Category Archives: TrulySwedish

A broken nose and 350 SEK poorer

Remember how I was raving about innebandy?  I still love the sport, and I’m finally getting a bit better at it.  What’s so difficult about running around a gym with a plastic club and a wiffle ball, right?

The last time I played – about a week ago – I broke my nose.  Or rather, my friend Josh did. I ran up behind him to get the ball, and he swung around and his elbow met my nose.  It wasn’t his fault – he didn’t know I was there.  But “crunch,” “pop,” and *boom* I was down on the floor.  It was a pretty solid hit.  As I lay on the ground, I felt like the insides of my nose were running out.

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A weekend in Falkenberg

I recently watched a film called Sunes Sommar.  It’s a film from 1993 about a Swedish family going on their summer vacation.  Sune is the middle boy in this family, probably about 12 years old.  Most of the film is spent in a typical Swedish summer town filled with RVs and campers.  The family sets up their “husvagn” (towable caravan) in the campsite.  The rest of the movie is about what the family does while they’re on their vacation: play tennis, lie on the beach, play card games with the family, etc.  The dad is a goof so there’s a lot of slapstick humor about the stupid things he gets himself into.  They also manage to squeeze some romance into the film, focusing on Sune’s love interest.

After watching this film, I understood immediately that the movie depicted a truly Swedish summer.  Spending time with family and friends out in nature doing, well, nothing, really.  Yes, some families might travel around the world or go to Spain, Greece, or Italy for a week or two, but when they’re not doing that, they spend their summers pretty much like what I saw in the movie. Continue reading

Swedish summers

I’m on my summer vacation and will be for the next few weeks.  Wow, that still feels strange saying it… but I have to say, I love it.

Swedes go through a miserable winter every year and are thereby rewarded by an amazing summer.  This summer has been pretty “lagom” – not too hot and not too cold, a little rain and a little cloudy.  It’s already starting to get darker every day – after midsummer, we start losing sunlight and it is remarkable how quickly you notice.  The sun is still up by 4 and doesn’t set until 9:30 but in just a few more days, we’ll have lost 25 minutes of sunlight.  And the days will only get shorter… Continue reading

Business meetings

Okay, I am a slacker. I have been meaning to write this article for a long time now.  But I had a birthday come and go, friends come and go, and a life to live (now that the summer is here). So, apologies, but I’ve had other things to think about… anyway, here we go.

When I first moved here, I was given a 3 hour introductory course on Swedish business culture. One of the handouts we received was very helpful – it was a list of different countries and a comparison of how people behave in business meetings.

I found out during that meeting that a common stereotype (but also often true) is that Swedish business meetings often result in more meetings because no clear decision is reached, and that most of the time is spent discussing the issues to ensure that everyone’s opinion is heard.

The meetings I am in are often the opposite of this, but I think that’s just due to the nature of my industry and the type of colleagues I work with.  However, I was recently in a meeting when I saw this in action and was blown away by how uncertain I felt after I left the meeting.  I was more confused leaving the meeting than before the meeting!

It had to do with a large and lengthy presentation that we were preparing for a client.  The slide deck was made of about 10 different sections, and each person was responsible for at least one of those sections.  One of those sections was tricky, so during the meeting the person responsible for writing the section asked our boss for some guidance.  The conversation went something like this (I’ve kept it very very generic):

Person 1: This section is very difficult because if the client thinks this way, then we have to present it in this manner.  However, if the client decides to switch their assumptions model and go the other direction, we have to do it this way. Our teams around the world need guidance now, but we won’t know what the client wants to do until another few months.  How should we present this in the presentation?

Boss: Hmm, yes.  That is a tricky situation.

<silence>

<silence>

Boss: Okay, so let’s move on to the schedule of speakers.

Wait, what?  The first person was obviously looking for some pointers, but the person expected to have the answer didn’t really give any guidance but instead just moved onto the next question.  If it were me, I would have tried to explore some ideas with the team and come up with a mutually-agreeable solution, or at least a suitable compromise that everyone could live with.  But this was so indecisive that I was sure it would result in another meeting.

Have you been in a Swedish business meeting where you left the meeting feeling more confused than when you started?

Trash, Recycling, and Maintaining Order

Swedes are very proud of the fact that they are one of the most environmentally-friendly countries in the world.  Generally, I agree – and this is coming from someone who has lived in the California Bay Area.  Bay Area residents have been recycling for decades, and those of us who live in the San Francisco and Berkeley areas know that the local City Councils are extremely supportive of recycling and other environmental issues.  Did you know, for example, that grocery stores in San Francisco do not allow the use of plastic bags?  They only give out paper bags or sell the reusable grocery bags.  The picture featured on this blog are of two containers that are provided to every family: a recycling container and a compost container.

In Sweden, we have recycling centers, everyone promotes lower electrical use, taxi companies have a large fleet of environmentally-friendly cars, we get to use a fantastic public transportation system (at least in Stockholm), and most important of all, everyone understands the importance of doing their part for the environment.

But this comes at a price. Continue reading

Yesterday was my name day!

My name is Kenneth.  And yesterday was my name day!

Kenneth is a pretty common Western name, and many people around the world have this name.  It’s not as popular as Bill or David or John, but it’s not exactly unfamiliar either.  For example, one of the characters in Can’t Buy Me Love was named Kenneth.  But apparently, Kenneth is a pretty common Swedish name for males, too.  Usually reserved for a slightly older generation, it falls in the ranks along names like Mats, Lars, Peter, etc.

For those of you dear readers who have traveled the world, you know that most tourist cities sell little license plates/license plate key chains with names on them.  Each country has its own collection of names, so if you’re in the US, you’ll get the common names like Katie, Kim, Kelly, Kevin, and Kyle.  I haven’t looked at the tourist stores in Gamla Stan recently, but I would assume the license plate keychains in Sweden would have names like Kalle (Karl), Kenneth, Kajsa, and Kia.

But the Swedes are ingenious, and they took it one step further.  They actually created the concept of a name day.  Yep, they assigned a name to every day of the year – 365 reasons to celebrate – and March 22, 2011 was my personal name day.  (Disclaimer: it’s actually for Kennet — no “h” — but a variant of the spelling is with the “h”.)

Yesterday, I got an email from someone I didn’t know named Kenneth Eriksson.  He works at one of my clients, and pulled up all of the Kenneths in his email system and sent them an email saying:

Grattis kollega, du är en av cirka 110 Kenneth som arbetar här!

Som medlem i Svenska Kennethklubben ber jag att få gratulera på namnsdagen.  🙂

www.kenneth.se

(Translation: Congratulations, colleague, you are one of approx 110 Kenneths who works here!  As a member in the Swedish Kenneth club, I want to congratulate you on your name day!)

I got the email since I have an account to their intranet.  I looked at the website and it’s amazing.  It’s a real club, with membership dues and activities.  The main club is in Sundsvall, Sweden.  There’s even a national Kenneth song!

I thought this was ingenious! So I went out yesterday and I celebrated my name day at Vapiano with some friends.  Well, not really, we went out for dinner “just because,” but I was feeling in a celebratory mood just the same.

When is your name day? Do you know someone for each day of the year?

Do Americans Dream of Swedish Sheep?

I recently posted an entry about how Swedes speak amazing English. I thought I’d post a follow-up on learning Swedish and how it’s impacted me.

First of all, I’ve been here 3,5 years now. I took lessons sporadically for about 2 of those years – my work paid for a private tutor who’d come to the office and teach me for an hour and a half roughly every week. Of course, the nature of my work meant that sometimes I’d have unavoidable client meetings or I’d be travelling somewhere, so I’d have to schedule for when it was convenient.

I am finally at a level where I can understand most conversations if I’m paying attention – at least the context of the conversation. I can speak reasonably well too (at least I think so) and I’m doing my best to write it also. Continue reading

Battle of the Sexes

Gender Equality?A Swedish girl I dated very briefly was quite into the feminist movement.  Everything was to be perfectly equal between the sexes.  There should be no chauvinism, and men should treat women as complete equals, and should not treat them as a weaker gender.  If you took a girl out to dinner one night, then she should reciprocate by buying the movie tickets.  And if the movie tickets were worth less than the dinner, well, she should buy dessert too.

Excuse me, what?

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Hot lunches and food stamps

Today we had a visitor from our Amsterdam office.  He is planning to transfer to the Stockholm office in August 2011 so he wanted to come and check out the city, the office, his future colleagues, etc.

Kenneth in Amsterdam 2008

Kenneth in Amsterdam

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), Mother Nature decided to unleash a snowstorm on Stockholm today.

We took him to lunch and he asked a few questions about how the work culture was like in Stockholm.  It’s always nice to get new people in the office because it reminds me how I’ve become Truly Swedish – things that foreigners find interesting or curious don’t even faze me anymore.  The topic at lunch?  Hot lunches and rikskuponger, which I fondly call “food stamps.”

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