Living in Lund

I have been living in Lund for a little over 2 and a half months now and think it might be helpful to write a little about what I have been up to. Despite the time, I have yet to do any really touristy things. I have mostly been saving those activities for when friends visit since (hopefully) we will have enough guests that I will get to see most of the touristy sites in good time anyway.

So many bikes.

Lund is a pretty compact place. From the central area of Lund most of the places I tend to go to are within a half hour walk. Not only that but Lund is very bike friendly, there are bikes and bike paths pretty much everywhere and vehicles are really considerate, they make sure that they will only pass you if they can give you plenty of space.

This means that I really have not needed a car or even to use public transport very often. In general it is simply faster to walk than to catch a bus, definitely faster to ride.

I can understand why there is a different attitude regarding distances and locations here. Lund is located in Skåne county in Sweden, this county is about 1000km² smaller than the greater Sydney region. It contains a bunch of cities and towns, all of which are distinct locations, in that they have fields and more rural areas surrounding them. Travelling between Lund and Malmö definitely feels more like travelling between 2 cities than going from say Seaforth to Croydon Park, despite the distances being about the same.

Lund is also old, it was founded somewhere around 1000AD, and it shows it. Not only are lots of old buildings and cobblestone streets around the town, but there are also fountains, statues and runestones just lying around the town. It makes walking around the central area of Lund just a little bit cooler.

Runestones, just sitting there like they are unremarkable!

Day to day I haven't been doing much of interest. Mostly looking at jobs, doing some household chores, grocery shopping and playing some games. The morning is the best time to be online for me, as that is when friends and family are online in Australia. Which is great in terms of contact, less great in terms of getting work done, since the people I am talking to have all finished their work for the day and are relaxing in the evening.

Afternoons are spent on job searching or personal projects. My current project is an exploration of the Steam Trading Web API, which is sadly much more limited than I expected.

Evenings are spent either on Swedish (I go to a course 2 nights a week), Karate or games. My partner and I joined a gaming society here called DMF, which has a play space on the southern side of the town and a lot of regular events. I mostly go to a savage worlds RPG on Monday nights but will probably start going to boardgames on Thursdays again once the Swedish course finishes.

During my first month and a bit here, I was slowly navigating my way into the Swedish system. I had to get my biometric details read so they could make my residency card. Then I needed to wait for it to be delivered. Then I had to find out why it was not being delivered. Then once I finally had it I had to apply for a personnummer, and once I had that I could do little things like make a bank account and register with Arbetsförmedlingen. Now I have a bank account I can do all sorts of things, like add credit to my phone online, join Lund's car pool organisation and order furniture from IKEA.

Right now my partner is in Australia on a trip leaving me to my own devices here in Lund. Just before she took off we got our keys to our new apartment, so while she is away I have been moving. Fortunately a friend from DMF helped out and we carried most of our stuff between the two apartments; fortunately as both places are at least semi-furnished apartments it was mostly clothing, small gadgets and devices. There is still some bits and pieces left at the old place, waiting for me to receive my car pool membership card so I can move them by car. The only other remaining step is receiving and assembling the rest of the furniture we need.

The furnishings in our new place don't include a bed for the master bedroom so we have put in an order with IKEA for that along with a few other useful pieces of furniture, they should arrive sometime on Thursday and on Friday a friend and I will put them together, so that when my partner arrives on Friday one of us won't have to be sleeping on the couch.

Life in Sweden - Cold and Swedish

I have been in Lund for almost 2 months now and a question that understandably pops up a lot from both locals and people at home is "How are you finding Sweden?" It is a question I find difficult to answer properly, mostly because the main content of my answer seems so obvious. Sweden is cold and everything is in Swedish.

The Cold
When I arrived in Lund there was snow on the ground and the temperature was around the 0-2 degree range. Now it is officially spring in Skåne and it has really warmed up. We are seeing high temperatures of 8-10 degrees and lows in the 3-4 range, to give some perspective this means it is almost as warm as the coldest month in Sydney. This isn't a complaint, obviously the climates are different and I am not exactly a stranger to colder climates, but this is the first time I have been living in one rather than been on holiday.

The climate a huge range of things, buildings are constructed differently, homes contain places to hang your coat and put your shoes, bathrooms are heated, curtains and blinds seem more important and outside doors all open inwards. Fashions are obviously different, scarves, gloves and beanies are clearly a much bigger thing this time of year, but it would seem there is a wider range of clothing and styles which fortunately as a man I can remain mostly ignorant of.

Now it is spring the flowers are blooming and you can see the buds of leaves growing in the trees, which is heartening, but I will be happier when they have actual leaves and not buds. Most of the trees simply read as dead to me.

Swedish

Pretty much everything is written in Swedish, certainly all the official correspondence. This is not technically a surprise, I mean Swedish is the official language but was hard to anticipate how it would impact me.

It clearly isn't as problematic as it could be since pretty much everyone here speaks English well enough that I am never worried that I can't be understood. But it also means that in a supermarket or department store, not only is the layout not quite what I would expect, but I can't use the navigation signs as easily.

It means when I opened my bank account or signed up for my phone plan I received some fairly weighty documents that I cannot read. Ultimately it makes pretty much every little breakdown in a system much more frustrating as I simply don't know where the issue lies or even where to start. I don't know if it was my mistake, or a mistake in someone else's hands. I don't know where to start to mitigate problems nor necessarily what the expected behaviour is.

I expect the frustrating to go away with familiarity, both with Swedish and the systems in play.

The Big Move - Sea Freight Pick Up

I have been in Sweden a little over a month now and this post has been sitting almost ready to go. I feel I should finish it up and then I can move on to other topics, like living in Sweden.

The day before our move from Redfern my fiancée went through and marked everything that was to be sea freighted or domestically moved with sticky notes, This was following the procedure provided to us by Grace. She even then provided a summary sheet so that the removalists had an easy reference. Unfortunately the sea freight pick up ended up being much more stressful than expected...

First the truck was late as they could not find our address,  which was not ideal but understandable. Once they arrived, they took a look around, said they would get started after having lunch and suggested we should do the same and stay out of the way while they packed.

We did so, but checked in a couple of times and they seemed to be making progress, but were falling a little bit behind. Rather than stay and get in the way, we requested they call us about 15 minutes before they were done, and then we headed to a friends place. They agreed to this and we headed off. However, instead they only contacted us after they were finished and rushed off as soon as we got home, before we had a chance to inspect because they were running pretty late.

Frustrated at this approach, we ducked upstairs to do a quick inspection and discovered that they had left our apartment a complete mess, packing materials and  were waste everywhere. The cup they had broken was simply left in the sink (though they did tell us they had broken a cup before hand) and worst of all, a closet, a couple of sets of drawers and our gardening things had been mysteriously missed and left unpacked.

This was a pretty significant issue, because whilst some was meant to go to a friends place, plenty of it was meant to be heading to Sweden. We called them to let them know, and they were apparently too far gone to turn around. So we loaded almost everything into my car and headed to our friend's place. We had to leave a couple of plants behind, and the removalists were meant to contact us about picking it up on the next business day, but somehow they never got around to it. We ended up doing that ourselves the next day.

We did beat the removalists to our friend's place, so we were able to get the missing items onto the truck, but they didn't pack it there, they apparently were out of packing materials and would have to pack them at the depot. Not a story that inspires confidence and we will have to go through what arrives fairly carefully.

Overall I am definitely not recommending Grace to people in the future. These are not the only headaches we have had with them, but the day of the sea freight pick up was definitely the most stressful one of this moving process.

They have also not been particularly communicative, we have had to chase them up to get details and updates during this process and have received information from them that was misleading at best, outright fabrications at worst.

For example, our stuff was meant to be loaded onto a boat on the 7th of February. When I contacted them for tracking details on the 18th of February, I was informed that there had been a delay, but it was loaded on the 14th and that we would receive tracking information soon. We only received tracking info for that shipment on the 3rd of March, and that information indicates the boat was loaded on the 28th of February.

So to reiterate, don't use Grace.

The Big Move - Preparation

My flight is this Saturday, my bags are packed, and I am almost ready to go. It is pretty exciting and I am really looking forward to arriving in Sweden and settling in. There are challenges that await me and a few organisational hurdles that remain, but I am ready and it is almost time to go.

Moving internationally is fairly complicated, there are a variety of shipping methods, customs forms and insurance required and despite having a number of coworkers who had made the move from Europe to Australia we had a surprisingly small pool of advice to draw from.

We knew that we did not want to send everything, and that we didn't want to try to tackle that kind of a logistical burden. Instead we used a shipping service a couple of our friends recommended after using them to move to Switzerland. They had a pretty good experience with them, unfortunately for us, it was not replicated.

I should note that I didn't do much of the organisation for this move. My fiancée did the bulk of the organisation, she did not have the formal work hours I did, and so was better able to organise quotes and the like. The quoting process for this service actually involves sending someone to your home, discussing your plans with them and showing them roughly the kind of materials you plan to move.

The biggest advantage of using a shipping service is that we didn't have to pack most of our stuff ourselves, organise boxes, packing materials, helpers, removalists and cleaners, the service we used did all of that for us. We were actively discouraged from packing, as if they packed then they could sign off on the manifest for customs and insurance, and since they are a trusted company, they are less likely to be delayed by customs.

Our move was slightly more complicated than normal, because we conveniently were able to send most of our furniture to one of our friend's houses for safe keeping, they had the space and were happy to get free use of furniture in exchange for providing free storage. In order to keep things a little simpler, we organised that aspect of the move through Grace as part of the whole operation.

This meant that our task was to go through our house put things into the following categories:

• To be sold/thrown out/donated to charity
• To be sent to our friends
• To be sea freighted to Sweden
• To be air freighted to Sweden
• To be taken with us
• To be stored with family

Selling  and donating things was specifically my job, the furniture our friends did not want went up on eBay and 2 items sold. The rest went out onto the street for the council to pick up. The clothes and books we weren't keeping were taken to the Salvos in Glebe and donated.

Our sea freight was arranged to be picked up and shipped about a month ahead of the actual move. We knew were going to be quite busy post Christmas and sorting it out closer to my fiancée's flight would have been simply too difficult and my parents were happy to have us stay with them in the meantime.

We packed some boxes and suitcases for the things we needed, our air freight and the remaining items that weren't to be shipped and took them to my parent's house. All that we had left in the apartment was  pretty much ready for the furniture move and sea freight pick up, which I will leave for next time.

Still Miss You 4 Years Later

Today marks 4 years since you passed away.

I find it amazing that 4 years has gone by and just interacting with those memories brings fresh tears. Especially at this time of year, which is always difficult despite the proximity of my birthday.

At the right times, in the right contexts I can talk about what happened less abstractly. But never in too much detail, because that brings back the more vivid feelings, the tense waiting, not knowing when things would be over and the terrible blow of the awful news. Especially the gap between the report of a death and the report of who died. The maths was terrible, and the implications of that desperate desire that the one who died was not one of your family.

I am sorry I don't talk about you that often, and that when I do it mostly is about your end, because there was a lot more to you than that. Unfortunately it really is hard to focus on the good times.

Regardless, I miss you Nick and I wish you were still here.

Birthday Musings

Today is my 28th birthday and I thought it was a good opportunity to dust off this blog.

I remember on my last birthday I was exploring Amsterdam with my partner with a fairly uncertain year ahead of me. I was unemployed and faced a job search, likely followed by a housing search when I returned home. My girlfriend shared the housing problem, and would also need to find work once she finished up her thesis later that year.

Now, on my 28th birthday I find myself in a completely different position. I am living at my parents place and soon will face a job search, followed by a housing search, but this time in a new and exciting locale! On the 1st of February I move to Sweden to be with my fiancée, who starts her new job there in a little over a week.

I can't say I am looking forward to my new job and home search, but it does set us up for a fairly different year. It will be interesting adapting to a new culture, learning a new language and living in a place where it snows; snow without travel just seems weird.

I also intend to start updating this blog again more regularly. While most posts will be about games, because I do play a lot of games, I will also probably include some slice of life posts too.

Here is hoping that this trip around the sun is as good as the last one.

Finished: To The Moon

To The Moon is an adventure game by Freebird Games made using RPG Maker. It follows a pair of doctors, Dr Eva Rosaline and Dr Neil Watts as they explore an old man named Johnny's memories in order to rewrite them such that they fulfill his final wish, to visit the moon.

They work for an organisation whose business is just that, you are reaching the end of your life, so you hire them to search through your memories, nudge various events and simulate how your life would have been had you taken the other path. Then they dump these new memories over the old ones.

The game itself is fairly simple, consisting primarily of exploring an area/memory to find objects and talk to people, then once the right objects have been found, to complete a fairly simple tile flipping puzzle. To be honest though, that doesn't matter, because the game tells the story of Johnny's life so well using these systems and music, that you can't help but be drawn in. The game took me about 3 and a half hours to complete, and once I was about half an hour in I did not want to stop until the story was over.

The way the story is told has a kind of memento vibe to it, the doctors have to start with more recent memories and work their way back toward childhood, so you have a similar pattern of seeing Johnny's more recent history, but not have the context. It results in drawing conclusions that you later revise as new information comes to light and completely changes the interpretation of later events.

Personally I find the concept of deliberately rewriting someone's memories really disturbing, that the technology exists has interesting consequences from a world building perspective, and whilst clearly they have permission (complete with a contract) to be rewriting Johnny's mind I still find it to be morally questionable. The game feels heartwarming and uplifting towards the end, but I can't help but feel that those notes are false in the wider context of what is going on. Changing how Johnny remembers his life doesn't change the life he actually led.

I do think that this game could probably be told just as well in another medium, though perhaps not by the game designer. I wonder if in its current state, the game format results in a closer attachment by the player to Eva, Neil and Johnny.

Of the games I played in 2012, this one probably had the greatest emotional impact on me, I thoroughly recommend playing through it and picking up the wonderful soundtrack.