5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Moving to Sweden - Just a Brit Abroad

i know that a lot of you watching this video will probably fit into one of two categories you're either swedish yourself and you're here to hear my experiences of living in your country or you're from someplace else and just like me you have an active interest in sweden and maybe you want to spend some more time here yourself in the future and as it's coming up now two and a half years since i moved to sweden it got me thinking what are some of the things i wish i'd known before i moved here that i could have used to help prepare me so if you fall into the category that you're also sat there contemplating whether you should make the leap over to sweden i suggest you find yourself somewhere comfortable and get ready to take notes because today we're diving into five of the things that i wish i'd known before i moved number one being active in sweden isn't a choice it's a way of life and you guys regardless of where you live you can probably pinpoint in your friendship group the friend that's like the jock the sporty one the one that you'll always find down the gym but it's just that the person or maybe the handful of people well brace yourselves because when you move to sweden the whole concept gets flipped on its head and you're easier to spot if you're not the one that's active the question isn't did you work out today it's how did you train today and if you're going to be living in one of the 10 biggest cities like i myself am when it gets to the end of the working day and you put on your shoes and you head out for some walk and some peace and quiet in the local forests don't expect to be the only one out there with the birds know you're bound to bump into at least half of the population of the town all running the tracks and the big thing to pinpoint here is where i'm from you do intervals as a punishment not out of choice whereas in sweden people seem to just do it because they love it let me tell you what guys if there was a dummies guide to sweden that existed out there they would need to include a paragraph about intervals because to the rest of us people like me from abroad intervals is something that reminds me of dark days when i was a child doing gym class at school and i've locked it away at the back of my brain i never want to think about it again fortunately that's etched so deep in my memory that even now that i've been in sweden for two and a half years and i'm a lot more active than i was beforehand i'm still not doing any intervals but i'm definitely running three or four times a week which you wouldn't have found me doing back when i lived in england the second thing that i wish i'd known before i moved is another thing that isn't so much of a choice here in sweden it's a right and of course i'm talking about access to coffee i'm sure if they could add it as an honorary human right they absolutely would because every workplace every store you go into coffee is everywhere and usually it's free okay i don't want to mislead you i'm not talking about the frappuccino that you're getting your local coffee house no you're gonna have to pay for that but when it comes to your basic filter coffee in most workplaces for example you can expect to get that on tap whenever you like free of charge in fact when i applied for my first job here in sweden i remember one of the perks that was listed on the form was free coffee and i was thinking okay well that's a weird thing to say you know i'll just bring my own it's not a big deal but now i understand it is actually a big deal i can actually almost imagine someone sifting through the list of applications that they want to go for and then they see one that says that there's not coffee included and it gets cast out the window because no coffee don't expect me to work and i tell you what guys in the coffee shops there's even subscription services where you can sign up to get access to a certain amount of coffee a month and if you don't know what i'm talking about think spotify or apple music but for coffee the largest coffee chain here espresso house have recently launched a new system where every two hours with their subscription service you're entitled to a new coffee and it doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out that that's four or five possibly six coffees a day depending on how long you commute and work for in fact i'm almost tempted to say that the third thing on the list today should be that you need to work on your caffeine tolerance because you need to get it up there if you're going to keep up the swedes the third thing that you're going to want to prepare yourself for before you set foot here in sweden to live for the rest of your life is that everything shuts down in july if like me you're from the uk you'll be used to taking your holiday day scattered throughout the year so that you always have some holiday or some leave to look forward to but that's not really how it's done here in sweden no in fact it's written into the law that if you want four weeks of paid holiday in the summer you are entitled to it so expect everybody to disappear for four weeks in july and before someone points out in the comments this was something that came from the industrial age here in sweden where the industrial holidays were timed in a particular way and so everyone ended up being off at the same time these days we don't have those same kind of restrictions so people are becoming a bit more flexible but having said that it's still more normal than anything else that all of your colleagues are going to disappear in july some workplaces will even shut down for a period of time in july so expect that you might even be asked to take your holiday then even if you don't want to and you guys i'm going to go out in a bit of a limb now and i'm going to call it as working patterns change and less and less people take their time off in july and they spread it across the summer i expect to see more people in sweden taking their holiday in june because what i've seen over the last two and a half years is that the global climate patterns and the way they're changing have meant that the weather has often been a lot better in june here than it has in july so if i want to get my tan i want to be off in june and from one climate extreme to another my fourth thing that you're going to want to know before you move out here to sweden is it gets dark and i know what you're thinking it gets dark in most places doesn't it and it does but you haven't experienced real darkness until you've been in sweden i know you guys this isn't me getting all dark morbid and depressing i actually think it's pretty cool because before i came to sweden my perception of darkness was totally off where i'm from in the uk isn't a particularly big city by any stretch of the imagination at least not on our standards but one thing that is different is there's a lot more light everywhere in england and i'm talking about everything from street lights to apartment lights to restaurant nights it's just a lot brighter whereas here in sweden there's so much more space that as soon as you get outside of the city you experience real darkness in fact it even catches me off guard sometimes when i'm in the city i can be cycling home late one evening and it's just so dark and i guess it's because light pollution is so low in scandinavia that you can actually see the northern lights so often so yeah just prepare to be going around with reflectors on every single piece of your body throughout the winters because otherwise nobody's gonna see you and the fifth and final thing that you need to know before you make the switch and then move out here to sweden is that cueing is part of the culture and you guys i thought this was something i was prepared for because cueing is a big deal in england too we're always joking about the fact that if someone cuts in front of you you tat and mutter away to yourself you put an ugly face and then you get on with your life you're never going to say anything you just join the back of the queue and you wait but then i came to sweden but the thing that baffled me when i first arrived is i'm used to going to my local supermarket and getting in the queue waiting till i get to the front to pay that i can deal with that i can handle what i'm not so used to is i go to a clothes shop i pick up some sunglasses or i pick up a tie or pick up a t-shirt i want to buy and then i get in the queue but i'm not in the actual queue yet i'm in the fake queue to get to the queue okay maybe i'm not explaining that very well but there's such thing in sweden called a curl upper and it's this ticket that you get from a machine that tells you what your number is and that's your place in the queue so quite often in public places and shops you will actually have to get into a queue to get to the little red machine to get your curl upper so that you get your cue place and once you've got your place in that digital cue you can sit comfortably because now the physical queue just disperses you've got no idea where people are anymore you just wait till your numbers called your dash to the front make your purchase and get yourself out of there but so just be prepared next time you go to the pharmacy or next time you go to orleans for example if you haven't got a curl upper you're not being served and there you have it guys there are five of the things i wish i'd known before i moved to sweden if you think i missed anything let me know in the comments down below and maybe i'll bring it up again in a new video sometime soon give me a like so that i know you enjoyed it and if you haven't subscribed yet it would be awesome if you could new videos all the time would be awesome to have you along for the journey but until then thanks for watching and i'll see you again soon bye guys

Channel: Just a Brit Abroad

Views: 105,085

Keywords: things to know before moving to Sweden, things to know visiting Sweden, 5 things I wish I knew before moving to Sweden, 5 things I learned about Sweden, 10 things I learned and loved about Sweden, things to know moving to sweden, before moving to sweden, how to prepare for moving to sweden, things I didn't know about Sweden, travel to sweden, living in Sweden, meagan nouis, moving to a new country, things I wish I knew before moving to Sweden, why I moved to Sweden, stefan, thyron

Id: KReP-NoHkGQ

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021