Learning to love my adopted homeland of Sweden

My first ever visit to Sweden was in the winter of 1996. I spent 6 weeks living in Stockholm. And despite the cold and snow that enveloped the city, brought traffic to a standstill, and made getting from A to B difficult to say the least, it is most definitely, one of my favourite cities in Europe. What a glittering place Sweden's capital truely is.

At this time, I was in transit. On my way leaving one country behind me, bound for the States to start a new career. Sweden was a stop-over. During these 6 weeks, I tucked my language book and swedish/english dictionary under my arm and started exploring. I also bought a winter coat - not something I needed in the Australian summer I had left behind me.

At that time, I never dreamt I would eventually live in Sweden. But here I am many years later, this time living on a beautiful peninsular, on the southwest tip of the country, surrounded by the Baltic Sea. In a land that I once knew so little about, and that my friends the world over have little clue about either, I believe it's time to share a few facts of this nordic place. Most important of all, there are a few people who need to know that it may be Scandinavia, but actually we don't live in total darkness in wintertime......

I live in the fourth largest country in Europe. Sweden is around 500 kilometres wide and nearly 1,600 kilometres from north to south - that's 450,000 square kilometres of land, and that makes it big. And yet the population is under 10 million people. When people talk about buying a place in the country, in say, England, then you imagine the high demand and even higher prices for houses. Here in Sweden, a place in the country is a fraction of the cost, due to the sheer fact that there is so much land to spare.

I don't live out in the country. I tend to have breathing difficulties when taken too far away from citylife. My first question when my Swedish husband and I drove extensively for the first time throughout the southern half of Sweden, was "Where are all the people?".

Even so, it's a fact that most of Sweden's population live in the southern part of the country, and there are areas in the far north that are completely unpopulated. Because of it's size, the climate changes dramatically from north to south. Way down here in the south, I love our hot summers, and the winters are extremely cold and always snowy. We don't seem to get a great deal of rain, not the sort of relentless rain that can go on for days. But the price we pay here in the flatlands of Skåne, is that the fields are not as green when the Spring arrives.

Our vast forestlands and many waterways are dotted with over 100,000 lakes throughout the country. And Stockholm is the largest city, Gothenburg on the west coast is next, followed by Malmö in the south, which is my nearest city, just 20 minutes from home and an easy half-hour train trip from the Danish capital Cophenhagen.

Let's talk about the people here. The Sami, or Laps, are a minority people who live in northern Sweden. They share their own culture and language. We have close friends whose grandparents herd reindeer in the north for a living. In the very northern territories of Sweden, many Finns live, close to their homeland border.

Swedish cultural mix is changing. Due to the great number of immigrants coming into Sweden, about one in every five people here now have a foreign background. I have many friends from Denmark (perhaps to escape the high Danish taxes!), know other moms who have moved here from The Netherlands, and also Germany, a country from which Sweden has derived many of it's traditions. It makes our children's school lives interesting, when they can have a playdate with a group of friends whose common language is of course Swedish, but between them all they speak five different languages. And that, I think, is pretty cool.