The Space-Time Continuum

You can tell it's getting closer to Spring when the kanin start multiplying, well like... So happy Daylight Savings time back in the U.S.A.! At the moment Sweden and the states are an hour closer to each other. Swedish cultural fact #17: While Sweden does not observe Daylight Savings like the US (thanks to the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005) but instead uses the European Summer Time standard, which means we don't change our clocks until the last Sunday of March. So right now we are only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast and 8 hours ahead of the West Coast, for the next couple weeks. See, you learn something new every day.

Keeping with the timely theme, it has now been a month (albeit a short month, thanks February) since we left the states. However, it's not until tomorrow that we will have been in Sweden for a month. Trippy huh? No perhaps it is the way in which we perceive time that is indeed trippy. "Then I realized I could have just said 'yeah.'"

[Cut to Kristen] Kristen - "Awww Mitch!"

[Narrator]
Everyone Ragen works with has been pushing for us to say longer. Maybe pushing is not the right word, but they are trying really hard to sell us on how great it is to live here. And to be honest, that's what we are leaning towards, staying her for at least two years, maybe longer. We are going to apply for an extension of our residence permits and the like so maybe we can get that personnummer thing. That way we could get cell phones and rent movies apparently. It's been a pretty good first month but is that really enough to make a decision like staying here for two years? Probably. Sounds good to me. I like it here so far, Ragen does too. Once we get over the language barrier it will be even easier to get around, once we can read all the signs and things at the grocery store. Plus that gives everyone more time that they can come visit. See, everybody wins.

We went to the movies for the first time last week. We went on a Tuesday night because we were told that the ticket prices are cheaper from Monday to Wednesday. Still we ended up paying 90 SEK each, or about $15 to see Rendition. Apparently movie prices are not uniform but vary depending on the film. It looks like the big films cost more, around 100 SEK. The movie was in English but the title on the poster was in Swedish. Sometimes they do that for films and sometimes they don't. When we were trying to decide what to see we saw the poster for Rendition and I recognized it because Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal were on the poster but I could not for the life of me remember what it was called. It wasn't until the opening credits that we figured it out - ok it told us the name of the movie then. Swedish Cultural fact# 8: Swedish multiplexes have small rooms to watch the movies in, the one we were in had about 30 seats, and you purchase assigned seats for the film. All the seats are numbered and they ask you at the window how far back you want to sit and if you want the aisle or in the middle. We were in the middle in row 4 of 5, and there was only two other people and they sat behind us. Also they sell bulk candy at the theater (I realize that lots of theaters in the US do that too) but they have some weird candies. Of course they have Swedish fish and above you can see one of the licorice salt fishes like you can find at IKEA. We had never tried one so we grabbed a couple. Man, they are definitely more salt than licorice, so keep the water bottle handy. They had a lot of licorice flavored things, chocolate with marshmallow filling things, and liqueur flavored chocolates. And most of it is kind of stale.

Another common flavor here is Pear. You can get pear juice, soda, ciders, ice cream, creamcicles, and these foam, marshmallowy, mushroom shaped things. It's not bad. For one of us, pear is her favorite thing next to chocolate. I won't tell you which one of us that is, but I'll give you three guesses and I think you'll only need two.

Now that we've been here awhile, CiS promises to be more timely (see how I tied that back to the theme set at the beginning) in our updates. So stay tuned loyal listeners!

Now for other, random picture time!

Here is the schedule for the 7 bus that stops outside of our apartment. Notice that they call the days of the week diffent names here. Plus they use a 24 hour clock. Kind of blows your mind a little doesn't it?
Nice name for a shop eh? We thought it might be one of those lost in translation named shops so we had to check it out. It was a punky skateboarder type clothing shop, lots of stuff from Element and the like. As well as some house brand t-shirts, so, get ready for Christmas presents y'all.