What at Week!

This last week has been a bit crazy. We moved apartments (for the third time this year) in Stockholm – and luckily our new one is for a year, complete with Kasper our new pet cat, while his owner works in the Congo.

Note my wreath plant – a featured item in every Swedish home – my orchid (another pre-requisite) lives in the kitchen.

This week has also included two trips to the Migrationsverket (The Swedish Migration Board) to have my biometrics taken for my new residency permit. You normally only have to go once – however on my first trip I forgot to bring my new address with me, and as luck would have it, my phone was sitting patiently at home on recharge, so I wasn’t able to call Geoff to ask him. So back I went the next day.

The Migrationsverket was actually very simple and quick to navigate. It opens at 9 am, so I arrive at 8.45 or so, joined the end of the queue (there were about 30 people before me) and at 9 am we were allowed to take a ticket (ticket machines are a popular feature just about everywhere in Sweden) and only 15 minutes later I was called up to have my biometrics taken – a finger print, my photo and height, all over in 10 minutes or so.

Now on Friday, only 4 days later, I have my new residency permit! That said, Geoff is still waiting for his and he had his biometrics taken 2 weeks ago, so I suppose it depends on who is processing it. Now we are one step closer to the elusive personnummer! One we have that, the world of Sweden will open before us! Well… at least we will be able to order things online from IKEA.

So a great start to a weekend that involves a trip to a Christmas market at a castle and a friend’s housewarming party.

Autumn in Stockholm

I have always loved autumn, but particularly so in Stockholm. It is so beautiful here at the moment, and the change is much more dramatic than I have seen before. Here I am surrounded by beautiful golden, orange and red trees, and piles of leaves everywhere, and … mini decorative pumpkins!

This was taken the other weekend in Skansen, the open air museum in Stockholm.

My local tram stop looks like this right now. It makes me happy every day as I walk past it:

One thing I particularly love are the mini decorative pumpkins you can buy everywhere:

I have seen these mini pumpkins in flower arrangements, and in autumn some people buy them to decorate their houses… it is pretty cute really.

Here is one in my teacup for scale:

Swedes love to make the inside of their houses cosy and beautiful, probably something to do with the very long and dark winters, most of which are spent indoors. They are the kings of indoor plants (especially orchids), flower arrangements, lamps, fairy lights and plenty of candles – everywhere. When I go out for dinner at night here, most of the windows I walk past have candles lit, it seems a very Scandinavian thing. I did once read that the year Denmark was rated as the most happy nation in the world, they also coincidentally were found to be the highest consumers of candles per person in the world. A coincidence? I think not.

Now perhaps I should go and light some candles …

Shopping – Swedish style

I can’t drive, and I love to walk, so back in Melbourne I always walked to the supermarket quite a few times a week. The same in Vienna and in London. In Sweden, shopping is helped by my cute red bike.

Shopping by bike

When I was a student in Uppsala we lived up a hill in a forest about 15 minutes bike ride into town along a beautiful river and through a park. I loved riding my bike into town each day or to class – even in the snow when my eyelashes would freeze (a very strange feeling…). Uppsala seemed designed to ride your bike everywhere, unlike Melbourne where I would worry about being run over by a truck as there are not so many bike lanes.

Now that I live in Stockholm I don’t get to ride my bike as often as I did in Uppsala, but on days like today when I have to do a huge amount of shopping for a dinner party, and the Autumn sun is shining, I feel very lucky to have it.