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 »
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 »
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.
“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).
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:
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!
The title of the speech is pretty much what the speech is all about, but at about 16 minutes into the talk, Mr. Sasselov uses two similes for introducing an incredibly powerful perspective: the significance of life-as-we-know-it on a universal scale relies in its duration.
Swedes aren’t really known for their sense of humour, yet sometimes they amaze me. Taken from this article:
When Malmö launched its Malmö Festival around 20 years ago, local daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet printed up t-shirts that said: “If you have seen Malmö, you have seen the world.”
Soon after, neighbouring Lund launched its riposte: “If you have seen Lund, you don’t need to see Malmö.”
I know the two cities very little but my vote – I must admit – goes for Lund.
A few days ago, when the Obama administration forced BP to set up an escrow account for speeding up the process of refunding residents of the the gulf region that are affected by the spill, it made world news what Carl-Henric Svanberg said during the press conference.
Of course -- for as evil as one can imagine BP top management to be -- the intended meaning of the expression was not derogatory. The expression itself was a translation slip from the expression “den lilla människan” which a commenter on the New York Times explains much better of how I could do: Read the rest of this entry »
What do you get when you put together a spring sunny day, some community spirit, conservation of embodied energy, plenty of kids and the pleasure to get rid of stuff you don’t need any more? A loppis! (which shorthand for loppmarknad, the Swedish word for flea market).
Admittedly, I have marginal experience with flea markets around the world, yet in most of the countries in which I happened to visit loppis, I noticed that the majority of people selling stuff were professional second-hand dealers, and a relevant portion of the customers were experienced “flea market hoppers” looking for a specific item (such a particular reprint of a book, or a specific recording of a song on vinyl) or in search of some good deal.
This is not the case with Swedish loppis, though. And most definitively not for the loppis we visited today. Here’s a bullet-point list of the things that make Swedish loppis one of the many things I love of this country: Read the rest of this entry »
This is the blog of Nadia and Mac: a happy multicultural couple living in Sweden (Stockholm), where we moved in 2009.
If you are a relative or an intimatefriend you can ask us for an account on the blog, so that you can access those posts containing private topics, such as our personal news and photos.
l 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.
Private