”healthy care.” Every six months, employees at my firm receive about $200 to use toward physical activities. This money can go toward anything like a gym membership, race entry fees, or yoga classes. More excitingly, this money can also go toward massages. Wow!!! My office seems particulary gung-ho about the massage benefit as a massage therapist is hired into the office every Tuesday. Employees sign up for a time slot and the office pays for half the fee while the employee pays for the other half of the fee out of their ”healthy care” stipend. The discounted rate for a 30 minute massage is only about $23, totally worth it!
There doesn’t seem to be vision insurance in Sweden, but my company pays about $500 every two years for employees to get their eyes checked and to buy a new pair of glasses. This is good timing for me because I’m starting to feel like my current glasses are a little too weak.
Göteborg seems to be a bit more car-centric city than Stockholm, but it is still not a given that everyone owns a car. For this reason, the office has a car that employees can check out when needed. Amusingly, the office also has two bikes for check-out. The bikes come with helmets and locks, and employees can check them out for personal errands as well as job-related trips. We’re even allowed to check them out overnight if desired. I’m curious what the company bike-insurance policy looks like!
Another significant perk to the job is that every employee receives a smart phone and unlimited access to calls, text messages, and data. The smart phone has two telephone numbers associated with it—one looks like a land line and one looks like a cell phone to the person receiving the call, depending on how the call is activated. The ”land line” number is your professional number that you give out to clients and such while the cell number is your personal number that you give out to friends and family. The professional number only rings to your phone when the office is open; someone calling that number after hours will reach voice mail. The cell number rings through to the phone at all times. The amazing part of this is that there are NO wired telephones in the office at all. No desk phones—just mobile phones. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of my fancy schmancy smart phone yet, but I’m pretty sure that in not too long, I won’t know what I did without it.
MONDAY, JUNE 10, 2013
FikaI am now one week into my new job. So far, so good. I’m certainly still in the introduction phase but everyone that I have met in the Göteborg office has been extraordinarily friendly. People are curious about why I find myself in Sweden, and many have complimented me on my Swedish. Speaking Swedish all day has been exhausting and I feel very limited in how I can express myself and in what I can say. For example, there are seemingly hundreds of synonyms for ”very” but only one or two come easily to mind. I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over and over again and can’t express any nuanced difference between ”very” and ”very very very very.” When I read, I understand all the synonyms and roughly their nuances, but all those words are still in my passive vocabulary and haven’t progressed into my more active vocabulary. I’m confident that my expressive range will widen over time and that as I use the language more and more I’ll feel less and less limited in what I can say.
Language aside, a Swedish architecture office looks and feels much like an American one. People spend their days talking to materials suppliers, drawing on the computer, and sketching at their desks or in groups in a small conference room. Pretty pictures of successful projects dot the walls. There are materials samples and fabric swatches littered about.
The one thing so far that stands out as very different from an American office is the coffee routine. In the US, an office worker might grab a coffee on arrival to the office and refill as needed throughout the day. It’s not unusual to chat about job or personal stuff in the kitchen, but the trip from the desk to kitchen and back is usually only about 5 minutes in total. In Sweden, the coffee break is a serious undertaking and even has a special name: fika.
Fika is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it means either ”coffee break” or ”a cup of coffee plus a sweet treat.” As a verb, fika means ”to take a coffee break and to socialize.” Fika is a twice-daily phenomenon that just about every Swede partakes in, whether an office worker, a student, or a stay-at-home parent. It is a social occasion and a real break from the day’s tasks; one does not merely grab a coffee, exchange a few pleasantries, and return to the computer desk. Instead, one grabs a coffee and a snack, sits down at a break room table, and chats with co-workers for at least 15 minutes but commonly for half an hour if there’s no immediate work deadline. Conversations vary from work-related topics to personal subjects.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of an office fika is that it is an organized event which occurs simultaneously. At my office in Göteborg, everyone, all 100 employees, gather in the kitchen and at break room tables at 9:45 am and at 2:45 pm every day. Imagine everyone in an American office taking a simultaneous break, together, twice every day!
Food is generally just as important to fika as coffee. If you were to go to a café for fika, you’d most likely order a cinnamon roll to accompany your caffeine. Eating cinnamon rolls twice a day every day is obviously not a very healthy habit, so office fika tends to be a little more moderate, and every office has their own routines regarding snackage. My office, for example, serves a more involved fika on Mondays and a simpler fika the rest of the week. The Monday morning fika snack consists of fresh bread and rolls with butter, cheese, cucumber, red bell peppar, and deli meats. The Monday afternoon fika snack is on the sweeter side with a choice of several different cakes. The rest of the week, the simpler fika snack is a never-ending supply of hard, thick crackers (ubiquitous in Sweden and known as Husman or Wasa) with butter or cheese.
The office has two office assistants who take turns setting up fika a little before the appointed time. There are two coffee machines in the kitchen so they don't need to brew coffee, but they do brew four pots of different kinds of tea every fika. After fika time, the assisstants put all the supplies away and get the dishwashers running.
I have noticed that most Swedes do not take sugar in their coffee, but milk is pretty common. The fridge in my office is supplied every week with five gallons of organic 1.5% milk.
In addition to the snacks in the bread family, the office also supplies fruit baskets for the employees to snack on whenever they wish during the day. The fruit baskets are popular enough that there is a sign on them reminding employees that they are only supposed to take one piece of fruit each day.
It’s hard to imagine this kind of dedicated social breaktime occurring in an American office. However, when you think about how much time one actually spends over the day chatting with co-workers, it probably adds up to at least half an hour if not an hour every day. In Sweden, the chatting is concentrated into two breaks, and people seem to be industriously working the rest of the day. In my experience, a break from intense work, the computer screen, and uncomfortable desk chairs is generally needed and taken everywhere, but the Swedes manage to make that break a guilt-free and socially productive occasion.
MONDAY, MAY 27, 2013
I Have a Job!
I signed and mailed back the contract last week, and I begin working for Liljewall Arkitekter on June 3rd! (The name is pronounced Lil-ie-e-vall).
The process of getting a job here in Sweden was mostly identical to the process in the US. The only big surprises involved my CV: I learned early on that you’re supposed to include your social security number (the first 6 digits of which is your birthdate) on your CV—so your potential employers know exactly how old you are. Most people also include their photo on their CV. Including these two personal things on my CV felt really odd, but I just went with the flow and did what the Swedes do. And it worked!
I received a lot of help with translating my CV into Swedish from numerous sources including a friend of my mother-in-law as well as a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of mine who has now become my own friend. Christian is a Swede who studied and worked as an architect in the US for several years before moving back to Sweden and practicing with a couple of firms here. He was able to really dig into the industry-speak and without him I don’t think my CV would have been nearly so professional sounding.
I also received a lot of help with my cover letter from a class that I took that was offered to me through my language classes and through the job center. The class could have been useless, but the woman who taught it was excellent and knowledgeable and took the time to personally help each student create a powerful CV and cover letter. After all of Christian’s work on my CV, my teacher didn’t have anything to change on my CV, but she turned my letter from something a school kid would write into something very professional. Not only did I receive invaluable advice from the CV/cover letter class, but the government even paid me about $350 to take the two-week class!
There were a surprising number of job announcements on Sweden’s Architects website. I didn’t qualify for many of them, but I found enough applicable ads that I sent out about 20 CVs and cover letters over the course of February, March, and April. I got some responses before I polished my cover letter in the class, but the responses became much more common after the class. In April I had 6 interviews with 5 different firms.
The interviews weren’t nearly as scary or intense as I had expected. Everyone I met was very friendly and no one asked trick questions like “what are your five weak points” or “tell me about a time when you failed.” No one asked oddly personal questions about my religious beliefs, if I had kids, or if I wanted to have kids (all of which is legal in Sweden). Although the interviews were a bit extra-hard because they were in Swedish, I didn’t feel like I was being interrogated. Some of the interviews were more formal than others, but everyone I talked with was super friendly. After all that interviewing, I just had to wait and see how it developed.
Within a week at the end of April, I was offered four different positions! I could tell that people had a hard time judging what my experience in the US was worth because the salaries were quite varied and there was a $12,000/year difference between the lowest and highest offers. (Here everyone is paid monthly and salaries are quoted by how much you make in a month, not in a year. It’s actually quite helpful to have the numbers broken down to the monthly level since most of life’s big expenditures are also paid monthly.)
There was also quite a range in the type of employment I was offered. One was for a regular, full-time, “permanent” position. Another was for a 5 month “test” employment most likely leading into “permanent” employment. The third was for a year-long contract that will likely be extended into a “permanent” position. And the fourth was for a six month internship hopefully leading to a “permanent” position. Because it is very hard and expensive to fire someone in Sweden, it is actually quite uncommon for a company to permanently hire someone right off the bat. A six month “test” employment is quite commonplace, and a six month internship is very common for those just leaving school. The internships are unpaid by the company but interns do receive a small but better-than-nothing stipend from the government.
I believe that the awesomeness of the Swedish government is one of the reasons that I received so many offers. Being a new immigrant to Sweden, I am eligible for the New Start Job Program. This means that anyone who hires me gets a 60% rebate on me. The company pays me my salary, but then the government gives the company about 60% back. The deal lasts for a year, and then is extendable for the next 4 years after that. The program is meant to take away some of the risk in hiring someone that’s new to the country and who has a lot to learn on the job. It worked!
The firm that I chose, Liljewall, is a large firm with about 100 employees in Göteborg, a large city on Sweden’s west coast about halfway between Stockholm and Oslo. They do all kinds of cool work with a big emphasis on sustainability. They have had a transient office in Stockholm for a while, but they now have enough work in Stockholm to establish a permanent presence here. I will be one of the first Stockholm employees, but I will be travelling to Göteborg one-to-two workdays every week. The train ride is three and a quarter hours each way and I’m sure to get to know every stretch of track over the next year! It’ll be fun to get to know another city in Sweden, and while all the travelling will probably be tiring, it’ll be nice to have a change of scenery every week.
It sounds like my first project will be a school here in Stockholm. I haven’t worked on a school before, so I am very excited about the new challenge. I am also excited about getting integrated into architectural practice here in Sweden—there’s a lot I need to learn, and I’m ready to start learning it! Most of it is simple stuff like how contracts are set up and how wide an exit stair needs to be and how you label drawings, but it’s all different than in the US. And of course there’s a lot of climatic stuff I need to learn, too, like how to deal with snow loads and what kinds of windows are best for this climate. And there’s a lot of plain-old vocabulary for me to learn as well. It’s a little daunting with everything that I need to learn, and learn soon, but part of the reason I chose Liljewall was because in-house education is important to them and they have in-house courses covering many of these things.
I now have a week “off” before I begin work. I plan to luxuriate in reading as much as I want to, enjoying the sunny, summer weather, getting some work done on this blog, and taking some long walks in this beautiful city. And maybe finding some office-appropriate shoes!
THURSDAY, MAY 23, 2013
I Saw a Rat!
I was walking around Södermalm today taking photos for my
next big blog entry when I saw a rat! Gladly,
the rat wasn’t real but was a steel street art rat. This guy was life-sized and looked like he
was about to jump down from a street curb down a staircase. Rats are actually kinda cute when they’re
made out of steel!
WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2013
Sweden is Expensive Part III
Carl and I just bought a new home! A new tent, that is. It is a three season, two person,
self-standing backpacking tent. It is
brand new, the lightest in its class, and doesn’t leak (hopefully!). It’s going to be a whole new world of camping
for us this summer!
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| Our new Big Agnes Copper Spur UL2 |
Other than the not leaking, there are a few other features that
we are very excited about. One is that
the tent has two doors and two vestibules.
This means that we each will have a dry spot outside the tent to store
our backpacks and boots and such. With
our old tent, we were sharing one vestibule so all of our stuff was piled on
top of each other, and if you forgot to pull something out of your backpack, it
was difficult to sort through the mess to get to it. The two vestibules also mean that two people
can sit up in the tent in the rain. With
our old tent, the vestibule was at the front of the tent, so it was uber-easy to
press the tent fabric against the rain fly when sitting up (or even when
turning over while lying down). Pressing
the tent fabric against the rain fly = wet inside the tent. Having the vestibules on the sides of the
tent instead of at the front means that there is very little risk of us
pressing the tent fabric against the rain fly and accidentally ending up with a
went tent.
The other thing we’re excited about is that the tent is
self-standing and doesn’t need to be staked into the ground in order to stand
up. This will enable camping on lots of
rocky islands out in the archipelago.
Since everything is more expensive in Sweden, Carl and I knew that buying a tent in Sweden would
be an expensive endeavor. We just didn’t
realize how expensive. Our Swedish outdoors magazine recently had a
review of tents with the prices listed.
The price for one tent was $900.
The same tent is $300 at REI.
When we saw that article, we immediately scrambled to order a tent to
Carl’s sister’s house so that she can bring it with her when she visits Sweden
in June. Thank you Emma for agreeing to cart our tent through 9 timezones!
It was a little weird to buy a tent sight-unseen, but we
have examined it from every angle and read many reviews on the web, and think
that we made the best choice. Even if
the tent’s only 95% what we wanted, we still saved $600!
TUESDAY, MAY 21, 2013
Falling in Love with Stockholm Again
Last week, Carl and I had four friends come to visit
us. I worked with all four at an
architecture firm in San Antonio, Texas (the four friends consist of two pairs—not
uncommon at the firm we worked at!). One
pair moved to Hamburg, Germany about five years ago (Carl and I visited them in
Octobers 2011), and the other pair still lives in San Antonio and still works
at the same architecture firm. Stockholm
was the site of our mini-reunion, and it was so, so much fun to see my friends
and to catch up on two years worth of news and thoughts about life. It was also wonderful to show my friends the
beautiful place we moved to.
It didn’t hurt that the weather was absolutely GORGEOUS with
clear, crisp, warm sunny days. Just at
the beginning of spring, Stockholm was at its loveliest. In the week that my friends were here, spring
sprung and the city turned from a wintery hue to spring green. The cherry trees in Kungsträdgården burst
into pink cotton candy blooms, buttery daffodils waved happily throughout the
city, and white wood anemone carpeted the forest floors.
I feel thankful to live in Stockholm just about every
day. Even so, however, I’m not always
hyper-aware of how beautiful this city is.
Having my friends walk with me through town helped me to see the beauty
through fresh, fully appreciative eyes.
Having my friends in town reinvigorated my love for this beautiful
place.
Our friends have flown home and Carl and my lives have
returned to everyday lives. However, my awareness
of my beautiful surroundings hasn’t begun to dull again. I’m sure that over time, I’ll lose some of
this appreciation again, but I’m also sure that I will regain it once again
when I’m showing more friends around this gorgeous place in July.
MONDAY, MAY 15, 2013
Sprucing up our "Summer Cottage"
I wrote this post about two weeks ago but didn’t have the
chance to post it until now… Our plants
have really taken off so I’ll be posting update photos soon!
Unlike most Swedes who have to drive cars or boats several
hours to their summer cottages, our commute is perfectly nonexistent. We just open the kitchen door and step
outside, and wha-la! We are in a whole
new relaxing world filled with flowers and dofting herbs and warm sunshine and
chirping birds. And in just a week or
so, all the trees will have leafed out so that we won’t even be able to see the
outside world.
There are 568,000 summer cottages in Sweden. With only 9.5 million people living in
Sweden, there is one summer house for every 16.7 people in the country. When you consider that most households are
about four people and that several generations of a family traditionally share
a summer house, it’s not hard to see how just about everyone in Sweden has
access to a summer cottage. You don’t
have to be particularly wealthy to have a summer house in Sweden. In fact, Sweden has one of the highest rates
of second-home ownership in the world.
Many of these summer cottages are quite modest in size and
primitive with no electricity, running water, or insulation. Swedes don’t go to their summer houses to
bask in luxury; instead, the summer cottages are a comfortable, convenient way
to enjoy nature. I think that it is the
simple character of these houses that keeps costs down and makes them
affordable to a broad spectrum of income levels.
Carl and I do not own a summer cottage, and we are part of
the minority who don’t have access to a cottage through family (although we do
get to help Carl’s parents enjoy their sailboat now and then!). Maybe someday we’ll acquire one (although I’m
pretty sure Carl would prefer to acquire a sailboat), but for now, we’re
enjoying our balcony which looks out into the trees and gets copious quantities
of strong and warm morning sun. Last
year we were too exhausted from our renovation efforts to focus attention on
the balcony, and it went largely unused.
So this spring it was high time to spruce up the balcony, buy some
furniture, and start growing flowers, veggies, and herbs.
First we attached some antique wooden grocery boxes that Carl’s parents gave us to the balcony
wall which receives the most direct sunshine.
The boxes are fairly well protected from rain and we lined them with a
thick plastic lining, so hopefully they’ll last a while. We haven’t planted the top box yet, but the
middle box contains herbs and we’re trying out arugula and strawberries in the
bottom box.
The balcony railing planters
are mostly planted with flowers, and these are also visible from our kitchen
window and breakfast bar. It’s such a
pleasure to see all these gorgeous flowers from the kitchen! Interestingly, it seemed like all the half
sun/half shade flowers were white or in the blue/purple spectrum. We weren’t really trying to be so color
coordinated but it worked out beautifully!
We found the table and one of the chairs for an incredibly
low price at ReFurn, a local furniture recycling shop. After haunting ReFurn’s website for a while
without finding a second chair, we finally broke down and bought another chair
at Ikea.
Carl and I have now spent two relaxing weekends on the
balcony basking in the morning sun, enjoying a long brunch, reading books and
drinking coffee in the sun. While we
don’t get any evening sun, the weather has gotten warm enough that we can sit
out comfortably with a jacket and a blanket over our legs to enjoy our evening
cocktails and dinners.
MONDAY, MAY 06, 2013
Valborg 2013
Last week was Valborg, Sweden’s traditional holiday to
welcome in the spring. I wrote about the
holiday’s history and traditions a bit last year in my post “Summer has Arrived.” Like last year, Carl and I picnicked and
enjoyed the evening’s bonfire. Swedes
don’t kid around with their bonfires.
This one was about 12 feet tall and about twice as wide before it
started burning down!
The
day following the bonfire is a national holiday, so we
took advantage of the beautiful, warm and sunny weather to go on a day
hike
just outside Stockholm. Stockholm’s
public transportation is amazing. Within
45 minutes of our apartment, we were on the trail and immersed in a
pastoral landscape. The following are a few photos from our day:
First we passed an “energy field” where quick-growing woody
shrubs are grown and cut to provide fuel for Sweden’s power and heat
plants. A little while ago I wrote a
post below entitled “Sweden Imports Garbage” about how Sweden is so efficient
with recycling that the nation imports trash from other countries in order to
keep the power and heat plants burning.
“Energy crops” are another solution to the fuel problem.
I keep excitedly writing about how spring is here, but as
you can see from this rather brown photo of the Lake Mälaren landscape, spring
is still in its earliest stages. Trees
have only just started to bud so the landscape is still fairly wintery.
Enormous barns like this one dot the Swedish landscape. In a climate like this, all livestock spend
several winter months indoors, so the barns have to be large enough to hold all
the animals as well as all of their hay.
Talk about spring fever! I’m sure
that these horses are loving the warm sunshine!
Wow, a pile of stones.
It doesn’t look so exciting on the surface, but for me, I get shiver
bumps whenever I see one of these.
Vikings piled these stones together to memorialize the important person
who was buried underneath. These
particular mounds were at the highest point of a then-island in the lake. The island was un-forested, so these
six-foot-high and twelve-foot-wide mounds would have been visible and quite
impressive from a distance. Mounds this
large are unusual, so the person being commemorated must have been unusually
important, or maybe the need to demonstrate power and strength in order to ward
off potential attackers was especially important at this location.
It was fun to see this Viking memorial on Valborg. Valborg is, after all, a Viking tradition
that has managed survive through 1000 years of Christianity.
FRIDAY, MAY 03, 2013
Salvaged Kitchen ComponentsA friend recently asked me what we ended up doing with the pieces that we had salvaged from our apartment’s original kitchen. I realized that while I posted a lot of photos of our kitchen renovation, I never posted photos of how we re-used the original teak-veneered cabinet doors and drawers. This is what we did:
In the bedroom, we created a headboard using three of the
kitchen cabinet doors. We used hinges to
bolt them to the wall without any visible hardware. Because the outside of the doors were fairly
bleached after 50 years of light exposure, we faced the more richly-colored
inside surfaces out. The warm teak color
provides a nice contrast to the cool grey and blue walls and the stark white
duvet and wardrobe in the bedroom.
We hung two deep drawers on a bedroom wall. We each have a box—I have hung all of my
necklaces in my box and Carl has a couple of bowls to receive the change,
business cards, and other miscellaneous stuff that comes out of his pockets at
the end of the day. We painted the back
of the drawers (which were a not-so-nice pressed board) with the same blue
paint that is on the wall behind our bed.
 |
| We found the ladder on the side of the road, painted it white, and now use it to hang our not-quite-dirty clothes. |
One large, shallow drawer became a tray for carting stuff
from the kitchen to the living/dining room.
All that it required was a coat of white, glossy paint on the bottom and
a handle for carrying ease.
Three more deep drawers became shelving on the walls above
our desk. To cover the pressed-board
backs, we cut up some old sailing navigation charts that Carl’s parents had
given us to fit into the boxes.
We also
integrated the original kitchen’s spice cabinet into the display after sanding off
layers of white and army green paint.
There are still several cabinet doors and a couple of
drawers in our basement storage unit.
We’re not sure what else to do with them, so if you have an idea, please
pass it along!
MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2013
Signs of Spring 2013 |
| You wouldn't think that the left-hand photo came from the city, but it did! I took this photo in a pocket of 17th and 18th century housing amidst the bustling neighborhoods of Södermalm. |
TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2013
No Long Johns!It's getting warmer and warmer and today was my first long john-free run since November! During the winter, my running attire consists of:
Hat
Ear muff
Long-sleeved, moisture-wicking running shirt
Lightweight fleece sweater
Wind-proof and moisture-resistant shell jacket
Thin running gloves
Wind-resistant running pants
Silk or fleece long johns
Medium-thick wool running socks
Running shoes, occasionally with city crampons for ice
It's liberating to only need a long-sleeve shirt and running pants. I practically flew today without all the extra layers!
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