Yesterday I was listening to a friend from Africa tell of his arrival in Sweden and how he found it moving from East Africa. He said there were two main problems.

The Weather

This isn’t too surprising. Sweden is a pretty cold, dark, wet place at times. It can even be like that when you least expect it (for unwary outsiders that is, all Swedes know midsummer could be freezing cold and wet). So coming from a place that is almost always warm and where the days are constant in length with large amounts of sun, well it’s a challenge. It takes some adjusting to. During the winter it can lead people to be indoors and alone a lot.

The People

Well, that would seem to cover pretty much everything, wouldn’t it? But what my friend meant was not that Swedish people weren’t nice once you got to know but that he didn’t know how to to get to know them at all. He explained that in his country you could speak to anyone, stranger or friend, and strike up a conversation and no one would think this strange. You could easily find yourself drinking chai with a new acquaintance. Not so in the north where it seemed it wasn’t just the weather that was cold.

In Sweden, by contrast, you can’t greet people in the street and say ‘hej’, people are wary of you, scared of you, and try to avoid you. The natural social distancing that is in the Swedish DNA seemed like an impenetrable wall to my outgoing African friend. Without the church he said, he wouldn’t have had any friends at all.

He did cite some positives and they were pretty big ones. He always felt safe, he didn’t feel threatened by insecurity, crime, radical groups. Everything worked, there was peace and order. He loved the peace and the nature and how green the cities were and how many parks were in the cities. I can confirm having visited his home city that it does not do well on open, enjoyable and inviting public spaces.