Earlier today, a guy looking to move to Sweden found my contact information and asked for some tips on getting himself over here. In the course of our conversation, he asked for my "uncut ideas about life in Sweden," so I figured I'd share them here, as well:

Aside from the difficulties I've had with figuring out self-employment here, I don't have any real complaints.

I realized late last week that it's been just over six months since my move to Sweden last New Year's Eve and I haven't written yet about the general Swedish Experience. I guess I'm a bit past due, so here goes:

I rather unexpectedly received a short letter from Annika's parents today:

For historical reasons that I've never seen explained, Swedish calendars list names for each day and "David" is today's, so they sent me four lottery tickets to celebrate my name day, just like they do for Annika on hers.

Sweden will be holding its elections for the EU parliament on Sunday and it appears that the major established political parties here are softening their stances on intellectual property enforcement as the election approaches. Although it may actually be unrelated, one obvious explanation would be that polls are currently showing that the Swedish Pirate Party ("piratpartiet") can be expected to win one seat in the election, possibly two, out of 19 total for Sweden.

The FishTwits and I met up this afternoon with a web designer, who sounded like a pretty good guy. He just moved to Sweden about a month ago from Indiana and the topic came up of what you say to someone when they sneeze here. ("Prosit.") I commented that I never seem to be able to get the stress onto quite the right syllable of Swedish words, at which point he asked where I was from.

Apparently, my Minnesota accent was just enough that he wasn't quite sure whether I was an American or a Swede who spoke really good English.

Last night, I got to experience my first Swedish Valborg, Sista April, Walpurgisnacht, whatever you want to call it.

It had been built up a bit for me in advance. Lund being a university town, it tends to get celebrated around here in the same way as college students traditionally celebrate just about anything: Heavy drinking. I've been talking quite a bit in the last couple weeks with two groups of student entrepreneurs (more about them in later posts) and both had mentioned it to me as "a party not to be missed".

Since moving, that quote has frequently come to mind. I guess that's to be expected when I live within easy walking distance of a 900-year-old cathedral, surrounded by a university which was established 110 years before the American Revolution. Still, so weird to think about at times...

Before moving to Sweden, one of the things that always made me mildly jealous was hearing from Annika about the various cats she'd run into on her way to and from class and stopped to pet. Back in Minnesota, I basically never saw a cat unless I visited friends who had one. I guess it's more the thing to do to have indoor cats in the US, but let them roam the neighborhood in Sweden.

Since being here, I've gotten to know a couple cats that live with our neighbors and one or two others along the way to places we often visit. Most of them are skittish, but there are a red one and a grey one who are consistently friendly. In any case, we don't often see any aside from the two that live in the next building over.

Tonight, though, we saw plenty of them on the way home from the grocery store.

Nine years ago, I registered sherohman.org and set up a site here, but haven't really done much with it since then.

Four months ago, I moved from the US to Sweden.

It's long past time to revise this site.