Language notes part 4

photo gallery

Jennifer I am enrolled in Swedish classes again, this time not from Folksuniveristet, but from SFI, the official bureaucracy in charge of teaching immigrants how to speak and be Swedish. The advantage of SFI is that it's free. The disadvantage of SFI is that you have no idea what you are going to get.

Svenska för Invandrare

JoeOne of these days I'll learn that I just can't do things at my own pace in Sweden. I keep falling for the same trap: I wait until I'm ready to start something, at which point I try to sign up for it only to find out that I should have started weeks before. You would think that our experience getting personal numbers, finding an apartment, seeing a doctor, etc., would have been enough to teach me this simple lesson, but alas it is not so.

Apoteket, Eventually

JoeThis week I finally ran out of my US prescription medicine, so today I went back to Apoteket, the state-run pharmacy monopoly here. You may recall from a while back that we were waiting to make doctor's appointments until we had gotten our registration from Försäkringskassan. This is because the documentation we had been given said we should register with Försäkringskassan as soon as we arrived, and the helpful (seeming) man at the local Försäkringskassan office said, "You fill out these forms, then we send you a card, and then you can go to the doctor." Well, after three weeks of waiting for a Social Insurance card to arrive, a couple of phone calls revealed that we needn't have waited: Försäkringskassan covers things like pensions, long-term disablility, and worker's comp, but it is unrelated to the national medical insurance scheme (which, I guess, is just so ubiquitous that Swedes don't even think to mention it). All this is a Good Thing, because as non-taxpayers (Jennifer's stipend is tax exempt) we aren't eligible for Försäkringskassan benefits.

To the post office!

JoeToday I mailed my grad school application, so now I proceed to the final stage: keeping my fingers crossed for two months. In the meantime, I've had my first encounter with the Swedish postal service, Posten. Like the USPS, Posten is not quite a private company and not quite a branch of the government. In the mid-90s Posten started a process of "rationalization." I don't know what exactly they mean by that, but I do know that while there were post offices in Sweden when we visited in September of '06, they are all gone now. Yup, they closed all the post offices. To buy postage you can go to a bunch of different places, mostly newsstands and tobacconists in the city, or gas stations and grocery stores in the country, who happen to have a little blue and yellow post sign hanging out front. The tobacconist I picked had a few envelopes, a postal scale, and a box of stamps, which was plenty for me today. After selling me the envelope and weighing it with the contents, he sold me some stamps and pointed me to the post box out front. Very low key. There seem to be plenty of postal employees still though, many of them pedaling around town on Posten bicycles with baskets full of letters.

I can hardly wait to go and pick up some mail at the local gas station.

The Frozen Tundra, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Byråkrati

JoeAs I mentioned before, briefly, on Wednesday as I was suiting up to depart Akademihotellet for good, our Personal Numbers showed up in the mail. This was somewhat unexpected, as we had applied for them just the previous Thursday, and had been told that we should expect to wait 10-14 days for their arrival. Nonetheless, it was good news, because as Jennifer described at some length a few days ago, it is difficult to actually accomplish anything in Sweden without your personal number.

The National ID Number

JenniferThe National ID Number is very important. Do not believe anyone who tells you that you can do anything without The National ID Number. University administrators will tell you you can open a bank account without it-- you can't. University administrators will tell you that you can rent an apartment without it-- you can't, because you need insurance. Did I mention that the University administrators will tell you that you can get insurance without the National ID Number? Well you can't. Need a permanent phone number for your potential landlords to call? Too bad. You can't have a mobile phone without The National ID Number. New University email address? Nope, not without The National ID Number.

Work so far

Jennifer So far work has consisted of:

1. Having lunch with the Boss and two other students joining the lab this term, a Swedish post-doc and a Mexican undergraduate student. The Evolutionary Biology Centre cafeteria lunch is a decent deal: 63 SEK for a large plate of hot food, a salad buffet, and tea or coffee. It was a very pleasant lunch and I like everyone so far.  The "Swedish sausage special" consists of a brick-sized chunk of bologna floating in a cream sauce. 
2. Getting my office space and meeting my officemate, who is a doctoral student working with computer modeling of biological systems, and who is a killer Othello player. 
3. Attending a journal club meeting, in which a recent paper in Science was trashed for extolling exciting results that turn out to be based on poor phylogenetic methods (among other things). This sort of thing was de rigueur back at UM, so I consider it a good sign.

Today we applied for our national ID numbers. The funny thing is that you need to have a permanent non-work address to get an ID number, which we haven't been able to get because we don't have an ID number. Similarly, tomorrow I hope to get my key to the building... and to get to the person who does the keys, one must go through at least three interior keyed doors, even after one has somehow managed to get into the building from the outside. My plan right now is to throw pebbles at the windows to get someone to notice me hopping up and down outside, and hope they let me in.

These sorts of experiences are exactly what my international student friends have been telling me to expect. Fortunately, so far the bureaucrats have been kind to us and it hasn't been too bad.

Second Day

Joe It's the morning of day three (Sv+3 maybe?), and after a good and fairly productive day two, this morning we are bedeviled by jet lag. I woke up at midnight last night and didn't get back to sleep until after three, about when Jennifer woke up—I don't think she got back to sleep until about 20 minutes ago. So for now I've retired to the lounge to admire the view of the cathedral and catch up on this.