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!