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Okay, this is my second post about Malmö and Sweden, and I will not include so many pictures here, I think!

Sweden is really a very northerly country, but the climate is relatively mild. Canada and Russia, which are situated at the same latitudes, are so much colder. The Gulf Stream keeps us warm, I suppose.

This is the average temperature in Malmö in degrees Celcius - you will have to convert it into Fahrenheit yourselves, I'm afraid (but remember that water freezes at zero degrees Celsius and boils at a hundred degrees Celsius):

January: average daytime temperature, +2, average nighttime temperature, -3. February: +2, -3. March: +5, -1. April: +10, +2. May: +16, +7. June: +20, +11. July: +21, +13. August: +21, +12. September: +17, +10. October: +12, +7. November: +7, +3. December: +4, -1. We get an average of 604 millimeters of precipitation each year.

Most of the rest of Sweden is colder than Malmö, particularly in the winter. 15% of Sweden is north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun never sets during parts of the summer, and never rises during mid-winter.

Sweden is a constitutional monarchy, but the king is a mere figurehead.

The king and queen of Sweden on the right, and their three children on the left:



The government, always dominated by the largest political party, has the executive power. The Parliament, where each party is represented according to how many votes they got in the latest election, has the legislative power. Elections are held in Sweden every four years.

Since 1930, the left-wing Social Democratic Party has usually been the largest party by far, and they have usually dominated the government. However, in the latest election of 2006, an alliance of four right-wing political parties won, and they now form the government. So far the Swedes have been relatively unhappy with their new government. According to the latest polls, a left-wing alliance would get 55% of the votes if there was an election today, and the right-wing alliance would get only 40%.

The Prime Minister of Sweden is just the leader of the dominant party. The current Prime Minister of Sweden is Fredrik Reinfeldt.



Of course, Fredrik Reinfeldt is the (right-wing) Prime Minister of Sweden. Sweden is also divided into municipalities, and they have their own "governments", although they are not as independent of the government of Sweden as the individial states are independent of the federal government of the United States. Nevertheless, the municipality of Malmö is governed by a left-wing, Social Democratic "city council". There is an election for the city council every four years, at the same time as there is an election for the government of Sweden.

This is the top man in Malmö, Ilmar Reepalu. You can hear from his name that he, like many other people in Malmö, has immigrant roots. His parents are from Estonia.



Malmö is a fairly expansive town right now, and many new things are being built. I'd like to show you this picture, too. Ilmar Reepalu on the left has grabbed the shovel to start off yet another building project, a city tunnel. But the reason that I wanted to show this image is that the woman in the picture, one of the bosses for the city tunnel project, is an astronomy friend of mine, Pia Kinhult.



I'd better quote Wikipedia here:

Sweden is an export oriented market economy featuring a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labour force. Timber, hydropower, and iron ore constitute the resource base of an economy heavily oriented toward foreign trade. Sweden's engineering sector accounts for 50% of output and exports. Telecommunications, the automotive industry and the pharmaceutical industries are also of great importance. Agriculture accounts for 2% of GDP and employment.

It is obviously Christianity, but Sweden is not a very religious country at all. We have had a Prime Minister - not the current one, admittedly - who was an avowed atheist. Such things are not important to most Swedes, who think that a person's religious faith is his or her own business. Credibility and personal morality are not seen as having much to do with a person's religious faith.

There was recently an article in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's most influential daily newspaper, which claimed that Swedes are the second most secularized people in the world. Only the Japanese are more secularized. These figures are from Wikipedia:

According to the most recent Eurobarometer Poll 2005,[70] 23% of Swedish citizens responded that "they believe there is a god", whereas 53% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and 23% that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force".

There is only one openly religious political party, kristdemokraterna (the Christian Democrats). In the latest election, the Christian Democrats got 6.59% of the votes. In the latest polls they have been down to about 4%.

Most Swedes regard churches as some sort of museums - beautiful to look at, but sort of boring too, and irritating to visit if there is a person inside lecturing you about God. The average Swede goes to church mostly or only to attend events like weddings, christenings and funerals. Marriage is really optional in Sweden, and we have a word, "sambo" - "live-together" - which is used about couples who openly live together without getting married. Huge numbers of Swedes are sambos, and that is never an impediment to life in Sweden unless, perhaps, you want to be a bishop or a diplomat in a country where non-married partnerships would be most severely frowned upon. But if you do get married in Sweden - and very many do, of course - then the huge majority want to get married in church, because that is much prettier than getting married in the court house.



A just-married Swedish couple. The little boys are probably their sons. People who get married in church when they already have children often baptize their kids at the same time, because it's popular to baptize one's children in Sweden.

The people who are most religious in Sweden today tend to be immigrants, many of whom are Muslims (and in many cases refugees from Iraq).

I should probably mention that Sweden really receives huge numbers of refugees these days. People who arrive here from countries which are at war, or where there is a civil war going on, are almost always permitted to stay, and within a couple of years they are almost routinely granted Swedish citizenship, too. The net result is that Sweden alone accepts almost three times as many refugees from Iraq as the rest of the European Union put together. Very many of those refugees gravitate to Malmö once they have come to Sweden, and they often end up in a part of Malmö called Rosengård. Here is an image of immigrant children in Rosengård celebrating Swedish midsummer:



Aren't ethnic Swedes opposed to the idea that Sweden should receive so many immigrants? Actually, few are concerned. There is a nationalist party, Sverigedemokraterna (The Swedish Democrats) which is against immigration, but they have never received enough votes to be represented in the Swedish Parliament. You need 4% of the votes to be represented, but the Swedish Democrats usually gets only 2% or at most 3%.

Speaking about immigrants, I should perhaps mention Möllevångstorget, the Mill Meadow Square, which is a very well-known part of Malmö. In the daytime the square is full of people selling fruit and flowers and the like. There are also many restaurants, bars and night clubs around Möllevångstorget, and many people love it. Möllevången is described as ethnically mixed, happy and laid-back. But this is also a crime-ridden part of Malmö, and personally I never go there after dark.



Well, well. I just picked up a copy of Sweden's snottiest (and certainly Stockholm-based) daily, Dagens Nyheter, and they exhorted people to go to Malmö just so they could sample all the culinary delights in all the exotic food shops around Möllevångstorget! Okay, just so you know!

Most people certainly graduate high school. As for how common it is to graduate college, I can't really say. Certainly many people go to college, but I think - I'm not sure, mind you - that fewer than half of all Swedes do. Going to college is free, however. It costs nothing, except that you will have to buy your own (often expensive) books.

It is certainly true that very many immigrant children and teenagers have very big problems at school, because their knowledge of Swedish is so rudimentary.

Definitely soccer! And the second most popular sport is ice hockey.



Swedish soccer fans. They dress in blue and yellow because those are the colors of our flag. The girl on the banner would be Pippi Longstocking, the strongest girl in the world. Pippi is a fictional character created by Astrid Lindgren, Sweden's most popular children's book writer ever.

I've been giving the trend thing some thought, and I think I can say something about some very important trends in Sweden.

Certainly since the 1950s, Sweden has been a welfare society. We expect the government to give us free health care, free education (including college), very generous child care, parental leave etcetera, sick leave and unemployment support. In return, we pay the highest taxes in the industrialized world. I was once asked about our taxes by an American woman, who was shocked and upset to hear how high or taxes are:

American woman: How can you stand it?

Me: Ummmm... because we think it's worth it?

We generally do think it's worth it, but then we also expect the government to be there for us in our hour of need.

One thing we expect from the government is paid vacations. Swedes are entitled to five weeks of paid vacation every year. After the Swedish economy was generally down in the 1980s, Swedes feel richer now, and an incredibly popular trend is to travel abroad. So many Swedes do it, and for so many reasons. The twenty-year-old son of a colleague of mine recently took a one-year break from college to go to Beijing and study Chinese. The daughter of another colleague is doing voluntary work in Ghana. The 24-year-old son of one of my best friends is currently living and working in Nicaragua. And I know a lot of other young Swedes who have travelled extensively in Asia and South America.

Huge numbers of Swedes travel abroad on vacation. They go to Mallorca, the Canary Islands, Greece and Turkey, and one of the best-loved destinations is Thailand.



On December 26, 2004, a huge tsunami hit Thailand, and almost 600 vacationing Swedes were killed. And no wonder, because almost 50,000 Swedes were in Thailand when the tsunami hit! 50,000 out of a total population of 9 million! Isn't that amazing? No other European countries had even nearly as many tourists in Thailand at the time, and no other European country had nearly as many casualities.

Seriously, how could so many Swedes be in Thailand on that day, December 26, 2004? The answer is that Sweden practically shuts down twice a year. It happens during the last week of December, between December 24 and January 1, and also during the entire month of July. That is when practically every Swede is on vacation! And so many Swedes go abroad when they are free.

By the way, please come to Sweden in July, because those who work with tourism will make your stay really nice for you. But don't come here for Christmas! That's when Swedes either go abroad or shut themselves up in their homes with their families. In 1993 my father died a few weeks before Christmas, and my neighbour Christer had also lost his father that year. Moreover, he had no other relatives left. Christer and I decided that we would go out and eat together on Christmas Eve in Malmö. Would you believe that it was impossible? Nothing was open! We decided to go to Copenhagen instead. It was hard enough to find anything that was open in Copenhagen either, but we managed to find one restaurant that would serve us. However, we were warned that they would close already at 3 p.m. This was before there was a bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, so we had to take the hydrofoil instead. As we got on board, we realized that we were the only ethnic Scandinavian passengers there! All the other passengers were immigrants, almost certainly Muslims, who don't celebrate Christmas but used the vacation to go to Copenhagen to, probably, visit relatives there.

Okay, so Christer and I went to the restaurant and had some rather nice fish. At three o'clock we left, as the restaurant was closing. But can you imagine what Copenhagen looked like when we got outside? Remember that Copenhagen is a large and important European capital with a very nice downtown center. I'm not kidding you when I say that the place was deserted! Seriously! Christer and I walked down the large pedestrian street with all its nice shops, and there was not a single person anywhere! At three o'clock in the afternoon! It was as if a bomb had hit and vaporized all the people but left all the buildings perfectly intact. It was absolutely surreal, believe me. So take my advice, don't come to Malmö or Copenhagen for Christmas unless you have family here!

Let's return to the tsunami of 2004. I said before that we currently have a right-wing government, which won the election of 2006. An important reason for why they won (and for why the Social Democrats lost) is that people were furious because the Swedish government had failed to save the 600 Swedes from the tsunami! Why didn't the Swedish government swoop down from the sky with helicopters to evacuate its citizens and bring them to hospitals in Sweden? So what if Thailand is tens of thousands of miles away from Sweden, and what if there was total chaos in Thailand after the tsunami? We pay taxes so that the government can save us, don't we?

So now we have a new government, and people are so disillusioned because this new government is apparently even less interested in taking care of us than the previous government was....

It could well be pizza! Hamburgers are popular too, and kebab, and Thai food. Many people love well-filled baguettes, and many others love pasta and meat sauce.

A very traditional Swedish dish is Swedish meatballs with potatoes, sauce and lingonberry jam:



Want to try Swedish meatballs? Is there an Ikea department store close to where you live? Ikea is one of the huge industrial successes of Sweden, and its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, is one of the ten richest persons in the world.



If you want to try Swedish meatballs and have an Ikea store close to where you live, go to the restaurant there! They will serve you Swedish meatballs!

An peculiarly Swedish "dish" - actually, rather something that is eaten on top of slices of bread - is Kalles Kaviar. That's cod roe with vegetable oil, sugar and salt. You squeeze it out of a tube. I love it!!



Another extremely Swedish thing is salty licorice! It's licorice candy, but it is salty as well as sweet. We and the Danes are the only ones who like it! Sometimes I bring some salty licorice with me when I go abroad. They say you shouldn't eat too much of it - it can raise your blood pressure....

There is one more thing that I just have to show you. Swedish men live an average of 76.8 years, which makes them the second-hardiest men in the world, after the men in Japan and Iceland, who are the Methuselahs of the world with an average life expectancy of 77.1 years. (Source: Globalis - an interactive world map ) I can't tell you why men in Japan and Iceland live so long, but I can tell you the secret behind Swedish men's longevity. It's "snus". Snus is wet tobacco, and the guys put it between their upper lip and their gum, as far up as it will go (although sometimes it will slip down), and then they sort of suck at it. Snus, in other words, is smokeless tobacco. Tobacco smoke is really extremely dangerous, and it contains, I think, hundreds of carcinogenic substances. Smokeless tobacco, or snus, is really much, much less dangerous. Relatively few Swedish men smoke, but many Swedish men use snus. (And just so you know, many Swedish men don't use tobacco at all!) But because Swedish men smoke less than men from other countries, they also live longer. Swedish women, however, tend to avoid snus, so if they use tobacco they will be smokers instead. So far Swedish women live longer than Swedish men - Swedish women live an average of 81.8 years, which means we tie third place in the world along with Switzerland. But we are behind Spain, Martinique and France, which tie second place in female life expectancy at 82 years. The longest-living women by far are found in Japan, where females live to an average of 83.8 years. But the life expectance gap between Swedish men and women seems to be closing. There may come a time when Swedish men, the "snusers", will outlive Swedish women, the smokers! Okay, take a look if you dare:

Man using snus

(These days snus also comes packaged in little bags looking like tea bags, and then it's not half as disgusting. Quite a few women use the tea bag snus.)

Don't know if it is exciting, but to me it is important that Sweden may be the best country to live in if you are looking for rights for women. For example, health care is free, and many teenage girls go to youth clinics where they can talk to gyneacologists as well as to welfare officers and get all kinds of advice. At the clinics, the girls can get help with birth control, testing for venereal diseases, and also help with abortions. Young girls who get pregnant and want to keep their babies are offered a lot of support. (Giving up one's baby for adoption is practically unheard of).

Pregnant women are given a lot of medical checkups, and child mortality as well as maternal mortality are among the absolutely lowest in the world. After giving birth, a woman gets 420 days of partly paid child leave, and her employer is forbidden to fire her for staying home with her child. Also, the child's father is entitled to 60 "parent leave" days of his own, which can't be taken over by the mother.

The only thing I can think of is that since pizza is so popular in Sweden, there have been stories circulating that some pizzerias are not to be trusted - because if they run out of meat they may catch a rat and fill your pizza with rat-atouille.... Wait, I remember something else. Do you remember Malmöhus slott which you could see in a picture in my previous post? It is surrounded by a moat, and people say that tropical turtles swim around in the moat. People who have turtles as pets are said to dump them in the moat when they get tired of them.

Oh, by the way! I just have to show you this picture. A few years ago a documentary was made about Malmö, based on ordinary people's private footage and films, Mitt hjärtas Malmö (Malmö of my heart). Volume #1 had this cover:



Guess what? The baby girl in the picture is my own best friend, Annika Ekman! She is held by her mother, Carin, now deceased. The picture is from 1957. Cool, eh?

In the background you can see the Central train station, from where I commute every day. But the tram cars are a thing of the past.

Ann