A mixed bag

How’s it going so far for us in 2022? Not great, not terrible.

We’re only second on the list for the furnished apartment from Juliet. Why? We don’t have a personnummer. That’s a downer. Chances for getting it are pretty slim now.

Our hotel didn’t burn down. Yay! Looks like somebody forgot his/her food on the stove and fell asleep. We were not so much asleep as a result of the smoke alarm going off at 7am on January 1st. Then again, we were wearing jackets outside the hotel building waiting for the firemen to arrive, while some poor guy was only covered in the blanket he slept in. What a start for 2022!

All wait and no play make Jack a dull boy. The really frustrating thing is, that currently, most of the time, we can just wait. Waiting for things to happen. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Johannes to brush his teeth so we can finally go out to the Vattenhallen science museum. After walking through the rain that had kicked-in right after Christmas and never really ceasing ever since, we got our tickets and met a family at the counter, all wearing masks. Of course they were german. Nobody else was wearing them. Anyway, the museum was great for Johannes, time to do something different, make experiments, try things out, meet other kids. It was fun and a lot more interactive than in most museums I’ve been to. Too bad we could not go through the all the shit, sorry, I meant digestion system as the tickets were limited due to corona and they had run out of them.

Camilla from Lundavälkomsten wrote us an email on January 3rd about Johannes’ integration at school. Great! She wants to see a lease/house contract (horror!) or the copy of the application for residency at Skatteverket, which luckily, we can provide. Phew!

One the same day, Katharina had to visit to the Skatteverket office to register at the Arbetsförmedlingen as unemployed. She has to do that due to German bureaucracy by the Agentur für Arbeit within six days of her arrival, nevertheless she did not get her PD U2 (Portable Document Unemployment 2) form from the agency in Germany yet. We queued outside in the cold for (I think) one hour. Of course, it’s the first working day of the year, everybody wants to go there. The first service clerk listened calmly as Katharina explained what she needed from him, getting more nervous with every minute. Finally, he was very sorry that he could not help us with such a case, as he only has been working at Lunds kommun for four months. But he told us to be patient as he would get a different clerk. Peter was an older man who had probably been at the service office for ages. Still, when Katharina explained again from the very beginning, he had no idea what to do. But he tried hard, very hard! He phoned the guys at the Arbetsförmedlingen and they later called back on her phone while I got our laptop out to send the required documents as photographs to the secret email address that Peter got hold of. All in all, this took about two hours. Again, we are not used to people actually wanting to help us from our experiences in Germany. Gladly, Sweden seems to be very different.

Peter also told us that our application for residency had not even been picked up by somebody yet. We should come back Friday next week.

Exhausted, we went to a Crêperie to get some pancakes for Johannes being a good boy waiting so patiently (and learning Swedish during that time). However, the place was full 🙁 But when we wanted to leave, a woman called us that she would leave in ten minutes. We’re used to waiting by now, and we got our pancakes after all (but man, things are really expensive here). Yay!

The next day Katharina had a telephone interview by somebody at the Arbetsförmedlingen. Turns out, the job centres are just as incompetent as in Germany. This was the first bad experience. But the woman on the line might have just been stuck in a typical checklist bullshit job. I was surprised that the battery didn’t fail after more than one hour of talking. Most of the necessary information was already printed on the photo document she sent, but still she had to spell out every single word again. “Will you apply for jobs in other EU countries?” Come again? Why did we come to Sweden? “We tried to send you an email, but it bounced.” — Well, you could have hit the reply button of the email she just sent the day before. “Even if you already got an employment contract, you will have to fulfil the ‘at least four job applications per month’ rule and documentation”. WHAT? “Otherwise we might have to tell this to the german agency and they may penalise your payments.” Thank’s for nothing!

Oh, and happy birthday Heike, happy birthday Christian! Was nice talking to you.

On January 4th, we sent a message to a house owner called ‘Hui’ for a slightly expensive house rental almost in the outskirts of Lund. A big house, “brand new” (2015), unfurnished, big enough to move our stuff from Munich there. Surprisingly, we got a reply pretty quickly and had a video chat with the owner’s family. They were quite nice and friendly and ignored Johannes sabotaging the call with all his might. The rent got even higher when they told us that the figure did not include internet, heating/electricity etc. Twice the rent of our flat in Munich! They were seeking for a new tenant that would be reliable in paying the rent. We could not view the house though, but an identical one from a friend. Actually, this should raise a red flag. But we were becoming slightly desperate and also had given up on the furnished flat from Juliet. We wanted to move into some place quickly and need to take some risks, too (like the old tenant not moving out in time, leaving stuff there or the house requiring renovation badly). Stay tuned! To be continued!

In the meanwhile Camilla wanted to know from us, which school Johannes would be going to. Also, the assessment and integration period would only apply for community schools, not private ones. Did I mention that Hui’s house is also very close (<500m) to a private Montessori school? What should I tell her? We don’t know yet? Anyway, the assessment will take place on January 17th and 25th.

As a really nice highlight we had dinner with Phil. Who is Phil? Phil is a german PostDoc I contacted via a telegram channel who also moved to Lund in summer last year. He suggested that we would cook a meal together and invited us to his flat without even knowing us. We had a great evening and it felt good to talk to somebody else in person again who shared some of our views. Thank you, Phil.

Today, Hui contacted us that they were sick and could not take the viewing appointment for tomorrow, so that’s rescheduled for Monday.

Camilla told us that there would be no pupil’s taxi if the school we picked was not the closest to our home (we first chose a top rated school in Söder Sandby, 8km from Hui’s house (in case we would not get a spot in the Montessori school and had to queue for it) instead of the public Viking’s School in a different hood where half of the pupils fail the tests. Camilla however told us, that all schools in Lund are great and all of them have great teachers and that we should not worry about the statistics. We will take your word for granted. We sent a mail to the Montessori school nevertheless.

One should always end on something good and the best thing for the whole week was to see Lilli, Basti and their son Tim from Munich again. They had spent their winter vacations in Sweden, drove all the way up north to the Ice Hotel with their car and on the way back, visited us in Lund in a café. We were all very happy to see each other again. Especially Johannes was so glad he could play and run around with a familiar boy from home. I wished they could have stayed longer, but they had to leave to drive all the way back to Munich in one go. Safe journey and thanks for being the first visitors for us in Sweden!

All in all, it was a mixed bag. There were several good moments and of course also very frustrating moments. But otherwise, one would not appreciate the others, right?