MAMEWorld Forums - Welcome to the War Room - As of this past Monday I'm now a permanent resident of Sweden.

> Cool... only took two weeks, instead of 1-3 months... congrats!!

Thanks!

> So life is good then? If yes, please send chocolate (no, wait, that's Switzerland =P
> )

Oh, good lord. You wouldn't believe how many friends I have in the US who can't seem to tell the difference between Sweden and Switzerland.

> I guess my question is... after being there (Europe in general) for what, 4-5 years
> now... how much better/worse do you like it, compared to here?

The way I put it to people is this:

The last place I was living in the USA, I had an apartment. It was a semi-basement unit in a highly-gentrified apartment complex where I was constantly looked at askance just for the color of my skin. The apartment didn't have any seal between the carpet and the surrounding building, so all throughout summer and fall, these big-ass crickets would randomly show up in my apartment, and I'd have to go chasing after them to smash them with a box. I'd try to sleep at night, only to be woken up on the verge of sleep by some asshole cricket doing his "reek-reek" bullshit. I had a car, but it wasn't registered, and I was unable to get it registered, because I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, and was unable to save up enough money to get it registered. I had a crappy Comcast cable internet connection, where I was frequently over-billed because Comcast happened to give the cable box with my serial number to some other customer, who quickly realized that when he ordered porn pay-per-view, it wasn't billed to his account due to PPV being bound to the cable box's serial number, which caused no end of billing issues for me until I literally e-mail carpet-bombed the entire executive branch of Comcast.

I had zero local friends. My nearest friends were a 4-hour bus ride away, in Morgantown, WV. My job was effectively that of a code janitor, every day responding to customer support tickets and trying to figure out why their particular use case didn't work in our engine, while shouldering their verbal abuse with a smile and a wink.

I didn't have a bank account. I couldn't get a bank account, due to my credit score being so abysmally low. Yeah, I made some really bad mistakes during my "capricious youth", let's say.

I didn't have a phone number. Rather, I did, but it was provided via Google Voice, so I only had the number when I was within range of Wi-Fi Internet.

Where I lived, the tap water fucking sucked, I had to get one of those Brita water filtration things that sits in your refrigerator, that you pour tap water into, which it then filters in order to not taste like shit.

So, let's contrast that to what I have here in Sweden:

I own my own home for the first time in my life. I have an amazing partner who for some reason loves and stands by me despite the fact that I honestly don't feel like I deserve it, and I have a job that's far more rewarding than the one I left in order to come here. I don't have a car, but on the other hand, there have been only two times in the past 3.5yrs of living here that I've said "Gee, I wish I had a car," and both times, my partner's mom was more than happy to drive us in the family mini-van.

The tap water here is unflaggingly pure, and tastes pretty much identical to the shit that people pay $1 per 20oz bottle for in the US. I have a 500 megabit down, 50 megabit up Internet connection that I pay the currency equivalent of about $35 a month for. All things considered, my monthly expenses amount to about $1500, plus the cost of groceries. That's less than the rent that I paid when I was still living in the US, before monthly bills were factored in. On the topic of bugs, last summer I had a minor problem with some cockroaches in my kitchen that weren't native to the area, but the homeowners' association that I'm part of covered the entire cost of having exterminators out to my place to take care of it.

In terms of public transport, there's practically no comparison. Across the various places where I lived in the US throughout my life, I was lucky if my hometown even had a bus line, and if it did, I was lucky if it arrived at a stop more than once every hour or so. By contrast, within the greater Stockholm metro area, the rail-based commuter train network has trains arriving on 15-minute intervals, the subway network has trains arriving on roughly 5-10 minute intervals, and the bus network has buses arriving every 5-10 minutes as well. Not only that, but $110 a month gets you full access to all public transport within the greater Stockholm metro area - roughly a 50x50 kilometer area, including buses, commuter train lines, subway lines, tram lines, boats (remember, Stockholm is part of an archipelago), and others.

This leads nicely into one major gripe that I have when people try to compare the cost of living between Sweden and the USA: Most of these cost of living websites tend to omit state income tax, as well as Medicaid/Medicare withholdings, and also Social Security withholdings. Meanwhile, they also tend not to account for the fact that in Stockholm, at least, you generally won't be paying a monthly car payment, or monthly car insurance, or gas for your car, or regular upkeep for your car, because you simply won't need a car, 99 times out of 100. People here regularly wait until their 30's to get their driver's license, simply because there is literally no societal pressure to actually get a license like there is in the US.

Overall, I have a larger percentage of take-home pay per month here in Sweden than I ever did in the US. It sounds counter-intuitive given the popular info that gets parroted across the Internet, but that's the reality for me. Might not be the case for everyone, but I can only speak for myself.

> What do you miss, if
> anything?

It might sound stupid, but I miss the shitty chain fast-food restaurants, and I miss the shitty "instant" food. There's only one Kentucky Fried Chicken in Sweden right now, and it's in Malmö, which is roughly a 1-hour airline flight from Stockholm. I like me some KFC, but no, definitely not worth it. Taco Bell is entirely absent. Chain restaurants like Applebee's just aren't a thing. There's a TGI Friday's, and there's an O'Leary's, but both are more or less only given business from the crowd looking to experience some kind of meal revolving around quintessential Americana.

There are plenty of restaurants to eat at or get takeaway from, don't get me wrong. In fact I would call these takeaway places a good example of integration: People act like Muslim people don't want to integrate, but from where I'm standing, they seem to have integrated pretty dang well - you couldn't throw a rock in downtown Stockholm without hitting some kebab or pizza takeaway place run by some Muslim dude, who's more than happy to give you whatever kebab or pizza or pasta dish you want. These people don't care what your religion is, they just want to sell you some tasty food. I can totally respect that. But, at the end of the day, they're still markedly different than the sort of take-out that you might get in the US.

So, the thing that I miss most? The shitty, unhealthy, pre-packaged/instant food that you can get at just about any supermarket or general market in the US, right down to Walgreen's. Campbell's Chunky Soup isn't a thing here. Progresso soup isn't a thing here. Chef Boyardee isn't a thing here. Hot Pockets aren't. Marie Callender's pot pies aren't. Lean Cuisine aren't. Jack Links beef jerkey aren't. The sugary, unhealthy (but wildly tasty) American cereals aren't.

You can, on the other hand, get healthy, organic (or not, if you want to penny-pinch) ingredients to make just about whatever recipe you like, and if you can't find some obscure ingredient for some Asian dish or whatever, you can most likely find it at one of the many ethnic shops that exist just about everywhere, all across Stockholm. It's much, much easier to eat healthy here, which I suppose is part of the reason why I've dropped about 20-30 pounds over the past 3.5 years. I simply can't eat the same unhealthy bullshit that I used to.

> And do you still get treated like "an American," or is it more chill, and
> you fit in just fine?

The answer is that it depends! There are situations where it can help to blend in, and there are situations where it can help to play up the "Oh, I'm not from around here!" card.

When it comes to learning Swedish, it's important to start out speaking Swedish in any given exchange, and to insist on continuing to speak Swedish during that exchange. The reason for this is that the English literacy rate in Sweden is well over 90%, so you're far more likely to encounter someone who is fluent in English than you are not to. And Swedes are a very efficient group of people, so they'll often try to switch to English if it's clear that you're not getting anywhere with Swedish. This, in turn, makes it hard to learn Swedish, because it's incredibly easy to get by just knowing English and assuming everyone also knows it. On the other hand, if you take the time to learn a decent amount of vocabulary, and you apologize from the outset for your bad Swedish - in Swedish - then it's far more likely that they'll humor you and also respond in Swedish, and thus it's possible to make some real headway in learning the language.

On the other hand, if you're trying to get directions somewhere, then it's a great idea to play the "I'm not from around here" card. Swedes are a fairly reserved sort of people, who avoid interaction with random strangers unless they absolutely have to, but if you explain that you're not a Swede and are just looking for directions or for help in understanding something, they'll practically trip over their own feet in their hurry to help you.

So, don't feel like you have to 100% integrate, as long as you're willing to put in the effort to integrate when necessary. But on the other hand, it can also help to try to integrate as much as possible, since Swedish is a very dense language, and it makes everyone's lives a lot easier if they only have to talk one language rather than additionally translating it into English, which on average is about 25-50% longer than its equivalent Swedish phrasing.

> EDIT: If you know anyone at DICE... tell 'em I love Battlefield, having a great time
> with BF1, but still want to see a proper Bad Company 3 =D.

Sadly, I don't! But if I meet any of them, I'll let them know.