Mid Summer

The summer solstice is particularly important in the northern countries of Europe… no doubt this is directly related to a distinct lack of light for a large portion of the year coupled with freezing temperatures, 4-5 months of snow, frozen lakes and seas…. brrrr… I’m probably the only one in Sweden that is actually looking forward to it!

Mid summers is a big holiday in Sweden, a practise run for the long holiday period really. Although termed mid summers, it isn’t really mid summer at all (despite being the summer solstice), but a time when weather patterns settle and the short but warm summer period begins (well, in theory at least). It is a prelude to schools breaking up a few weeks later and most of the country cashing in their long annual leave entitlements and disappearing for months at a time, only to return when the days truly shorten and the excitement of the oncoming winter is experienced by only a sole deranged New Zealander.

In Stockholm, families flee to their holiday homes on the archipelago, mow and weed the erratic spring growth, paint walls, dust down the cupboards, stock them with supplies, make lists of building materials and supplies needed and slowly return to work the following week in eager anticipation of their annual summer migration several weeks later. We were lucky enough to be invited to be part of this ‘prelude’ and stay at the Pehrson family collection of summer homes on the beautiful Island of Blido in the northern part of Stockholm’s archipelago. While Karin rode her bike and the rest of the family drove, Tina, Ana and I took the slow route – the ferry, from downtown Stockholm. We arrived early on Thursday morning, the bus strike (yes a strike in Sweden) not curtailing our efforts to get there by 9am to get a good queuing position in what was to be a busy boat with families heading out to the Islands for the long weekend. We would have been a bit stuffed if the train drivers hadn’t cancelled their strike the evening before, which would have potentially curtailed all our weekend plans; however the train drivers pulled the plug on their planned action enabling our carless family access into the city. Incidentally, the bus drivers were still on strike one week later. Riots and strikes in the space of 5 weeks, maybe Sweden isn’t the harmonious society we were led to believe?

Anyway, I digress. Despite the long line of overloaded prams, cycle trailers, bags and families, there was room to stretch our legs on the boat as it started its two and half hour journey through various inlets of the Baltic Sea stopping at small wharfs and jetties, ejecting people and goods and collected others in replacement. From the boat we could admire the idyllic looking holiday houses - some mansions, some more modest abodes, and the calming effect of green forest meeting blue water, fluttering Swedish flags and boaties of all shapes and sizes darting in and out of maze of islands had us looking forward to the long weekend. It seems no one is really sure just how many islands there are. Some are big, some are so small a solitary tree takes up the entire surface area, while others aren’t even big enough for this. But take a look at a map of the Stockholm archipelago and it is mind boggling. Various sources list 10,000 to 30,000 islands in all. All this in an area of about 100 km by 50 km.

The ferry stopped at the small wharf at Bruket (our destination on the Island of Blido) just long enough for us to extract ourselves and our gear and the small pedestrian ramp was actually pulled out from underneath me as I took my final step onto solid ground… keeping to the ferry timetable obviously the essence of the occasion.

From Bruket, Karin was waiting for us, and we walked the narrow country lane through the forest before we turned off onto a dirt road which become smaller, narrower and rougher and more infested with mosquitoes until we finally reached the end. We had reached the Pehrson posse of holiday homes, a collection of three beautiful wooden houses surrounded by large gardens and bordered by the surrounding forests. The mosquitoes took one look at the fresh city folk and went to work!

The main celebrations kicked off the following day. After a leisurely breakfast (everything was leisurely on Blido) flowers were picked and taken to a large open grassed area where they were attached to a maypole. With cross bar and circular rings of leaves and flowers, the pole lay flat on the ground until the celebrations later in the day saw it hoisted into the air, it’s phallic stature, meant, I assume, to promote virility among the populus.

Tina, Ana, Karin and Anna - One of the many fikas on Blido

Island Walkway

One of Pehrson holiday homes. Not too shabby for a hand-built  job

 However, before the celebrations kicked off it was time for a traditional lunch of pickled hearing and assorted condiments. The extended Pehrson family and few foreign imports (us included) munched away in the early afternoon sun before three o’clock rolled around and families from around slowly started migrating to the pre-arranged gathering place where fika was held before births and deaths since last mid summers were announced, the maypole raised and the real celebrations were ready to kick off.

 

On our way to mid-summers celebrations

Now, in a lot of the world it would be time for the adults to start drinking heavily for an evening of boozy entertainment. What I really like about Sweden, well at least to what I have been exposed too so far, is that it is very family orientated and in what is arguably Sweden’s biggest national day, alcohol did not seem to play too much of a role. Perhaps that is simply what we have been exposed too so far, but the afternoon really centred around the children. A small band played while traditional songs were played and the community danced around the maypole while those not inclined to dance or too tuckered out by too much dancing, sack races or tug-o-war competitions, simply lay on the grass and drank coffee. To say Ana enjoyed herself would be an understatement and by the time we had returned home, eaten a late dinner, bounced (or were bounced) on the trampoline by half a dozen kids a lot older than her for an hour, she virtually collapsed onto the bed at the site of it despite the sun not even giving the faintest hint that it was going to go down that night.

 

Dancing around the Maypole

The following few days revolved around taking fika, swimming, a spot of boating and having a pretty relaxing time all around. Just what we needed after a month of settling into our new lives. Stockholm, work, and the tax office all seemed very far away. It amazed me that the houses we were staying in were practically all built by the family. Karin explained that although on the face it, months idling away on Blido every summer seemed like paradise, the reality was that all through her childhood, the were practically always building; there was always a project on the go. It is hard to believe looking at the houses. Practically the only help they got was the milling of the wood from the trees cut down on the property. The buildings were all at least double glazed, the more modern ones triple glazed, people don’t believe me when I tell them they still build single glazed buildings in New Zealand. It seems the art of building is passed down from generation to generation. If you want a house built, I would recommend getting a Swede to do it.

 

Boating - a favourite Swedish pastime

Island fika spot

Back in Stockholm, we are now living with Karin’s mother until we can move into our apartment. A few more trips to Norway loom for me, to Germany for Tina and Ana, and then come mid-July we move (hopefully for the last time this year) back to Rissne where we can unpack our meagre possessions for the last time and our shipment from New Zealand will arrive and we make a home here.

One month in Sweden

It’s hard to believe that I arrived in Sweden nearly four weeks ago, with Tina and Ana arriving a week later. In many ways it feels we have been here quite some time, of course in other ways it is all still very new to us all.

Overall life seems pretty relaxed here. If people are stressed going about their day to day lives they are good at hiding it. Since the moment I arrived I have been astonished how quiet everything appears considered Stockholm is a reasonably big city (for my standards anyhow). The tunnelbanna (underground train) always appears reasonably quiet and at worst busy, but never so chaotic that the platforms are overflowing and the trains bursting. The same can be said for the roads, airports, the tourist sites, practically everything in fact. It’s like everything is stuck in an un-hectic un-stressful cruise mode. I’ve seen people making ‘interesting’ manoeuvres in their cars and bicycles that have ended up causing inconvenience or at worst causing the traffic to come to a halt. In New Zealand they would receive a barrage of abuse (by way of depressed horn of the car or furious arm waving cyclist (I’m one of the later I have to admit), but in Sweden, people simply stop and wait. It appears a few seconds inconvenience is not the end of the world… as it should not be. Cyclists, pedestrians and other cars are also treated with a lot more respect than I am used to. It has had a remarkable calming affect on my own attitude too.

Even the Royal wedding in the weekend appeared a relaxed affair. We were walking through the city and passed by the Royal Palace where things were in full swing for the big wedding between Princess Madeleine and New York banker Christopher O'Neill later in the day. Well I say full swing, but it was a pretty sedate. I’ve seen school boy rugby matches stir more passion. Barricades had been set up along the procession route and police stood on corners. But even when guests were being whisked to the ceremony in their chauffeured cars and buses (yes public buses) under police escort, the crowds were not 20 deep, or even 5 deep. In fact along much of the route, apart from the very entrance to the palace, the crowd was zero deep. It seemed that either people didn’t care for a royal wedding (there was only one a few years ago) or they just didn’t think it was worth making a huge fuss about. The roads in front of the palace were officially closed and barricaded off. Yet cyclists still whizzed by and the police escorts just went around them. I can imagine in other countries they would have been shot! It was similar for Sweden’s national day last Thursday. We went into the city to see what was on. The Royal Palace was open to the public, and although a constant stream of people walked through it and the Swedish flag flew proudly around the city, things were very relaxed.

Ana negotiating the crowds outside Swedish Parliament on Sweden's National day

Inside the Royal Palace on Sweden's National day

Guests taking the bus to the Royal Wedding. At least the driver put on his suit!

Even the male train drivers have a relaxed attitude to wearing skirts:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22828150

As far as getting settled we have achieved the following.
-Obtained a national ID number, without which you can't even sneeze in Sweden;
-Opened a bank account (which you need a national ID to do);
-Arranged for payment of relocation expenses and salary (which you need a bank account to do);
-Enrolled Ana in pre-school (again, national ID number is crucial for this task);
-Found and signed a contract on an apartment (you guesses it, the national ID is the key);
-Purchased new bicycle (what were you expecting?); and
-Sent registration information to Försäkringskassans who in effect are the social welfare providers in Sweden. They told me that we will be eligible for up to 460 days of paid parental leave (yes that's four hundred and sixty) minus what we received in New Zealand (which was nothing) if we stay up to two years or more (highly likely). 

Ana's new bike. She'll grow into it

No wonder there are kids everywhere in Sweden. In fact neither of us have seen so many pregnant women, prams and buggies, playgrounds and actual children themselves anywhere else in the world. It’s like one very large breeding programme.

Pram park

Update on the Great Stockholm House Hunt

Despite finding our apartment in record time, the phone kept ringing with offers from prospective 1st hand lease holders eager to sign us up as seconds. Most sounded dire, but one caught our ear. As we hadn't signed the contract for the one we had already found, we went to view it and it was damned near perfect in every way. So we kind of changed our mind, and are now moving there. The 30 second commute is ancient history, but to be honest, living that close to work scared me a bit. So in Rissne we will stay, with its wide open spaces, cheap rent (relatively) and family orientated living.

The Great Stockholm House Hunt

Finding a place to live in Stockholm is no joke. We were warned about it before we came and all the advice most people in Stockholm can offer is “its really hard”. The reality of the game set in pretty quick as we started our own adventure.

Ironically, the problem seems to stem from Sweden’s egalitarian society which at the end of World War II was transformed from a largely agrarian society into a model representing the ‘middle way’ between capitalism and socialism relying heavily on a social welfare system in which equality was its cornerstone. Home ownership was and is encouraged with heavy tax breaks for people paying mortgages and low interest rates (compared to New Zealand at least) making ownership an attractive proposition, apart from the very high cost that is. However one of the biggest drivers for home ownership would have to be the dismal rental market. We have heard of people giving up on finding somewhere to rent and buying instead!

There are basically disincentives to be a landlord in Sweden. The return on the investment is simply not worth it or negative. There are government schemes to rent, which to be honest I still don’t really understand, but basically babies are put on this list when they are born, the waiting list is so long. So when you get a rental directly from the landlord (termed 1^st hand rental - more often than not the landlord is the state) you never let it go. A big advantage to hanging on to the apartment is that the state often sells the apartments with time and if you have been renting it out for a long period, you usually get it very cheap. So when you want to leave, you don’t relinquish the lease (that would be deemed idiotic), you simply sub let it out (termed 2^nd hand rental). Believe it or not there are even 3rd hand rentals where you lease from the leaser of the leaser of the landlord. Confused?

Of course everyone adds on a bit of fat to line their pockets, leaser terms become more and more restricted and cumbersome (and often not legal) the further down the chain you become, and you end up with a property market like Stockholm’s where it is nearly impossible to lease directly from the owner of an apartment or house, and 2^nd and 3^rd hand leasing terms are generally overpriced and short term – 1,2,3 month leases are not uncommon.

Unbelievably, we turned down a 1^st hand lease that was made available to us through a friends sisters neighbour before we even set foot in Sweden (I hear everyone in Sweden gasp and call us fools), but it was simply beyond our means. To put it simply, the rental market in Sweden is horrendously hard to crack. A recent Property Federation (Fastighetsägarna) study in Stockholm study had this to say about it:

“The study compares how long it takes to find and sign a contract for a small (40 square meters) rental apartment in eight European capitals.
In six of the cities in the study – Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Brussels, Madrid and Berlin – you could find an apartment immediately. In Amsterdam it would take you one to five weeks. For Stockholm the figure was a shocking 307 weeks.”

So how is our property search going? Blocket (http://www.blocket.se) is the Trade Me or EBay of Sweden and is generally the first port of call. Apartments and houses are listed, you send a little message to the lister and if you are very lucky they will get back to you. Rumour has it that people listing adverts or available apartments get literally 100s of calls / emails within the first hour and I have heard that if you do not make contact within the first couple of minutes of an advertisement been posted, you may as well forget it. The other option is to list yourself, tag a cheesy photo and hope people will come to you first. So for approximately $120 NZ up our advertisement went:

Our small family (Tim, Tina and young daughter Ana) have recently moved to Stockholm from New Zealand.

We have transferred to Sweden with Tim’s employment and he has taken up a fixed income / permanent position as a scientist in Solna. Tina has recently finished her doctoral studies and will be working in a research position.

We are excited to be Stockholm and seek an apartment or house with a minimum of 2.5 rooms to live for at least six months somewhere in the north of Stockholm (Sollentuna, Danderyd, Täby, Uppland Vasby, Solna, Sundbyberg, Lidingö, Bromma)

We don’t mind if the apartment or house is furnished or unfurnished and are willing to pay up to 12 000 SEK a month.

We are non smokers and have no pets. We have never been in any financial difficulty and are dependable people who are quiet and clean and would look after your apartment / house as if it were our own. We own a house in New Zealand and this is currently leased out long term to tenants.

Please contact me by phone or email if you would like to hear more about us, or you have a property that you think would be suitable for us.

Thank you for your time in reading our advertisement and we hope to hear from you soon.

Tim and Tina

Our Blocket Photo - how could you resist!

We were very lucky to get an almost immediate reply from a lovely lady who worked as a chef on an oil rig (and happened to be 4 months pregnant) and her husband who was a sergeant major in the British Army currently deployed in Afghanistan. They had the perfect apartment for us and if we deposited 3 months rent into a secure bank account, the key would be delivered to us and we would have a 10 day appraisal of the property in which we could decide whether we wanted it or not. Needless to say I stopped communications at that point. We were offered a 1 month lease on the opposite side of town, a two month lease in a 1 roomed 35 m² apartment, a 3 month lease that may be extended from a lady with two daughters who was moving in with her boyfriend who also had two daughters that could extend into something more long term (if they didn’t hate each other after the first few weeks!) and in the mean time we were sending dozens and dozens of emails to 1^st and 2^nd hand lease holders of apartments being listed for 2^nd and 3^rd hand rentals and hearing back from barely any of them. And that was just on Blocket!

As the week went by we sent messages to many people advertising apartments and houses and heard back from barely none of them… apart from those mentioned before. We got quite a few messages from our personal advertisement, but nearly all had apartments or houses with very long commutes, tiny boxes where you couldn’t swing a cat, minuscule lease periods, were over priced and/or in areas that have recently made the International media for the wrong reasons – the Stockholm riots. I came home from work one day and announced that I had had enough and we were going home!

Then Thursday rolled around and I had a nice email from a lady called Eva who had an apartment in Solna, which happens to be the suburb where I am working. We exchanged a few emails and photos and then she sent me the address. The address looked strangely familiar. I copied it into google earth, dragged the little man across to look at the view of the street and laughed out loud. From behind my computer, I stretched to the right and there, outside the window, across the road, was the very same apartment block that my computer screen was showing. In the whole of Stockholm, we were going to look at an apartment directly opposite my office!

So off we went. The apartment was big – 110 m², and at the very top (maybe a bit over) our price range. Eva and Bo (the 1^st hand lease holders) were very nice and the apartment which they had lived in for the past 35 years and had been an embassy for some obscure country before that, seemed like a good catch, even though the décor was not really to our taste. Eva and Bo owned a holiday house on and island near Stockholm and were planning on buying a house in Spain and living there over the Swedish winters, yet still rented the apartment and wanted to continue to rent it (1^st hand lease holders), such is the peculiarities of the Stockholm property market. We spent an hour there before leaving, in which time the apartment was offered to us for 12 months. To get a nice apartment with a 12 month lease with no massive sum of money for a bond from people we trusted within 7 days of looking and 14 days of arriving in Stockholm is pretty unheard of. Locals would beat us on the head with the folly of what we did next. We said we would sleep on it. Later that night, Eva sent us an email dropping the rent and asking us to have it… yes this is Stockholm, but it does happen!

Move in 1^st of July, and that is our Stockholm great house hunt story.

Unlikely to be too many complaints about the commute length.