Sweden

Incremental Farmer: The New Farm is on the Rise

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Rise and shine – I am sure if one day I fulfill this destiny of becoming lord and mistress to a bunch of chickens, I may yet have a rooster crowing at some insane hour, telling me “rise and shine” even before it actually is time for that. My colleague, determined as she is to spread the gospel of chicken ownership, has talked up the different personalities of her chickens and, as if to assuage my fears about their noise potential, claimed that they are largely silent. She went on to attribute this to the breeds of chicken one gets – and opened the chicken bible I have already written so much about to show me pages and pages of glossy images of all the different breeds of chicken one can get. I really had no idea.

But then, who really does have any idea? People are fairly far removed from livestock, animals and food production. I recall having a field trip or two to a working farm but don’t remember anything useful (and I grew up in a place where most farms were flower-bulb farms anyway, so chicken breeds as a topic did not come up). All I can say is that as a consumer or as a baker or eater, I can see, taste, feel the difference in quality when comparing a real, whole, organic, fresh product and something from the store. I have never had a worse egg in my life than the ones that are sold in Sweden. I don’t even know how they can be called eggs. The yolks are slightly yellower than a pale vanilla custard, and the egg, when cooked, tastes like nothing. Very few things in Norway, in my humble opinion, are markedly better than something in Sweden. But eggs are high atop that short list.

These egg experiences do indeed make me question whether it is time to get back to nature and start doing something – some little thing – to at least get eggs that pass muster for me.

I would not be alone in this. I have read a number of articles lately citing the trend toward taking up farming… whether it is because people are inclined to “drop out and become farmers” (despite having no agricultural or rural experience that might lead them to think it was a wise choice), because people want to become more connected to the food they eat, slow down and do a small bit to fight against the overlord factory farm and get into “niche farming” – or just because people really have reached a saturation point (a combination of joblessness and dissatisfaction with the corporate world, whether or not they are actively part of it, and the real desire to escape the maze or jump off the hamster wheel that the world and life often feels like). Farming is difficult and hard work – but it’s undoubtedly rewarding work – very little can be as satisfying as enjoying the fruits of one’s labors. (No, I don’t intend to romanticize it, but sometimes doing something manual and inherently “good” – not at all ambiguous – sounds heavenly.)

And I do live in a place that at least allows for ideal chicken-raising capabilities and environment.

Some farming trends are about getting back to the earth, to something simpler, but even the enrollment in American high school club, Future Farmers of America (FFA), is on the rise. “No Plows, Cows, Sows: Not Your (Grand)Father’s Youth Farm Group” describes a club that is less about plows, cows and sows and more about food and agricultural science with a healthy dose of “law, public policy, entrepreneurship and bookkeeping”. The vast majority of those joining FFA are in urban areas and are not planning to go into large-scale production farming. But the movement reflects that people are growing more interested in learning about their food and where it comes from – at the very least (organic and “ethical” farming are also issues driving participation in FFA).

I will continue to contemplate my chicken situation – and read this book to find out how one cares for chickens. Then I will decide. Out here in the wilderness where I live, the chances of foxes getting into the henhouse are pretty good, and we actually love foxes so much, we might even be inclined not to stop them. That does not really bode well for future chicken residents.

The Allure of Regional Pride: Värmland, Sweden

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The Värmland region of Sweden is a place that seems to fill its residents with a considerable amount of regional pride. People who don’t live in or aren’t from Värmland often echo the feeling that Värmland is the most amazing place, that it would be “like a dream” to live there, and that it embodies what many consider to be “the real Sweden”. Sort of smack in the middle of everything, Värmland is mostly rural, its largest city – the virtually unheard-of (outside Sweden) Karlstad (except for IKEA furniture named after the city) is uniquely placed at a near-equidistance from the Nordic holy trinity of Stockholm, Oslo and Gothenburg. Värmland is not known for city life, of course. It’s the landsbygd – truly rural and in many ways untouched. For those who love nature, Värmland is it.

And it seems to me (in my very few years as a Värmlander myself) that Värmlanders (current and former) bond with each other – in a similar way to how people who come from a small town and meet somewhere else, far away, do. Even though Värmland is a big place and coming from the eastern edge is not totally the same as coming from the far west on the border with Norway (life there, which is where I call home, has been affected by an influx of both Norwegians and their massive border shopping centers) people connected to Värmland do seem to consider it home forever – long after they leave to put down permanent roots elsewhere. There is a sense of pride and identification with the place that people from Värmland adopt – and transplants, like me, fiercely take on. I feel protective and proud about Värmland for some really inexplicable reason. Maybe just because living here has given me the kind of inner peace that I did not really imagine ever having. I never felt at home anywhere, but Värmland is home. As exotic and wonderful as my “native stomping grounds” – Hawaii – is, Värmland is home. I spent most of my formative years in the lovely and diverse Seattle and surrounding environs. But Värmland is home. Yes, Sweden is home, but more than that, Värmland is home. When you meet Swedes, they may tell you they came from “some small town but now live in Stockholm” or will introduce themselves using the city they currently live in. But when you meet a Värmlander, it’s almost a guarantee that s/he will self-identify as a Värmlander (if their värmlandska language does not give them away! Even those who have long left Värmland still consider themselves proud Värmlanders – you can take the Värmlander out of Värmland but not Värmland from the Värmlander). The regional identity assumes almost equal importance to the national identity, and I have not noticed this anywhere in Sweden as I have among Värmlanders.

Heading into the long Easter weekend, I drove home and felt a growing sense of relief, contentment and pride once I crossed into Värmland. Happy.

Tax

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People in the US and a lot of the Americans I know talk a lot about how things are so easy and user friendly in the US. And you know what? They aren’t. Stuff like filing taxes can be a bureaucratic, paperwork nightmare. And it just isn’t here (or in Norway). It’s just about the easiest thing in the world. And most of the things Americans are told are backwards, socialistic, inefficient and on and on in nameless other places just aren’t. It’s just a brainwash.

Snus in Scandinavia

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I sat down in a meeting room at my office, waiting for the new employee who just joined my team to come in for an introductory one-on-one. She came in, said hello and set down her mobile phone and the telltale round plastic container that can only be one thing – snus.

Snus, for the uninitiated is, smokeless tobacco. Unlike loose chewing tobacco, snus is contained in wee little packets that look like very small teabags.

snus packets

snus packets

The stuff is illegal throughout the European Union – but it’s still legal and highly popular in Norway and Sweden. In Sweden, it’s quite serious business. Back in 1995 when Sweden was poised to join the European Union, the country received an exemption to the smokeless-tobacco-product ban, with some saying that Sweden would have reconsidered EU membership had the exemption not been granted. (The same 2008 WSJ article cites a Swedish member of the European Parliament, Christofer Fjellner, who is selling snus illegally from his office in Brussels as a kind of act of civil disobedience. Fjellner is, according to a 2012 article from The Independent, still at it.)

A similar state of affairs (that is, treating snus as life or death) exists in Norway (Norway is a snus-loving, non-EU country). Several years ago, a former friend in Norway had gone on holiday to Italy with her boyfriend, and the boyfriend was mostly excited about the prospect because it meant he could stock up on snus at the airport duty-free. When the couple had their luggage, passports and tickets stolen, his snus was also stolen. As my friend was phoning the embassy and trying to get things under control, her boyfriend was calling his friends, lamenting the loss of his case of snus. That should tell you about how seriously these people take snus. You’d think the theft of snus was the end of the world.

Perhaps for those legality reasons and the fact that snus is not present anywhere else, I never had a clue how unrelenting and ubiquitous this stuff was until I moved to Scandinavia. Men particularly never go anywhere without it, and switch out the little tobacco packets right in the middle of important meetings, discarding the used packets on the edges of plates or cups or scrap paper. It’s still vulgar and crass to me – but I’ve more or less gotten used to it among men. But women – even though I know they also use snus – and that there are brands and flavors specifically made for and marketed to women – still surprise me as avid users. And even those who use are not generally so dependent that they turn up to meetings with the container of snus in tow, as my new colleague did. (Another colleague saw the snus container our new colleague carries as cause to laugh – she loves it when people do things that are mildly inappropriate.)

It may be an exaggeration to say that I “got used to it”. It is just something I accept, as I dodge all the used little packets strewn across city sidewalks in Gothenburg… and try my best to overlook the used, dried-up packets people leave on the edge of dirty dishes. I am still struggling to find out how it is so widespread that it is acceptable to use all the time. Somehow I feel as though tobacco products should be reserved for breaks – go outside or at least don’t be digging around your gums in the middle of business meetings. Couldn’t it be a bit more… subtle and discreet?

In truth, I should not complain. I would prefer the snus habit to smoking – particularly as statistics on the matter show that “the risk of dying from a tobacco-related illness, such as lung or oral cancer is substantially lower in Sweden than in any other European country” – which is thought to be because of the dominance of snus over smoking.

Tobacco use in Sweden*

Tobacco use in Sweden*

I think the disposal aspect of both smoking and snus packets is most disturbing – I don’t want cigarette butts OR snus pouches littering the sidewalks. I want litter to be disposed of properly no matter what it is.

The world is not anyone’s garbage can or ashtray.

*http://www.eusnus.eu/the-eu-ban/

A World Beyond Telecommute: The Digital Wanderer

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Location-free living and working. That’s the dream for a lot of people. For a long time I thought my dream was just to be able to work mostly from home – and that works for me since I live somewhere that’s like a dream in terms of just feeling contentment oozing from every pore almost every minute of every day. Idyllic countryside with a few modern comforts in the peaceful respite of Sweden. But the urge to pack up and spend a few months in Uruguay or spending a year in Australia … or Turkey… or wherever… that’s tempting to lifelong nomads like myself. I feel content and rooted, but the wanderlust never quite leaves.

I have written a lot and frequently about employers being flexible enough to allow employees to work from home. By extension, what’s the difference if you are “at home” or on the road – staying for long stretches in different places? Granted, it can be difficult if you have a regular, full-time job and need to liaise with people on a daily basis (and thus must have a guaranteed stable internet connection). But more and more, this is becoming a moot point.

I am not alone in my feeling that this lifestyle is possible. There are in fact a lot of people out there doing it – living it – and writing about it, giving the rest of us inspiration and/or envy on the way. But they are living proof that this lifestyle is possible and sustainable. The infrastructure to support this lifestyle is a bit ad hoc still but as more people choose to live with this flexibility, the supporting structures making it possible will improve.

Some online resources for budding/curious potential digital nomads:

Digital Nomads

Digital Nomad Podcast

Digital Nomad Life

And my favorite: Never Ending Voyage

Let go of the fear – just go! Loads of barriers prevent us from choosing to break free of the 9-to-5 life, but there is another way.

“Geographer” – Sydney Wayser

Commute Hell – Missing Snow Days

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I live three hours from where I work. On a good day. Today was not a good day, and I knew it when I set out. I cleared my car of the piles of snow about an hour before I decided to leave (at the ungodly hour of 1:00 a.m.). It was already covered again, as was the path to the car I had shoveled twice already during the weekend. As I have said before, winter came very late to Sweden, but it came with a vengeance. Other people are very happy with this virtual avalanche; I hate it. I especially hate driving in it – which is why I set out so ridiculously early. I knew that the normal roads I drive would be covered in thick snow and that I would want to take the motorway, which takes me an hour west of where I really want to go. The trip took just over four hours, but it was mostly clear on the E18 and E6 roadways, which is more than I can say for the other roads I drove on.

There was one point that the road near my house was just bad enough that I considered turning around and going home. I held out hope amidst the fear that was driving my driving, so to speak, that the bigger roads would be clearer (they were) and that the route to Gothenburg would not be quite so treacherous.

Snow showers continue to be the forecast for the rest of the week. If ever I wished I lived somewhere else, this drive was it.

Bright side – I finished putting together my anti-Valentine soundtrack mix, so I had something to listen to and assess all the way here.

Overcrowded: Housing Shortages as Hindrance to Economic Productivity

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Outside of Sweden, people won’t likely know that the Swedish real estate market is a nightmare. I read the other day that right now, properties in Sweden’s cities, both the rental and sale market are at an all-time low, making scarcity of living space one of the biggest hindrances to economic productivity and growth for Sweden’s cities. This “bubble” has been written about for years – and the problem has just gotten worse. Some blame rent control (disincentivizing renting out properties) but the problem goes well beyond that. It is not really an open-market system, such as you find in the US or even Norway.

This would not be of the greatest concern to me, really, because I have a house in rural Sweden within commuting distance of Oslo, Norway, where I used to work.(Yeah, you know, I’m a real country girl.)

Trouble is, last year, I started a job in Gothenburg, Sweden. I knew that it would be difficult to find a flat for rent or purchase, but I did not anticipate the near-impossibility of it. The rental market is flat out a joke – there is nothing available. People luck into available flats or get on an eternally long waiting list or buy rental contracts on the black market. The purchase market, at least when I started planning the move, had a reasonable number of properties on the market – somewhat reasonably priced in terms of asking price, but most would end with a final price well above asking. I went through the viewing, bidding and disappointment process more times than I can count – and it finally became too exhausting. I was living in temporary housing all year (short-term apartments, hotels, etc.). At some point, I gave up.

I did not intend for this to become another article advocating for remote work, but in a roundabout way, that’s what it amounts to. The stress and strain of spending outsized amounts of time searching for a place to live that never materializes coupled with the stress and strain of living in temporary housing and learning a new job on top of it really got to me until finally when this year began, I knew I could not continue and had to renegotiate my work conditions.

I am not alone – but at least in my case, when the housing crunch became too untenable, I could make a play for remote work arrangements. Also, I already live in Sweden, so it is not as though I live halfway around the world (although that should not matter). But the idea that potential employees’ mobility is hampered, and that companies may not be able to hire the talent they want simply because they won’t be able to find a place to live is a serious impediment to economic development and growth and an inconvenience (or worse) to employers and employees.

Yet another compelling reason to look at virtual employment options.

Made in Sweden – It might surprise you

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Most people have clear ideas of things that are Swedish – Volvo, IKEA, Abba. It’s also easy, being in Sweden, to imagine that everyone knows what’s Swedish and what isn’t. But I realized that there are a few things that are very much Swedish that a lot of people (outside Sweden and Scandinavia) don’t realize. Even some really major companies.

H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) – Late last year when I was in the US, a giant new H&M store was opening in a shopping mall near where my parents live. I had to explain to virtually everyone that it’s a Swedish giant. No one I talked to seemed to have a clue. One person thought it was Dutch; another thought, improbably, Korean. But no one guessed Swedish.

Spotify – Spotify has spread all over the world to become almost like the “Google” of streaming music, i.e. synonymous with the idea of streaming music the way Google is with search. But people outside Scandinavia seem blissfully unaware of the Swedish roots of the near-ubiquitous Spotify service.

Skype – Skype revolutionized instant communications. But again, an everyday convenience and household name technology is not recognized outside northern Europe as a Swedish invention.

Tetra Pak –You probably use Tetra Pak or some facsimile of it every day without knowing it – but probably did not know that the paper-based packaging, developed in Sweden, was a revolutionary change in packaging.

Electrolux – the world’s second-largest appliance company. You know, all the white goods!

And a little older …

Celsius scale – Swede Anders Celsius invented the 100-point thermometer scale used globally.

Winter has come to Sweden – Temperature drop

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Winter usually arrives much earlier than this. But no, this winter, everything waited for January. Last week it was +7C and raining.

This morning when I drove in the warmest temperature I saw was -8C (about 17.6F) and the coldest was -17C (1.4F), which was at my house.

Winter took its time to show up with a vengeance.

Unexpected turns – So far from “home”

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I am asked all the time why I live so far from “home” – but people don’t understand when they ask that “home” is a relative term. Where is home? I feel at home in Sweden now. Iceland was always home in my heart. But time does change things.

Sooner or later everyone asks how I would end up in the woods of rural Värmland, western Sweden – most of the people native to this region think I am weird and/or exotic… the neighbors apparently could never work up the nerve to talk to me so they just talked to each other about me, making up stories. They were convinced I was German because of my name (and there are a lot of Germans and Dutch people around here in the summertime). Eventually one neighbor came by and told me all the “theories” the neighbors passed around. I can see how they thought I was quite an anomaly since everyone here seems to have been born within a 30 kilometer radius of this place. And my moving here a handful of years ago was the most dramatic thing to happen in ten or more years.

I had a little fling with a local guy – never met people more vanilla in their tastes and experiences – and so in awe of the smallest things that they perceived to be outside the norm. The local yokel tells me, years after the fact, that he was also in awe and still sometimes looks back on these little dalliances together as though they were some kind of dream. It was so “Hollywood” for some glamorous (HAHAH) American to turn up and actually express some kind of interest in him. And to his delight – not even interest in him for something long and drawn out but rather just in a few light-hearted conversations and a bit of casual sex here and there. I didn’t need or want something else, nice as he was. Sometimes he agonizes that maybe he used me, even though it has always been clear that I took and got exactly what I wanted from knowing him. It was mutually beneficial, and apparently this is outside the norm as well. It seems people in this neck of the woods jump into committed relationships with everyone they sleep with. That would explain the inexperience and the awe.

My ending up here is no mystery. I am a practical and pragmatic person. I lived and worked in Oslo. I disliked it. I started looking for places to live outside Oslo, and the area I covered in scoping out suburban and rural areas within a reasonable commuting distance from Oslo grew wider and wider until I might as well have been in Sweden. Sweden offers an abundance of benefits – much lower cost of living in every way. Being part of the EU, it also is not subject to all the taxes/customs when buying stuff online from other European countries (one of the banes of my existence in Iceland and Norway). Also, as a citizenship collector, I could get Swedish citizenship (since Sweden allows for multiple citizenships) but Norway is one of those countries that makes you choose either/or – Norway or “nothing” (whatever you have already). I found a liveable house and land not far from the Norwegian border. I worked at home most of the time. It was the best of all worlds. Many years into what started as an experiment in cross-border living and working, despite not working in Oslo anymore (for the time being), I have not once regretted this choice. If anything, my connection to this place has become so much a part of me that, despite my wanderlust and nomadic tendencies, I always long to go home. And when I think “go home”, I think of this little house in the Swedish woods.

Part of the torment of the nomadic mind is that it can occasionally fool me and make me start to wonder whether I should try out some other place. For a while I thought maybe I really wanted a balance of country and city life. So I took a job in Gothenburg (which is not a huge city but is a big enough city to qualify in my experience) and originally planned to live in both places (coming home on weekends). Things have not worked out quite as planned, so I have spent much of the last year living in hotels and succumbing in every unfortunate way to a life of commuting misery. At this point it is not just the hotel life and lack of “settling in” for me – I realized that I just don’t want to be there. At all. No matter where I lived in the city, I just want to be at home.

Who could ever have imagined that this concept of home – this longing for home – would mean a life in Sweden? As I discussed and wrote about recently, I used to laugh at people who opted to be Scandinavian studies majors at university – what on earth could they possibly do with that? Turns out, seeing as how I have spent almost my entire adult life living and working in Scandinavia or for Scandinavian companies, I might have benefited from studying Nordic languages rather than Russian and Serbian-Croatian (as I did). Sure, I can read Anna Karenina in the original now – but speaking everyday Swedish is a silly challenge. I had a couple of pen pals from Sweden in my high school years – seeing written Swedish and hearing all these place names, it felt even more far off than a place like Vladivostok or Khabarovsk, which were like second nature in my academic brain. When a college classmate (which almost makes it sound like we were friends – she was hostile toward me from the beginning for absolutely no reason) told me she had been an exchange student in Sweden during her high school years, it struck me as perplexing – why Sweden? (Of course I remember that everyone I know who became an exchange student had the “dream location” for their studies abroad – and all of them ended up somewhere else. The girl who dreamt of fluency in French was sent to Adelaide, Australia; the guy who wanted to advance his Japanese studies was sent to Germany….)

It’s funny now when I talk with Swedish people about locations in Sweden, it dawns on me now that I know exactly what they are talking about and where they are talking about. First and foremost because I live in just such a remote place and thus have become intimately familiar with a part of Sweden that a lot of Swedes don’t even know particularly well. Secondly I suppose this is just because I am so portable – carrying bits of my life to and fro, driving all over Sweden, discovering all its towns and hidden places. It is like my experience of Canada – most Canadians have not even seen as much of Canada as I have. Sweden, despite being so much smaller than Canada, seems to suffer the same fate. Swedes seem to know where they came from and then seem to know the place where their summerhouses are. I suppose that is one way to know one is at home.

And the living is easy …

On a similar note, you can always tell how “Swedified” a foreigner is by what prepositions they use when they speak English. When a native English speaker repeats, “He is on the table” instead of “at the table”, you know they have been here too long and their native language has been infected (and inflected) by their adopted language. I’ve been saved from this – slightly – by the fact that I wasn’t a Scandinavian studies major and spent so much time reading stuff like Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (Тихий Дон) or Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina (Na Drini ćuprija/На Дрини ћуприја).