January 19, 2008
Stockholm, Days 0-14
STOCKHOLM, SVERIGE – The 2008 European handball championships are on, live from Trondheim, Norway. Currently Iceland is pwning Slovakia 15-6. The Slovak goalkeeper looks like the saddest guy in the whole world—getting whipped by a team who live on a giant volcanic rock with a population of 270,000, or about the population of some neighborhoods in Manhattan. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on but this Kaupþing guy seems to be a good player… wait, that’s a sponsor.
(For pictures, see my facebook page.)
The past two weeks have been really fantastic, but for the miserable weather. It seems perfectly acceptable to start a conversation here by complaining about the lack of sunlight (the sun disappears over the horizon around 2.15pm but it’s not fully dark for another 90 minutes) or the incessant drizzle, stirred up by storms over the Norwegian Sea that the old Kjølen Mountains seem unable to stand up to. (The Kjølen are actually part of the same chain as the Appalachians, formed when the continents rammed together to form Pangea a half-billion years ago.) Global warming has hit the northern regions hardest, and typical highs here are 35 with lows of 33, a few degrees warmer than “normal.” Back in the day, all this drizzle would have been snow. There was actually snow the first day I was here, January 4, which was absolutely beautiful.
The lack of sun—the result of a conspiracy between clouds and Stockholm’s being as far north as Anchorage—gives just about the whole country a case of Seasonal Affective Disorder. The other day the lack of sun hit me and I was feeling a bit depressed, and then I got more depressed because I realized I was depressed and I had no reason to be. The next day, the sun came out and I was happy again.
Despite Scandinavia’s entirely inhospitable climes, the Swedes have been extraordinarily friendly. Therese especially has been a great friend for helping me to get settled and for her advice in coming here. In fact, Therese and I wasted no time in starting on the Zagat list of top Stockholm restaurants, finding ourselves at Berns Asian within 12 hours of arriving here. (The Zagat was a present from an especially prescient coworker in New York.) Others who have been helpful or who I’ve met here include Anu, Daniel, Eric, Malin, Kristoffer, Sanna, Björn, Sloan, Stephen, Lina, Roberto, Fausto, Vikram, Ryan, Noelle, Linda, Alper, Valentina, and others I’m forgetting.
In some ways, this city is the anti-New York that somehow preserves the things that make New York great. The pace of life is generally pretty laid back, which is most noticeable in the lack of traffic, a product of a highly successful congestion pricing scheme. Living here makes me more convinced that a steep congestion fee would be the best thing to hit New York since Bob Moses. Things here get rolling around 9.30am, and lunch is taken quite seriously—unlike New York where getting lunch is done because it’s a biological necessity, like using the john. The most common way to take lunch is to go to a restaurant, order at a counter near the entrance from a menu of four choices (each about $15), take a small plate of salad and bread, and wait at a table until the entrees are delivered a few minutes later. The kitchens work something like a cruise ship’s, churning out plates of the same four high-quality dishes. The most common lunches are pasta, beef lindström (something like meatloaf), meatballs, and salmon. It’s all quite high quality, and I don’t know how I could go back to the staple lunch in NYC: a greasy deli sandwich in a brown paper sack.
The city is generally of stunning beauty. (I’m talking about the buildings; more on other forms of beauty later.) Streets are lined with 5-story pastel-colored 150-year-old apartment blocks, like old Warsaw or Krakow if Communists had never ruled, or a bigger version of Riga. The city and its people are obsessively clean, and crime is generally low. This last point is changing – Sweden has problems similar to France’s problems with certain types of immigrants dubbed “scum” by the French President. A Swede told me that the country’s murder rate has gone from 4 a year to once a day, and 80% of the prison population is foreign-born. Therese’s place in Östermalm was recently burgled, the cat burgler making off with enough jewelry to make filing an insurance claim worthwhile.
There are no doormen here—socialist countries can’t have doormen or security guards for that matter—so PIN codes are everywhere. Just to get into the office on the weekend, I have to enter three PIN codes four times, swipe a card in two places, and hold a transmitter to a panel.
The old apartment blocks, especially in the popular Östermalm, provide a perfect setting for the sores of little restaurants, coffee shops, and boutiques that cater to Swedes’ need for coziness, caffeine, and artful food. The restaurant scene here is truly fantastic, dominated by a plethora of little 25-seat places serving mainly “crossover” cuisine, Swedish plus something else like Italian. Although it’s nearly impossible to eat dinner for $10, a $40 meal can be had with consistently higher quality than in New York (lack of tourists to fill the crummy places) and far more consistent service. Eating is a bit of an adventure in Stockholm—if you’re not cooking at home, there should be a good reason for going out.
As for other forms of beauty present here: the stereotype, like nearly any stereotype, is both grounded in a truth and greatly exaggerated. I’ve seen estimates that anywhere between 15% and 50% of Swedes are blond, and my informal survey suggests that it’s about 1/3, or about the same proportion as in my high school in Indiana. Informal research also suggests that Sweden does a big business in exporting young stewardesses to the airlines of the world.
One thing that’s not beautiful is the pricetags here. A 1.5 mile cab ride, which might cost $8 in New York, cost me kr 100, or about $16. Dinner for two at a pizza joint was $92, and two drinks at Café Opera came to $50. Alcohol is in a league all on its own. Sold exclusively by a state-owned monopoly, a bottle of Absolut weighs in at about $48, mostly due to exorbitant alcohol taxes. In a perfect illustration of the Laffer Curve, something like 40% of hard alcohol consumed in Sweden is purchased abroad, meaning the Swedish government gets $0 in tax. Designer clothing, household appliances, dry cleaning, museum admission, and the subway are all so pricey that “the New York price” has come to mean a bargain. There are two exceptions. One is in clothing. Zara and the Swedish retailer H&M both have better products and better prices. Lidl, one of the two German hard-discount chains that beat Wal-Mart at their own game, forcing Wal-Mart to sell their German subsidiary Adsa, has established a 2.5% grocery market share. Yet many Swedes remain wary of discount retail, which has one of the lowest penetrations here of anywhere in Europe. This is in stark contrast to the planet’s wealthiest large country, Norway, where discount grocers are 50% of the market.
Here is my price index for the cost of various things I buy regularly in Sweden and in New York:
Adrian’s Swedish cost-of-living index
| Good or service | Stockholm price | New York price |
| Subway, single-ride card | 40 kr or $6.30 | $2 |
| Bottle of Gillette shaving cream | 50 kr or $8 | $3.50 |
| Taxi from the airport (comparing Arlanda and JFK) | 445 kr or $70 | $60 |
| Mixed drink at a mid-tier bar (including tip) | 115 kr or $18 | $10 |
| One month of cable, the channels I actually watch (you can pick and choose in Sweden) | $45 | $60 |
| 1.5L of Coke | 15 kr or $2.36 | $1.39 |
| Washing and pressing of a shirt | 18 kr or $2.83 | $1.65 |
| Night out with a blonde | Market price | Market price |
Add all this up, and the conclusion is that Stockholm is 80% more expensive than New York for stuff that I actually buy.
Some friends here recently concluded that Sweden is the most American country in Continental Europe, and I have a hard time naming any country that’s more American. The spoken English here is perfect (with American accents), the food is meat and potatoes, the environmental consciousness is somewhat low, and there’s an order and cleanliness that Americans would find agreeable.
And it’s Saturday night at 11pm, so it’s time to think about going out.
Posted by adrianjo at January 19, 2008 04:53 PM