(picture shows moi standing outside our apt, which is on the 2nd storey for singaporeans... and 1st floor for all those who don't count the ground floor like swedes :))
swedish living

a few ppl have asked me what it's like to live in sweden etc so this blog is abt that - how a muslim singaporean girl crossed the oceans and continents to live with her husband in a temperate climate.

uppsala is a university town, so it does have more shops and is somewhat larger than the other towns, but it's still smallish to someone who has lived in a city-state all her life.

so far i have seen only bits of stockholm, a little of dalarna, and most of uppsala - not the county, that's far too large - but the town. so what is most striking abt these places?

the relative cleanliness of the streets. even the dirtiest public toilets, which incidentally, cost abt SD$1 (5 kr... the rate is abt 4.7kr to to the sg dollar) per entry, are clean compared to sg standards - mostly because the no one squats over the seats of the squatting toilets. on occasion there were toilets with an incredibly overfamiliar pong - but, surprise surprise, they tended to be labelled with the ubiqtuous 'male' sign. well well...

the other thing i noticed is how quiet ppl generally are. perhaps it's the lesser numbers of ppl around , or perhaps asians generally talk more or louder. ppl talk, of course, but hardly anyone raises their voices even in jest, as is the norm in sg.

after the initial 'ooh, aah' of the many old buildings and cobblestone streets that are still standing (it's not uncommon to hear of residential apartments built in the 1930s' or even the century before), you realise it's not exactly a tourist attraction. most towns, because they were built at roughly the same era, have exactly the same type of buildings and roads, which lowered the novelty value quite a bit, imo. some buildings in ludvika were almost exactly like those i encountered in uppsala - they were 3 storey residential buildings that looked like they were built by the same ppl... same look, from the outside, even the same cementy texture despite the different colour of paint.

the swedish dating system - what h says is the international std - is written in the (YY)YYMMDD format... and being a new immigrant, i had lots of practice with using that format since there were so many forms to fill in - registering/ confirming my presence in sweden, establishing my name - i'll tell you abt that in a mo - swedish id card, setting up a bank acct, applying for social insurance - the fun never ends.

up til the 1800s, patronymic names (for eg, Per Jr, son of Per Sr, might be Per Persson in swedish. Eva, daughter of Per, would be Eva Persdotter... get it?) were common. for many muslims like meself, and those with similar names, most bloody angmohs (and, i lament, even some singaporeans who lack patronymic names) never get this right, so i usually get called by my father's name. anyway, the first time i registered my name, predictably this problem occured. the system just can't accept that some ppl are surnameless. to cut a long story short, they changed my name from

Bte Abdul Wahab, Marlina to
Abdul Wahab Abdul Wahab, Marlina (yes they did. this way i could retain my dad's name as a middle name) to
Abdul Wahab Liss, Marlina

and that, unfortunately, is now the name that i have to scrawl out on all future forms, as if my name wasnt long enough. i did ask the counter person registering my name if they could accept Abdul Wahabsdotter as a surname (which, incidentally, would be acceptable in the previous 2 centuries), but noo... so my id and visa cards have that mouthful written out for all the world to see...

half the morning's gone now and i have to start making lunch - an experiment with chicken heh... next time i write i'll tell you abt my visit to ludvika, h's hometown. ludvika is a small town in the dalarna county, and dalarna is where all those cute little red wooden horsies originate from. ~ m!