I am so incredibly hungover today.
In the last week, I made ambitious social plans. On Thursday, I went out with a group of other expats that I met with a meet up group. A couple of girls from Africa, who are here with their families of diplomats, and an English guy studying in Uppsala. It's been incredibly entertaining to hang out with them. They are all highly educated, smart and funny people from very diverse backgrounds and it's been so refreshing to go out with people I can joke with.
I woke up a bit hungover on Friday. Of course, we went out with Fredrik's friends to a bar. AG it's called, it's a Spanish inspired restaurant with delicious meat. We had hamburgers and drunk quite a lot. It was a laid back event and I had quite a few glasses of wine.
On Saturday, I was feeling tired. My liver was showing signs that something was wrong. We went to a double birthday party with Fredrik's high school friends. They were incredibly sweet and I had a laugh. But I think I went a little bit crazy on the booze. I woke up this Sunday with my head requesting a quick and painless death.
The thing is, it's much more acceptable and common to get hammered here, and it can be quite hard to not try to keep up with everyone. In all three occasions, the drinks just kept appearing in my hand all night long from I don't know where. In Sweden, people will drink hard. If you keep up, they will compliment you on your skills, haha.
After 24 years of living a comfortable life in Brazil, I moved to Sweden with my boyfriend. This blog is about my personal experiences in the new country.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
I am legal - about the bureaucracy of getting registered in Sweden
I was born and raised in Brazil. My whole family is Italian and for that reason I am legally Italian too. That means I have an Italian citizenship and, with it, a passport. I can be treated like an EU citizen whenever convenient or a Brazilian if that suits me best. I have the papers to get by as either.
When I moved to Sweden, I relied on my EU citizenship to allow me to stay here. Getting all my documents in order has taken a little under two months. Well, technically: I haven't received my ID card in the mail yet, but I already have the number and can use it if necessary. If you don't wanna know the bureaucratic road there, please skip the next paragraph, the conversation continues after that :)
I first had to submit an application to move to Sweden as an EU citizen planning to move in with their Swedish relation (boyfriend/girlfriend). It required mostly detailed information about my situation here as well as Fredrik's, and stating that our relationship was real. They didn't require any proof of it, as some people on the internet have described experiencing. After a couple of months, they sent in my approval in the mail. (As I said in a previous post, it never really arrived because my name wasn't listed by the building's door. I did end up emailing my case officer and she was generous enough to email my approval so I could continue the process) With the approval, I booked an appointment at the Migration Board (Migrationsverket) and had my picture and signature taken. When your permission of residence arrives in the mail after a few days, you can go to the Tax Agency (Skatteverket) to get registered and get the much anticipated Personal Identification Number (personnummer!).
In my case, after having gotten my permission, when I went to the Tax Authority to get my ID, the lady taking care of the papers informed me that I couldn't register as someone moving to Sweden and get an ID number simply because I didn't have a job or a document from Italy stating I was covered by their public health system. Although I am a citizen, I never lived in Italy and never registered in their social system so that problem was a little bit more complicated to solve: either I had to go to Italy, get registered as a permanent resident there and then request to have my address moved to Sweden, or get a job.
Going to Italy was an option, yet an extremely bureaucratic one: I would have to take a plane there, stay with any of my relatives, register as living there and wait for my Italian ID to arrive. Then I would have to ask for permission to move to Sweden. That could take months to happen, and sounded rather unpractical.
Finding a job seemed like something that is more in my control, so I started looking right away. The few days after the Tax Authority lady told me I needed a job, I sent out a lot of resumes and have been navigating the dreaded waters of the job searching world for quite some time now.
Misteriously enough, the Tax Authority lady was wrong. My 'mother-in-law' and I were a little disappointed at the fact that despite me having official permission to live in Sweden I couldn't register as someone living here. So we went back to the Tax office the next week to ask about that crazy rule. We were helped by a much nicer lady that basically told me that as long as I had received my permission, I should be okay. My Identification Number arrived on the mail that same afternoon.
The next day I just went back to the Tax office thing and had my picture and measurements taken for my official ID card, and now I'm 100% legal and registered here. I still have to wait for my notice to arrive with the mail so I can pick up my card, but that is just more bureaucracy to have physical proof of who I am.
The good side of having all that done is that I have registered for the Swedish for Immigrants class, or SFI, which is a government-funded class to help immigrants learn Swedish and become part of the society.
I am happy that didn't take too long. It was a little bit stressful, but I can't complain that it has taken a long time. Also, I compare to the experience one of my best friends has had getting registered and legal in Brazil and I must say this was not bad at all. The only problem is that no one actually had clear information about what needed to be done, and the websites were confusing and unhelpful. Maybe leaving this registered might be helpful by letting others know how it went? :)
When I moved to Sweden, I relied on my EU citizenship to allow me to stay here. Getting all my documents in order has taken a little under two months. Well, technically: I haven't received my ID card in the mail yet, but I already have the number and can use it if necessary. If you don't wanna know the bureaucratic road there, please skip the next paragraph, the conversation continues after that :)
I first had to submit an application to move to Sweden as an EU citizen planning to move in with their Swedish relation (boyfriend/girlfriend). It required mostly detailed information about my situation here as well as Fredrik's, and stating that our relationship was real. They didn't require any proof of it, as some people on the internet have described experiencing. After a couple of months, they sent in my approval in the mail. (As I said in a previous post, it never really arrived because my name wasn't listed by the building's door. I did end up emailing my case officer and she was generous enough to email my approval so I could continue the process) With the approval, I booked an appointment at the Migration Board (Migrationsverket) and had my picture and signature taken. When your permission of residence arrives in the mail after a few days, you can go to the Tax Agency (Skatteverket) to get registered and get the much anticipated Personal Identification Number (personnummer!).
In my case, after having gotten my permission, when I went to the Tax Authority to get my ID, the lady taking care of the papers informed me that I couldn't register as someone moving to Sweden and get an ID number simply because I didn't have a job or a document from Italy stating I was covered by their public health system. Although I am a citizen, I never lived in Italy and never registered in their social system so that problem was a little bit more complicated to solve: either I had to go to Italy, get registered as a permanent resident there and then request to have my address moved to Sweden, or get a job.
Going to Italy was an option, yet an extremely bureaucratic one: I would have to take a plane there, stay with any of my relatives, register as living there and wait for my Italian ID to arrive. Then I would have to ask for permission to move to Sweden. That could take months to happen, and sounded rather unpractical.
Finding a job seemed like something that is more in my control, so I started looking right away. The few days after the Tax Authority lady told me I needed a job, I sent out a lot of resumes and have been navigating the dreaded waters of the job searching world for quite some time now.
Misteriously enough, the Tax Authority lady was wrong. My 'mother-in-law' and I were a little disappointed at the fact that despite me having official permission to live in Sweden I couldn't register as someone living here. So we went back to the Tax office the next week to ask about that crazy rule. We were helped by a much nicer lady that basically told me that as long as I had received my permission, I should be okay. My Identification Number arrived on the mail that same afternoon.
The next day I just went back to the Tax office thing and had my picture and measurements taken for my official ID card, and now I'm 100% legal and registered here. I still have to wait for my notice to arrive with the mail so I can pick up my card, but that is just more bureaucracy to have physical proof of who I am.
The good side of having all that done is that I have registered for the Swedish for Immigrants class, or SFI, which is a government-funded class to help immigrants learn Swedish and become part of the society.
I am happy that didn't take too long. It was a little bit stressful, but I can't complain that it has taken a long time. Also, I compare to the experience one of my best friends has had getting registered and legal in Brazil and I must say this was not bad at all. The only problem is that no one actually had clear information about what needed to be done, and the websites were confusing and unhelpful. Maybe leaving this registered might be helpful by letting others know how it went? :)
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Of furniture, job searching and other things
The last few weeks were of learning.
In my very first week here I worked as a pole cleaner in the "Battle of the Pole" or the North European Pole Dancing Championship. It was interesting to see where Sweden's at in terms of pole dancing. It seems like the athletes here are good but not numerous and apparently they need to rely on the neighboring countries, including Russia, to fill all the spots for competitors in these festivals to justify the trouble of having them in the first place. The competition ended up including about 15 Russian competitors and only about maybe 6 Swedish, and as expected the level of the Russians was incredibly high. For the Russians, we needed to climb the pole with a cloth wet with vodka and a dry one and clean the pole with vodka and dry it as we slid down. For the other nationalities we could use self-drying solution which made it faster and easier for us... To be honest, I don't really think cleaning with vodka makes any difference but our job was to keep the competitors satisfied and feeling like they had a fair chance at winning. In my opinion, a very rude Russian lady should have won: she was unbearably rude to me and the other cleaners, but her performance was perfect. A Swedish resident won, which was interesting. He wasn't bad at all, just the only man in the competition and one of the only athletes representing Sweden. I met a few friendly girls interested in Pole Dancing and now have the scars to prove I climbed 120m of pole in one night.
Most of my time here has been spent fretting over my Residence Permit. We applied for it last November, so it was supposed to arrive in January. We waited until February 12th with no answer from them until Fredrik decided to email the case officer taking care of my approval. Basically, since my name wasn't on the door here, the mailman could never deliver the letter and I never got the approval that was granted almost two weeks ago. Sweden is a beautiful and organized country where all things basically work, but numbering houses and apartments is a technology that I realize they haven't really mastered here. While in Brazil, country of chaos, the number of the house reflects 3 pieces of information* here they are numbered in order, without any reference to distance, and the apartments in the apartment buildings are just... not numbered. So when you send a letter to someone, because they are organized people that take care of business, the name of the person will probably be listed by the entrance and that's how the letter gets delivered. In my case, because we were not so organized to get my name by the door right away, my letter got lost in the system because there was no apartment with my last name included in the over 20 apartments in my building. Brilliant. Nothing that simply numbering the flats in the buildings wouldn't solve.
Other than that, the month has been filled with IKEA trips, and Fredrik bought and assembled a lot of new furniture to fit my things. I really like the solutions IKEA finds for problems I didn't even know I had, but I'll be happy if we don't have to step in one in a while (even though the meatballs there are delish and super cheap!). I am really satisfied with the result and it's noticeable how much of an effort he is making to help me adapt and stay here. For that, I guess I just need to find a job. I started sending my CV around last week but I haven't gotten to the stage of interviews yet. Let's see how that goes. In the meantime, we play the waiting game for my Residence Permit: I took the picture and got my fingerprints registered for it today.
Yey: I'm almost a regular resident!!
* in case you didn't know, the buildings in Brazil don't follow a strict numerical sequence because they represent the distance in meters between the buiding and the start of the street (it's actually more complex than that, it has to do with the distance between the water pumps in the house and streets and etc, but it's roughly the distance between the house and the start of the street) so house number 252 is always located before 300 and after 288 for example, in proper numerical order but maybe not following a complete sequence (2, 4, 6, ... 200, 202) and is located aprox. 252m away from the start of the street, on the even numbered side of it. Smart and useful because you always know how much you have to walk to get to a certain street based on the distance between the house you are at and the one you want to get to!
In my very first week here I worked as a pole cleaner in the "Battle of the Pole" or the North European Pole Dancing Championship. It was interesting to see where Sweden's at in terms of pole dancing. It seems like the athletes here are good but not numerous and apparently they need to rely on the neighboring countries, including Russia, to fill all the spots for competitors in these festivals to justify the trouble of having them in the first place. The competition ended up including about 15 Russian competitors and only about maybe 6 Swedish, and as expected the level of the Russians was incredibly high. For the Russians, we needed to climb the pole with a cloth wet with vodka and a dry one and clean the pole with vodka and dry it as we slid down. For the other nationalities we could use self-drying solution which made it faster and easier for us... To be honest, I don't really think cleaning with vodka makes any difference but our job was to keep the competitors satisfied and feeling like they had a fair chance at winning. In my opinion, a very rude Russian lady should have won: she was unbearably rude to me and the other cleaners, but her performance was perfect. A Swedish resident won, which was interesting. He wasn't bad at all, just the only man in the competition and one of the only athletes representing Sweden. I met a few friendly girls interested in Pole Dancing and now have the scars to prove I climbed 120m of pole in one night.
Most of my time here has been spent fretting over my Residence Permit. We applied for it last November, so it was supposed to arrive in January. We waited until February 12th with no answer from them until Fredrik decided to email the case officer taking care of my approval. Basically, since my name wasn't on the door here, the mailman could never deliver the letter and I never got the approval that was granted almost two weeks ago. Sweden is a beautiful and organized country where all things basically work, but numbering houses and apartments is a technology that I realize they haven't really mastered here. While in Brazil, country of chaos, the number of the house reflects 3 pieces of information* here they are numbered in order, without any reference to distance, and the apartments in the apartment buildings are just... not numbered. So when you send a letter to someone, because they are organized people that take care of business, the name of the person will probably be listed by the entrance and that's how the letter gets delivered. In my case, because we were not so organized to get my name by the door right away, my letter got lost in the system because there was no apartment with my last name included in the over 20 apartments in my building. Brilliant. Nothing that simply numbering the flats in the buildings wouldn't solve.
Other than that, the month has been filled with IKEA trips, and Fredrik bought and assembled a lot of new furniture to fit my things. I really like the solutions IKEA finds for problems I didn't even know I had, but I'll be happy if we don't have to step in one in a while (even though the meatballs there are delish and super cheap!). I am really satisfied with the result and it's noticeable how much of an effort he is making to help me adapt and stay here. For that, I guess I just need to find a job. I started sending my CV around last week but I haven't gotten to the stage of interviews yet. Let's see how that goes. In the meantime, we play the waiting game for my Residence Permit: I took the picture and got my fingerprints registered for it today.
Yey: I'm almost a regular resident!!
* in case you didn't know, the buildings in Brazil don't follow a strict numerical sequence because they represent the distance in meters between the buiding and the start of the street (it's actually more complex than that, it has to do with the distance between the water pumps in the house and streets and etc, but it's roughly the distance between the house and the start of the street) so house number 252 is always located before 300 and after 288 for example, in proper numerical order but maybe not following a complete sequence (2, 4, 6, ... 200, 202) and is located aprox. 252m away from the start of the street, on the even numbered side of it. Smart and useful because you always know how much you have to walk to get to a certain street based on the distance between the house you are at and the one you want to get to!
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
The last few days
So the last few days have been of some accomplishments. I am understanding little conversations more and more, but still very reluctantto actually speak in Swedish. It's the first time I've been somewhere where I don't really speak the language (and I live here!!) and I get embarrassed by my inability.
A few days ago I was a little tired of staying home, it was the first day I didn't go out and I felt a little trapped. So I decided to go out to the supermarket and buy snacks. As I was paying, a man with a kid heard me talk in English to the employee of the store, and walked towards me. He started asking questions, in a strong Irish accent and telling me he's been here four years, has a kid (absurdly cute kid by the way) and could offer me a job?? Weird things. He told me to go meet him at the pizzaria sometime this week and we would talk about it. I'm not really going, but I think it's funny how there's random people starting conversations with me just because they mistake me for american (?) or canadian (??). I think maybe I havent't been here long enough to start missing people from "back home" but I see how this could be a thing in the future.
So in case you were wondering if Sweden is the most civillized country in the world, the answer is: probably. This is a hard thing to measure, but I'm a little impressed every day at how the little details keep things rolling nice and smooth around here, and how much information flow there is between all the little parts of everyday life to make things quicker. This deserves a separate post, but I'll try to keep it in a few paragraphs:
The Swedish Public Transportation System
It is impressive.
I haven't been to Germany in over seven years, or anywhere else maybe a little organized other than London, so I can't compare it to the rest of the very organized parts of Europe. Comparing it to Brazil would just be unfair. So I'm going to just write my ode to the public transportation system here.
First, there is an app for that. I have a little app that tells me how to get from here to anywhere, and it's in real time. As in, it tells me all my options of routes, and how much time I have left before the buses pass (and YES THEY ARE ON TIME). Also, it shows little maps of how to walk from my current location to the nearest bus stop. And it's fast.
Second, you can pay the bus with your phone. Not like, you beep your phone on a machine or something. You just text a number, and you get a text reply back. You show the text you received to the bus driver and you are good to go. Then when the phone bill arrives, you pay for everything together.
Third, it's a tiny country and A LOT of the buses are those big articulate ones. I keep thinking of Sao Paulo and its millions and millions of people squeezed in small warm dirty buses and subways constantly. And it makes me sad. Not only are the buses big here even in the suburbs, but they are also nice and cozy (yes, I am thinking of you, 40-degree-Celsius bus rides in Sao Paulo!!). I bet the subway can be quite crowded during rush hour, but I haven't experienced anything like that for now.
To be honest, my only question is why does the subway stop and wait at the end of each line? I live nearest to one of the final stops for the metro, and every time I walk in, the train is stopped for quite a few minutes at the station. I suppose here they focus on having it run on time rather than run the whole track as many times as possible, as it probably happens in SP.
As for the city, it is beautiful. You should come and visit Stockholm.
A few days ago I was a little tired of staying home, it was the first day I didn't go out and I felt a little trapped. So I decided to go out to the supermarket and buy snacks. As I was paying, a man with a kid heard me talk in English to the employee of the store, and walked towards me. He started asking questions, in a strong Irish accent and telling me he's been here four years, has a kid (absurdly cute kid by the way) and could offer me a job?? Weird things. He told me to go meet him at the pizzaria sometime this week and we would talk about it. I'm not really going, but I think it's funny how there's random people starting conversations with me just because they mistake me for american (?) or canadian (??). I think maybe I havent't been here long enough to start missing people from "back home" but I see how this could be a thing in the future.
So in case you were wondering if Sweden is the most civillized country in the world, the answer is: probably. This is a hard thing to measure, but I'm a little impressed every day at how the little details keep things rolling nice and smooth around here, and how much information flow there is between all the little parts of everyday life to make things quicker. This deserves a separate post, but I'll try to keep it in a few paragraphs:
The Swedish Public Transportation System
It is impressive.
I haven't been to Germany in over seven years, or anywhere else maybe a little organized other than London, so I can't compare it to the rest of the very organized parts of Europe. Comparing it to Brazil would just be unfair. So I'm going to just write my ode to the public transportation system here.
First, there is an app for that. I have a little app that tells me how to get from here to anywhere, and it's in real time. As in, it tells me all my options of routes, and how much time I have left before the buses pass (and YES THEY ARE ON TIME). Also, it shows little maps of how to walk from my current location to the nearest bus stop. And it's fast.
Second, you can pay the bus with your phone. Not like, you beep your phone on a machine or something. You just text a number, and you get a text reply back. You show the text you received to the bus driver and you are good to go. Then when the phone bill arrives, you pay for everything together.
Third, it's a tiny country and A LOT of the buses are those big articulate ones. I keep thinking of Sao Paulo and its millions and millions of people squeezed in small warm dirty buses and subways constantly. And it makes me sad. Not only are the buses big here even in the suburbs, but they are also nice and cozy (yes, I am thinking of you, 40-degree-Celsius bus rides in Sao Paulo!!). I bet the subway can be quite crowded during rush hour, but I haven't experienced anything like that for now.
To be honest, my only question is why does the subway stop and wait at the end of each line? I live nearest to one of the final stops for the metro, and every time I walk in, the train is stopped for quite a few minutes at the station. I suppose here they focus on having it run on time rather than run the whole track as many times as possible, as it probably happens in SP.
As for the city, it is beautiful. You should come and visit Stockholm.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
l'aventure commence
This is my third day in Sweden.
Fredrik is currently at work, and I need to get myself busy. I had a Swedish morning: Swedish breakfast, drove in the snow to take him to work, drove back. Now the Brazilian part of the morning: parked car, left for apartment. I noticed halfway there that I was freezing because I had no gloves on, had to turn back to get them from the car. Left for the apartment again, and noticed I had no scarf on. My goal so far is to make the walk to the apartment without freezing. I smile to myself every time I realize I'm not at all prepared for this, but I still am able to enjoy myself.
Now I have to wait for the Ikea people (so Swedish!) to deliver our new desks. Then we are going to need new closets, new shelves. All new things. I feel horrible for my insignificant monetary contribution the redecorating enterprise, but what is left to me but to be grateful that someone is able and willing to afford the complete redecoration of my new little home? :)
For the first time in a year I feel a little demotivated to work out. Could be because I don't know the gym and it is much smaller than the one I'm used to, or maybe because I get SO LAZY when I think about the language thing. Bad, bad Bianca. I scheduled a session with one of the trainers on Saturday. I might go and run a bit today, if time allows it (ha!). The point is, I have to learn the overall direction of the gym and just force myself to go. Yesterday night, there were several guys working out there, no women. Not sure if that is a bad thing yet.
For those wondering how does it feel to know I'm going to live in this cold weather from now on: weird. Really, really weird. On the way back from dropping Fredrik off at work, it was starting to get lighter outside (about 8am) I actually witnessed for the first time in my life the moment when street lights get turned off. In Brazil the days are so regular that you have to really be willing to party to get to see it, around 5 maybe? 6 in the darkest day of winter.
I have a few small goals to root for in the mean time: get pole dancing classes going, work out better, get a Swedish ID and, with that, start Swedish lessons. That makes me feel lazy haha. But I'm curious to learn it and also very sure my poor brain will start craving stimulation pretty soon.
But for now, I wait for my desk :)
Fredrik is currently at work, and I need to get myself busy. I had a Swedish morning: Swedish breakfast, drove in the snow to take him to work, drove back. Now the Brazilian part of the morning: parked car, left for apartment. I noticed halfway there that I was freezing because I had no gloves on, had to turn back to get them from the car. Left for the apartment again, and noticed I had no scarf on. My goal so far is to make the walk to the apartment without freezing. I smile to myself every time I realize I'm not at all prepared for this, but I still am able to enjoy myself.
Now I have to wait for the Ikea people (so Swedish!) to deliver our new desks. Then we are going to need new closets, new shelves. All new things. I feel horrible for my insignificant monetary contribution the redecorating enterprise, but what is left to me but to be grateful that someone is able and willing to afford the complete redecoration of my new little home? :)
For the first time in a year I feel a little demotivated to work out. Could be because I don't know the gym and it is much smaller than the one I'm used to, or maybe because I get SO LAZY when I think about the language thing. Bad, bad Bianca. I scheduled a session with one of the trainers on Saturday. I might go and run a bit today, if time allows it (ha!). The point is, I have to learn the overall direction of the gym and just force myself to go. Yesterday night, there were several guys working out there, no women. Not sure if that is a bad thing yet.
For those wondering how does it feel to know I'm going to live in this cold weather from now on: weird. Really, really weird. On the way back from dropping Fredrik off at work, it was starting to get lighter outside (about 8am) I actually witnessed for the first time in my life the moment when street lights get turned off. In Brazil the days are so regular that you have to really be willing to party to get to see it, around 5 maybe? 6 in the darkest day of winter.
I have a few small goals to root for in the mean time: get pole dancing classes going, work out better, get a Swedish ID and, with that, start Swedish lessons. That makes me feel lazy haha. But I'm curious to learn it and also very sure my poor brain will start craving stimulation pretty soon.
But for now, I wait for my desk :)
Monday, January 13, 2014
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