A lot of important things have happened in our lives since the last post: some of them (too personal to be shared on a public space) have been very hard to cope with and kept us away from the blog, but others have filled us with joy, as for example the Egyptian revolution, that we followed almost minute-by-minute (in a way, that too kept away from the blog!). Nevertheless, back we are!

My first post for 2011 is to promote a long-term project that I initiated with a friend of mine last September. It is about building an autonomous sailing robot (i.e.: a sailing boat operated by a computer making autonomous decisions and getting the energy from on-boat solar panels) that eventually – in a few years time – will be able to circumnavigate the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

The Queen of all Swedish pastries and my ultimate favourite. You cannot miss the irresistible smell of freshly baked kanelbullar coming from every “Pressbyrån” in the metro stations in the mornings.

Once I tasted them I knew we moved to the right country!

What gives the Swedish cinnamon roll its distinctive flavour is the cardamom (حبهان) which is added to the dough, plus the pearl sugar on top. Unlike Cinnabon (an American chain that specializes in Cinnamon rolls and which surprisingly does not have a branch in Sweden), kanelbullar do not have the thick caramel layer on top (which makes them a bit lighter but definitely not to be considered as diet food!).

Since 1999 Sweden has even a national “kanelbullens dag” on the 4th of October of each year. No need to mention that we were happy to join this Swedish tradition!

I tried a number of different recipes along the past months and finally I think I reached a decent result with this recipe which I am most happy to share with you all. Even though the recipe is easy, yet the process is quite long (takes a minimum of two hours or even more) but it’s definitely worth it! Read the rest of this entry »

I never had a passion for comics, cartoons or animation in general. Luckily my curiosity keeps me on the edge and  pushes me continuously to challenge my artistic taste buds. So in this case it did not kill the cat!

Last weekend we finally had the chance to watch the French animated film “Persepolis”.  The film is based on Marjane Satrapi‘s graphical self biography with the same name.  I heard a lot of positive reviews about the book and the film and in this particular case it does deserve every bit of acclaim it received, that’s of course according to Mac and me. The film received numerous awards and has been translated to many language (I wonder if Arabic was one of them?! naaaaaaahhh….difficult to do if you have God and Carl Marx in the same scene!) Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second part of an ongoing series of posts on “moving to Sweden”. Part one dealt with finding a house.

Resident permit

Of course – Sweden being part of the European Union – things are different for EU citizens (and their relatives) and non-EU citizens. We have direct experience only with the first case that we can gladly share.

As an EU citizen one has the right to stay in Sweden for up to three months without doing any kind of paperwork. Same applies to a family member with an EU residency permit. If however you like kanelbullar, sill and hjortronsylt so much that you decide you would like to stay longer than 3 months, you have to register “your right of residency” with the Swedish Migration Board. You can either send the form by post or visit their office.

[Note by Mac: I am unsure about the legal status of the registration requirement. One of the three basic freedoms of EU is freedom of movement, so I don't think Swedish authorities could throw a EU citizen out of their borders just because he/she doesn't have registered, nor do I think that one would be considered as "illegal migrant" in that case. It is true - though - that without the registration one won't be able to have access to many of the public services. Besides the legal status, I find the idea of registering a right silly (you don't register your right of free speech or religion, why should you register your right of free movement?)] Read the rest of this entry »

Although I am far from being an expert on the subject, I did some work in the Middle East and had the opportunity to facilitate mixed groups of Israeli, Palestinians, Lebanese and others in their effort to dialogue and launch co-operation projects.

One of the good things about those project was that participants were ordinary people, mostly members of small NGO’s that had as a primary concern other issues than the ongoing conflict in the region. Talking to each other and starting a cooperation was in large part just instrumental to access public funding from international institutions.

Paradoxically, I think that particular mix of participants maximised the outcome in terms of peace building. The fact that meetings were not targeting peace activists avoided the “preach to the converted” situation, and the fact the issue at stake was not “peace in the middle east” prevented the discussion to reach a standstill (participants had to challenge only some of their beliefs in order to co-operate, and not all of them, all together). Read the rest of this entry »

As anybody who follows international politics knows by now, the Sweden Democrats (whose only democratic thing is the name, being the party a spin-off of the neo-nazi movement) have for the first time in history gone over the 4% threshold, a fact that allows them to sit in the Swedish riksdag.

On the election night (SVT1 live coverage of the event), Jimmie Åkesson (the party leader) claimed that SD “are not against immigrants, but against broken immigration laws”. Not that anybody really believed him, but it is good to know that some of his fellow neonazis proved him wrong in a matter of hours.

From this article:

“Line the immigrants here on the film up against the wall and put a bullet between the eyes, then put them in a bag, stick a stamp on them and send them back to where they come from,” the Sweden Democrat candidate for Trelleborg in southern Sweden wrote on her Facebook page, according to the local Trelleborgs Allehanda daily.

On the other hand, there are rumors the other parties in the parliament are working out new rules for the parliament commissions, with the specific aim to exclude the SD from taking part into the work of them. Let’s hope they will manage to keep them at bay.

Yesterday was election day in Sweden and also my first direct experience with democratic elections.  Although the result was extremely disappointing yet the whole experience was amazing and very thought provoking. I believe that many modern Western citizens, especially young ones, take the right to vote for granted, but it’s  means something completely different for someone who was only given the chance to vote yes or no for the same president for most of her adult life (Hosny Mubarak is still in power and the preparations are in full swing to “coronate” his son).

Read the rest of this entry »

This is our first joint blog post. This way we can be sure not to miss any interesting information.

Having successfully moved to Sweden, we are often asked to share our experience on how we moved here. We believe that our blog is a good place for sharing (and hopefully also exchanging) this type of information and experiences.

Our account is based on our specific case and is not meant to be comprehensive in any way. That is we can only share the experience of an EU citizen accompanied with a non-EU family spouse, who possesses a long term residency permit in another EU country.

Some information will necessarily be Stockholm specific, while other will apply wherever you choose to land in Sweden. The four challenges that we will tackle in four different posts are:

• Finding a house
• Paperwork
• Learning Swedish
• Job hunting

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a short note to advertise a new page of our blog, where we have begun storing the cheat sheets that we produce while preparing for the SAS exams. We hope that they will be of some use for at least somebody out there!

Isao Hashimoto works as curator in a Japanese museum. He is not famous, but a few years back, he made a short film showing the location of nuclear detonation on the planet, in the years 1945 to 1998, that became famous enough for me to find it.

The clip is lengthy and – quite frankly – a bit repetitive, but it serves well the purpose of illustrating the idiocy of the human race. Some data and observations that is easy to extrapolate from watching the film: Read the rest of this entry »