Three steps forward, one step back

The first month in Sweden has passed. We’re getting ready to calm down, settle and begin our new life. Slowly.

In a few days, hopefully all our stuff with be delivered here to our new home smoothly.

In the last two weeks, we took several steps forward, like applying for a Swedish ID kort in Helsingborg, Kathi meeting a few future colleagues for fika, terminating our rental contract in Munich, terminating more contracts, getting Swedish SIM cards, trying to resolve the Handelsbanken account situation (with varying milage — at least Kathi has an account now), making insurance contracts even without BankID. We spent time in furniture stores without buying anything. How boring.

There were a few steps backwards, too. Like the first day of work being postponed due to her colleagues being quarantine. Like the nurse for our school examination appointment calling in sick, moving the date two weeks further. Like the first day of school being postponed due to Johannes teacher (a male teacher again and goes by the name of Johann) being in quarantine (or sick). Like me not having a bank account yet. Like us not having the ID kort yet and therefore being unable to get the BankID you usually need for everything on the Swedish internet. Like us expecting to be able to enter the house earlier, but now only will get the keys on Feb 1st. But these are just minor drawbacks.

Still, we are better off than others, and we feel humble for being so lucky.

Christina and Christian have been such a cool team getting our flat ready in Munich. Thank you so much! We really hope everything goes smoothly on Monday. Christina does so many things for us (like organising the successor tenants), it’s just fantastic. I cannot express our gratitude for this — it goes far beyond what one could expect from friends.

I met with chellomere for lunch last week, a demoscene guy from our demogroup Desire, who has supported us with valuable information since December. I went out with Phil for a beer, again. Tomorrow, Kathi is meeting again with Maria (from the company she didn’t sign up) for a girls’ day out (well, brunch). So there is some social life at least.

The other day, we went ice skating at the stortorget in Lund. Silly Germans as we are, we assumed that we had to pay for borrowing the ice skating shoes, but of course, this was for free. They do love their children. We should have checked that out earlier. It was the first time for Johannes to go ice skating, and I really think he had fun doing that.

Our visit to Helsingborg was nice, too. They do have some amazing playgrounds there (with floodlights when it gets dark!). Still, Kathi and I like Lund better.

We’re really looking forward to Johannes going to school again. He misses his friends from home and school and sometimes it seems like they have forgotten him faster than he would have expected (we do have phones and email!). He needs to be among other children again. We cannot replace his friends.

It is time to say good-bye to our hotel apartment where we lived for about 42 days. Tomorrow Hussein, the guy at the reception, will also have his last day at the hotel. He was commuting more than two hours a day and this got too much. He always took the time to talk with us and maybe I could call him our first “neighbour”. We hope to stay in contact with him. We will also miss Alejandra, one of the other receptionists. We did exchange more than a few stories and she also tried to help us as well as she could.

We will not miss the kitchen with the 100db water tap, the splishy-splashy shower that took ages to get warm, the shoddy windows that open by themselves at stormy nights (and we had several), the missing curtains, the electric extra radiator and the horrendous wifi (that went offline every few minutes). This one, single room.

“No matter what we say / No matter what we think / We will never, we’ll never leave this room / What are we going to do about this?” (This Room, The Notwist)

Uhm, yes, we will leave this room. You’ll see.