When you have lived in Sweden for a long time

After living in Sweden for about a year, i noticed that i had changed in certain ways of looking at various aspects of life, doing things and reacting to people. It is quite interesting when one thinks about it. I collected a couple of this Swedish behavioral patterns of thinking , doing things and also got some of them from friends.

Here are some of the behavioral patterns that will be linked to you after living in Sweden for a certain period of time. It is part of the culture here. It is subjective and there are common things one sees everyday. Here are some of them :-

• You get extremely annoyed when the bus is two minutes late.
• You become a punctuality freak and dump your friends for being late more than once.
• When offered a bottle of beer the first thing you look at is the alcoholic percentage .
• You use the alcohol percentage-per-kroner standard for measuring the quality of beer and wine.
• You get extremely annoyed when somebody is five to ten minutes minutes late.
• The first thing you do upon entering a bank/post office/chemist etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
• You think it is normal EVERYTHING is regulated and you obey the rules voluntarily.
• When a stranger on the street smiles at you, you assume that he is either drunk, insane or is he's an American .
• When someone asks you for "sex" you assume they mean half-a-dozen.
• You no longer fold your paper money. You always put your money in your wallet
• Silence is fun.
• You think that riding a bicycle in the snow is a perfectly sensible thing to do
• You become extremely skilled at assembling prepackaged furniture kits
• You always thinking about of changing ques in a grocery store.
• Your idea of unforgivable behaviour now includes walking across the street when the light is red and there is no WALK symbol, even though there are no cars in sight.
• It no longer seems excessive to spend 1,000kr or 100 euro on alcohol in a single night
• You regard it as sensible to eat ice cream when it is –15C.
• Paying $6 for a cup of coffee seems reasonable.
• You start to differentiate between types of snow.
• You accept you must walk 2 kilometres to collect your book/tape from the Post Office, because they don't deliver small packages (or large ones)
• You own a pocket calendar.
• You start avoiding your neighbour.
• It's normal to have an entire pizza just for yourself.

You read more on http://mystayinsweden.googlepages.com/theswedishways

I hope you are enjoying Sweden and i hope you have a good time when you are in Sweden. You will joins us in looking at the percentage content of alcohol of a beer can or bottle when you are offered one.