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4. At check-in at Stockholm Airport, the check-in woman had a rant at me for having the audacity to ask for help checking in - and by "help" I simply mean "doing her job and checking us in".
She kept saying that I should pay to go online, check in manually, weigh the bags myself, print out the tags and then deposit them at a drop off. Now, she had the ability to check me in, she just didn't want to do it. She actually said "Why should I do something that you can do?”
Coming from Asia (though I admit it isn’t much different in the rest of Europe) there is absolutely NOTHING to do after 5pm which is when EVERYTHING closes. These lazy socialist opening hours permanate all of Sweden.
The only thing open late are bars: that’s if you don’t mind spending the price of a New York condo on a pint of beer. Even in the fucking airport there is nothing open in the evening. Odin help you if you are flying a red-eye flight.
Ok - that’s the basic stuff about Sweden out of the way. However, this all pales into insignificance when you stay there for an extended period and are eventually forced to deal with the absolute worst and vile feature that embodies everything that is wrong with Sweden...
... I’m talking about washing machines. That’s right. Washing machines.
It’s not well known outside of Sweden but their washing machine culture epitomises everything wrong with that society. A worthier writer than me - perhaps a Scandinavian Houellebecq - needs to write a drama based around Swedish washing machine practice.
It’s called the Tvättstuga (“Laundry Room”). In Socialist Scandinavia, it is unseemly to have something as bourgeoise as your own personal washing machine. Stated simply, it’s communal laundry facilities in apartment blocks.
Most Swedes live in Soviet style concrete blocks and the individual apartments are not even set up to allow the installation of individual washing machines. Instead, each complex has a designated washing room which has washing machines and drying facilities.
To use the washing machine, you have to sign up for a 1 to 2 hour slot which typically involves a 1/2 week waiting time. So you can only do your washing during these pre-arranged appointments. Obviously competition for the top washing spots at the weekend is fierce.
People often have to take days off work in order to do their washing because they have not been able to do their washing in the evening or at weekends for months - months! - on end. Some people resort to booking slots at 3am and setting their alarms to wake up on week nights.
You have to PHYSICALLY be in the room to do your wash otherwise the sensor turns everything off. People have huge arguments when others are late for their slot/do too much washing/don't clean the washing machine afterwards (you’re obliged to clean the machine fully after use).
The constant battle for slots actually dictates peoples lives and schedules. Can you imagine living under such a regime? You'd be considered a dangerous free-thinking maverick if you bought your own machine or attempted hand-washing. You would probably be shot.
With all the - ahem - recent added diversity into Sweden, you can just imagine the fun this creates when you have such a system and one adds some free-thinking immigrants to the usual mix of Swedish NPC clothes-washing automatons.
When I’ve told people about the Stalinist clothes washing machine that exists in Sweden, I’m normally met with disbelief. Let me share the statements of others as accompanying proof: http://welcometosweden.blogspot.com/2014/10/moving-to-sweden-laundry-room.html?m=1 …
"I jumped out of bed ready to tackle the day. And by tackle the day, I mean do my laundry. I had scheduled a laundry time for 7am. That’s a silly time to do laundry, I know, but I had zero clean pairs of underwear and zero clean pairs of socks. Don’t judge me."
http://www.thelocal.se/20100224/25178 "Nothing raises more hackles, shortens more lives and causes more gnashing of teeth in Sweden than a bleak room filled with washing machines." "The tvättstuga is naturally a place of conflict."
My favourite: an entire website devoted to passive-aggressive angry notes left in Swedish laundry rooms: http://www.argalappen.se/tvattstugelappar/ …
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0105/Sweden-Laundry-rooms-may-be-communal-but-they-re-not-all-neighborly … "Communal laundry rooms in Sweden stir strong emotions. In Stockholm in 2008, more than 70 cases of laundry-related threats and beatings were recorded.”
After all that hell involved in washing your clothes, you probably wish to go out, but some alcohol, and have a nice drink to relieve the stress, right? Easy, right? No. Fuck you. This is Sweden.
Alcohol in Sweden is purchased at a brutalist dystopian store that seems like it was taken from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We”. It’s a government monopoly called “System Bolaget” or "The System" for short. A name straight from a Soviet dystopian novel for sure.
Sweden’s nanny state doesn't think that it’s population can handle the normal sale of alcohol. Presumably because due to the darkness and everything closing at 5pm the Swedes would just spend their evenings drinking themselves to death with lack of anything else to do.
The government strictly regulates the sale of alcohol. All alcohol, with the exception of light beers with an alcohol content of less than 3.5%, can only be sold in one of the state sponsored off licenses delightfully known as The System.
The System is the alcohol store equivalent of America’s DMV. These shops make it as difficult as possible to purchase alcohol - a deliberate government policy (you can look all this up). Opening hours are 11am till 4pm and they don't even open on a Sunday.
Hence you can only really buy alcohol on a Saturday (unless you take a day off work) and it shows: there were huge lines of people stood outside The System when I went on Saturday like peasants queueing for potato’s during the final days of the USSR.
There are no promotions, no deals, nothing. All alcohol is kept behind glass cases and has a number printed beside it. You then have to remember the number, go to the counter, and tell them for example "I would like a bottle of 1765 and a can of 88427" which they then give you.
Supermarkets and other stores in Sweden are also weirdly socialist and fucked up. You have to do the cashier's work for them. I first discovered this when I went to an Asian supermarket to buy some noodles for self-catering since I couldn’t even afford a modest Swedish restaurant
The cashier threw a fit at me for just putting my basket on the check out conveyor belt and shouted at me to take everything out. At first I thought this was just a crazy autist, but it turns out that there is a set protocol to how you are supposed to behave at a Swedish cashier.
You are supposed to take all your items out of the basket and line them up in a neat row on the conveyor belt with the barcodes facing outwards. This is so that the barcodes can scan themselves automatically as they pass the scanner and the cashier doesn't have to touch the items
Then they fall into the tray at the end and you pay 5 fucking euros per plastic bag or some ridiculous near-equivalent and bag them up yourself.
I asked why the cashiers won't touch the items & was told it is to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome in cashiers if they are forced to perform small repetitive movements all day like slightly raising bags of peas to a scanner: so for their safety you have to do the scanning yourself
Fuck it. I mentioned bedsheets in Sweden already but I need to go back to them. Alongside washing machines it is the thing that most stands out from my stay in Sweden.
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