Wednesday, January 14 | 2026
Wednesday, January 14 | 2026
If you need a bank account before you’ve got a personal number, take your passport with you and firmly suggest they use your passport number as a temporary identifier. It worked for me anyway.
Also, find a student pub! It’s the most friendly place I’ve come across and great to meet locals. Drinking there is good, working there is even better for meeting people.
Swedes are not very considerate (not saying this as a woman, but as a person!) – not holding the door for the person behind you, not saying thank you, stopping in a doorway to check the phone without realizing/caring that your blocking the door for others, not queuing if there is no numbered ticket system (yes, very British I know!).
It was also hard to adjust to the “everything is ok” culture. At work people are happy to moan over coffee about the various problems that exist, but in a meeting when the opportunity is presented to comment on things that aren’t working, no one wants to comment.
Finally, Swedes are generally good at English. So getting started with speaking Swedish can be frustrating when people switch to English. This might also be why they are not very flexible when listening to newbies trying to speak Swedish. Unless your pronunciation is exactly correct they really don’t understand what youre trying to say.
The light in the summer and the work-life balance. Bureaucracy might exist, but for the most part its quite transparent and efficient. Most things work smoothly. Moving to Sweden from the UK has come with a lot of adjustments but overall, things have been ok.
Once you get to know them, they are true friends, it just takes a while to get there☺ And I love their dry sense of humour and that they appreciate and respect nature.
They are pretty quiet – until they have had a few beers!
Lagom. (A hard to translate word that means something along the lines of “just right”).
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