I realized late last week that it's been just over six months since my move to Sweden last New Year's Eve and I haven't written yet about the general Swedish Experience. I guess I'm a bit past due, so here goes:

Getting there is half the fun

In my past travels to northern Europe, I've always flown Icelandair. Their ticket prices tend to be the cheapest for flights between Minneapolis and Scandinavia, plus it's a fairly quick and direct two-hop trip, taking one plane to Keflavik, and one to your final destination, with about an hour and a half layover in between, which is generally just enough time to get through Schengen passport control and to the gate with about 5-10 minutes to spare before boarding starts.

Unfortunately, I had not been previously aware that Icelandair temporarily shuts down service to Minneapolis each winter. They still did end up being the cheapest way to get here (by a large margin), but, instead of the normal 7pm flight straight to Keflavik, it involved a 7am flight to Boston and a ten-hour layover there before continuing on to Iceland. Long layovers suck, of course, and it was made even worse by needing to be up by 4:30am rather than my more customary 10am, but I survived, despite weather issues, as told in a pair of posts to my (now mostly defunct) livejournal, one while at Logan airport and the other after my arrival (minus one suitcase, which eventually turned up three days later).

It had been a full 24 hours from my 5am arrival at the Minneapolis airport until my noon arrival in Copenhagen (Sweden/Denmark are 7 hours ahead of Minneapolis), plus I hadn't slept at all the night before leaving, so I rested a bit before going out onto Klosterängshöjden to watch the city of Lund celebrate my arrival (oh, and I guess there was something about 2008 turning into 2009, too).

My early days here were taken up with the administrative issues of getting a personnummer, setting up a Swedish number on my Skype account, opening a bank account, renewing my residence permit, and so forth, along with catching up on sleep, but I ultimately got settled in fairly quickly.

Kloster-wha?

Since then, Annika and I have been living in a small apartment in a student housing complex in the northeastern outskirts of Lund. Our front door looks out onto Klosterängshöjden ("Monastery Meadow Hill"), an artificial hill constructed of waste dirt from construction sites. This gives it an amazing variety of flowers and grasses growing on it and about a fifth of the area currently appearing as bare dirt on google's photo (as I post this) is now green as the hill and the plants on it have grown since it was taken.

One sign of just how different things are here than in Minneapolis is that, from the top of Klosterängshöjden, I can look around and, on a clear day, see to Malmö and Copenhagen and beyond, and about as far in all other directions, and there's not a single smokestack to be seen. Instead, there are no less than a dozen wind turbines (of which I only ever saw one in Minnesota, just north of Elk River) and a pair of nuclear reactors (which are not currently in operation, but are likely to be brought back online in the relatively near future, if I understand correctly).

Social insecurity

It took me a good two or three months before I was really comfortable going out on my own, partly because I didn't know my way around the city and partly because I don't know much Swedish. I'm not really being forced to learn the language, since everyone here speaks pretty good English. I've only met three exceptions so far: Two of the endocrinology nurses at the local hospital¹ and Annika's father. Most of the programming on TV is in English as well (with Swedish subtitles), so it seems that my Swedish improves primarily just from our visits with Annika's parents. I am now able to go to the store and get through similar basic transactions without falling back on English (usually), but that's about my limit. In normal conversation, I catch a few words here and there, but rarely enough to be able to follow what's being talked about.

Aside from language issues, I've also had a couple cases of people making unexpected assumptions about me, such as one of Annika's teachers thinking I was her father and a web designer confusing my Minnesota accent for a Swedish one.

Rain and wind and weather

The weather here can be generally summed up as "mild, windy, and damp", thanks in large part to having the Öresund coast within about 20 miles of us. The winter weather features daily high temperatures consistently within a few degrees of freezing - more often above freezing than below - with lots of fog and occasional extreme winds. Summer weather is about the same, with the temperatures pushed up to generally hang around 20-25C (65-75F), frequent rain, and occasional extreme winds. Thunderstorms seem to be pretty rare here, but we've gotten serious hail three times in the last month and a half even without them.

Workin' in the code mine

Work has been my major issue since moving. When I went freelance in late 2004, I intentionally set things up to be as location-independent as I knew how. Unfortunately, I didn't know at the time about the complications introduced by conducting business across national borders. I eventually discovered in mid-2007 that, even though my residence permit allowed me to work in Sweden, my company was not allowed to operate here without registering a branch office in the country, which involved a large amount of expensive paperwork, maintaining a minimum share capital requirement (despite being a privately-held S-corp), and industrial-grade bookkeeping and auditing requirements.

To get around this, I got myself involved with a Swedish company which was basically a consultant-owned consulting firm, made up of people in similar positions who all operated more-or-less independently and just used the company to handle the bookkeeping and administrative requirements for them. On my arrival, though, it turned out to be a bit more restrictive than I'd anticipated. Where I've always worked small off-site jobs with individuals or small organizations, this company's processes were all geared towards massive contracts, usually on-site, with governments and large corporations. To fit their market, they required a much higher level of bureaucracy and general overhead than is appropriate for most of the work I've been doing (you don't spend a month hashing out a contract with your lawyers before starting a two-hour job).

I wasted about four months trying to work out new light-weight processes with them which would give me the agility I'm accustomed to. Once I thought we'd established sufficient understanding, I wrote up a proposal for them under the assurance that it shouldn't take more than a couple days for their lawyers to review it and either approve it or identify issues that I'd need to resolve first. Two weeks after sending it to them, I had made multiple requests for status updates or comments on it, but they didn't even acknowledge those requests, much less give me an appraisal of my proposal, so I sent them a resignation (without ever having managed to do any work or perform any billing through them) and filed for a Swedish sole proprietorship.

That has ultimately worked out for me, although even that proved a tough road, as Skatteverket (the tax bureau) didn't want to initially accept my application without extensive additional details of what kind of business I intended to engage in, then I discovered that there were specific requirements for what has to be included on all invoices, then a question came up about what the law requires for the invoice numbers²... About a week ago, though, I was finally able to send out my first invoice after moving. It only took six months...

Murphy being the bastard he is, though, this came only after I got involved with FishTwits, a startup founded by a couple students here at Lund University who have just completed their Masters of Entrepreneurship degrees. They've brought me on as CTO and third partner, so I'm busy writing code for the real FishTwits site, due to launch at or around the start of August, rather than doing freelance work anyhow.

Once FishTwits is online, I'm not really sure whether it's likely to continue keeping me busy full-time or if I'll be going back to more of a focus on random freelance work and, honestly, I'm not sure which I'd prefer. Freelancing always brings in more variety, but the FishTwits stuff would leave me in the position of getting to choose the technologies to pursue and generally be self-directed. It'll be interesting to see what happens either way, though, plus there's the third possibility that the FishTwits guys could go on to set up additional sites/businesses instead of sticking with just the one.

Doctor, doctor, give me the news

Finally, my experiences with Swedish health care. The quality is very good, costs are low³, and the experience is utterly different...

In the US, I did most of my waiting at the doctor's office itself. Calling to make an appointment generally got me someone on the phone within five minutes and the appointment was often set up within a week, maybe two, of my call. On the designated day, I'd go to the clinic, check in, spend half an hour in the waiting room, get called in by a nurse who would check my blood pressure and so forth, wait another 45 minutes in the exam room, and finally get a brief visit with the actual doctor.

In Sweden, the waiting is almost entirely done on the phone when making first contact. When I set up my first doctor appointment here, I ended up spending the better part of an hour waiting to talk to someone on the phone, being told every minute or so "Din placering i kö är nummer... sju."⁴ The size of the line tended to stay consistent for 10 minutes or so, then drop by two or three in rapid succession; I'm not sure why the operators were that synchronized with each other. Once I got to talk to someone, it went rather quickly and an appointment was set up for about three weeks later.

On the day of my appointment, I got there right on time, checked in, and had a seat in the waiting room. About five minutes later, the doctor himself came out to get me and then it was into the exam room and away we went with no further waiting. The only nurses I talked to were a lab tech and the clinic's diabetes nurse (to get a glucose meter), both of whom were after I was done with the doctor. Because the clinic was only accustomed to dealing with type 2 diabetes, they referred me to the endocrinology department at the university hospital and, about two weeks later, I got a letter from the hospital telling me they'd already set an appointment up, so I didn't even need to sit on the phone again unless I wanted to reschedule.

All in all, I have to say that I like what I've seen of Swedish health care much better than the US version. It would be nice to be able to get in to see a doctor a little more quickly, but I'm sure there are processes in place for making that happen if there's a reason that it's necessary to do so.

And this has turned out to be way longer than I intended. Time to proofread and post, then go write some database upgrade code...

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¹ Universitetssjukhuset, or "the university's sick-house". Just about everything seems to be a "house" in Swedish. "Brandhuset" (firehouse), "polishuset" (police house), even "parkeringshuset" (parking-house, often abbreviated to "P-hus").

² We haven't been able to find a definitive answer for whether or not they're required to be strictly sequential with no gaps. The question came up because my preference has been to construct invoice numbers containing a customer number and the month issued, so 00709070 would not be immediately followed by 00709071 if the next invoice was issued to a different customer or in a different month. But I gave in and just switched to plain sequential simply for the sake of being able to issue invoices, despite my conviction that invoice numbers should not give customers any information at all regarding whether I've issued invoices to anyone else or not.

³ There's a flat fee of about $20 for any doctor visits, most prescriptions are reasonably priced, diabetes-related prescriptions are completely free, and there are annual caps on out-of-pocket costs at (IIRC) about $250 for doctor visits and $450 for prescriptions.

⁴ "Your place in the queue is number... seven." I partly remember the wording because I was so happy to understand an entire sentence of Swedish "in the wild", but mostly because my brain started wandering and decided at one point that the recording was instead saying "din placering i ko" - "your place in the cow".