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Eight strange things that surprised me about Sweden

After surviving four months in Stockholm having moved from the UK, The Local's Catherine Edwards explains what aspects of Swedish life have surprised her most.

Published: 17 February 2016 07:44 CET
Updated: 17 February 2016 11:33 CET

Eight strange things that surprised me about Sweden

Swedes celebrating... something. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

1. There are whole days specifically dedicated to pastry

This was probably my favourite surprise. Although I was disappointed to find out I’d just missed Cinnamon Bun Day (October 4th) when I arrived, I didn’t have long to wait before Gustav II Adolf Day, which has its own special cakes, and then Lucia Day, which celebrates saffron buns (oh, and Saint Lucia – but mostly the buns). Even on the days which don’t have a designated dessert, in Sweden there's always time for fika. What's not to love?

Mmmm… cinnamon rolls. Photo: Tina Stafrén/imagebank.sweden.se

2. The doors open outwards instead of inwards

This seems like it should be an easy quirk to get used to, and I'd never given much thought to the direction of doors before, but it resulted in a frantic 10 minutes when I thought I’d locked myself out of my new apartment. Actually, I was just trying to push a pull door. Apparently the reason they open outwards is for fire safety, or because of snow, or to save hallway-space… no one seems to have a conclusive answer, but there must be a lot of expats who get smacked in the face the first time they visit a Swedish house.

Will this door open outwards or inwards? Photo: Magnus Hjalmarson Neideman/SvD/TT

3. The weather is really not that bad

Coming from the gloomy north of England, I'm used to the cold, but the thought of Swedish winter with temperatures regularly dropping to the minus-10s still made me nervous. As I encountered an increasing number of Swedes who seemed shocked that I'd moved here of my own free will at the end of October, I wondered what I'd let myself in for. But it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. The biggest difference is that there's much less rain than in perennially damp Manchester, where I'm from, so if you wrap up warm you can cope with the cold.

Stockholm's Old Town in winter. Photo: Ola Ericson/imagebank.sweden.se

4. The customer service is great

We Brits like to think of ourselves as polite, but most of the time there’s a large dose of passive aggression behind every ‘sorry’, ‘fine’ and ‘can I help you?’. By contrast, the Swedes I’ve encountered have all seemed genuinely friendly and helpful, many of them apologizing profusely when I admit I haven't understood their Swedish.

When I rang a call centre to fix the wi-fi in my apartment, instead of grumpily putting me on hold, the man at the end of the phone said he was excited to ‘practise his (already perfect) English’ while he reset the router, and asked me how I was finding Stockholm so far. He even recommended a pastry shop in my new neighbourhood.

The customer service is surprisingly friendly. Photo: Miriam Preis/imagebank.sweden.se

5. Everyone is very, very tall

Most expats move to a new country hoping they’ll seamlessly blend in with the locals in a matter of weeks. This is a total impossibility for me, a petite, dark-haired Brit in a country of tall blondes – the world’s second tallest population, in fact. Not only am I instantly recognizable as a non-native, but many everyday tasks from clothes shopping to reaching high shelves are made much more difficult by the height difference.

Some very tall Swedes. Photo: Tove Freiij/imagebank.sweden.se

6. The housing shortage is real (but manageable)

Finding a long-term apartment was my biggest worry when moving to Stockholm, and sure enough, I had to send dozens of emails before getting invited to a single viewing. My flat-hunt took me to various corners of the city, and I discovered just how flexible the definitions of the words 'furnished' and 'central' can be. One landlady wanted me to fill out a detailed questionnaire about topics including 'weekly hours spent on telephone' and 'foods consumed weekly' before agreeing to a viewing, and although I saw several nice apartments, there was huge competition for anywhere close to acceptable.

However, after about a fortnight of looking, and with lots of help from friends and colleagues, I was able to find a spacious apartment, 15 minutes from work, at a price for which you couldn't rent more than a cupboard in London or Paris. The housing shortage is clearly an issue, but there are options out there and from my experience there are far fewer scams or exploitative landlords than in other European capitals.

How do you find an apartment in Stockholm? Photo: Tuukka Ervasti/imagebank.sweden.se

7. Systembolaget

The bar in my hometown used to sell drinks for 10p, so the high price of alcohol in Sweden came as a bit of a shock. And then there's the fact that you can only buy alcohol from state-owned Systembolaget, which is closed in the evenings and on Sundays. It can feel like an inconvenience having to walk more than five minutes to be able to buy alcohol – and not having any options at all outside Systembolaget's opening hours – but on the other hand it does seem like a sensible approach to alcohol abuse.

The famous and infamous Systembolaget. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

8. People are really into exercise (even in winter)

In the UK, many people describe themselves as ‘runners’ even when the slightest dip or rise in temperature is enough to send them retreating under the duvet. Here, I’ve seen people jogging in deep snow, playing ice hockey on the city’s frozen lakes and generally not letting anything get in the way of their exercise routine. My colleagues have even started a daily mid-afternoon 'stretching session' in the office.

They're all really good at sport too – when I attempted ice-skating on the city's outdoor rink, thinking it would be a lovely Christmassy experience, I failed to take into account the fact that Swedes learn to skate before they can walk, and spent the entire time gingerly staying near the edge and trying to avoid being floored by a 6ft Swede or a pirouetting toddler.

Anyone for a tour on the ice? Photo: Helena Wahlman/imagebank.sweden.se

This article was written in February 2016.

'Supply and demand, motherfxxker!': The real crime behind Sweden's gangster rap

When riots broke out in 2017 in Rinkeby, just days after US President Donald Trump had been ridiculed for talking about “Last night in Sweden” in a speech, the spark was an encounter between the police and an up-and-coming rapper.

Police had arrested the young man, Yasin Abdullahi Mahamoud, a few months earlier for carrying a pistol and so felt justified in stopping and searching him when they encountered him, together with his friend, Jafar Ahmed Sadik, outside the local underground station.

What they hadn’t taken into account was how much of a local celebrity he was becoming.

The police officers checking him were soon surrounded by young, masked men who began throwing stones at them. They panicked and fired warning shots, after which the situation escalated into a full-blown riot, with shop windows and cars trashed.

Mahamoud — going by the name Yasin, or Yasin Byn – would go on over the next few years to become one of Sweden’s biggest music stars, topping the Spotify streaming lists and winning top music prizes, with his friend Sadik, rapping then under the name Jaffar Byn and now JB, not far behind.

Whether Yasin has ever really been an active member of Shottaz, the gang whose conflict with the rival Dödspatrullen has been blamed for an explosion of violence in the suburb between 2018 and 2020, is disputed, although the police have argued that he was.

His music certainly refers frequently to the conflict.

“Me and Fayye in the backseat with a Glock-19”, starts his 2018 hit, “Chicago”. Fayye, one of the leaders of Shottaz, would a year later be shot dead in a gang execution in Copenhagen.

“Rest in Peace, Indiana”, comes a line a little later in the song, a reference to the 2016 murder of two young men in Rinkeby’s Mynta café.

This killing has been seen as the point the violent dispute between young men in Rinkeby led to a split into the two rival gangs.

Should gangster rap be banned for glorifying violence?

When Yasin, Dree Low (real name Salah Abdi Abdulle, from Husby), and Einár (real name Nils Grönberg), were winning music prizes at the peak of their fame from 2018 to 2020, there was a fervent debate in Sweden’s culture pages as to whether it was appropriate to celebrate a genre that glorifies violence and crime.

At the same time these rappers were earning big sums from streaming, they were in constant trouble with the police.

When Yasin topped the Spotify streaming charts in January 2020 with his song XO, which lauded the intoxicating combination of Rémy Martin cognac and cannabis, he was sitting in pre-trial detention for suspected involvement in a murder. When he received a Swedish Grammy the next year, he was again in prison, so could not pick it up.

Between 2019 and 2020, revenues from Dree Low’s music company, Top Class Music, went from 3.3 million kronor to 7.8 million kronor, bringing him a profit in 2020 of about 4.5 million kronor. The next year he was jailed for involvement in a robbery.

The Social Democrat minister Mikael Damberg in 2021 complained on Swedish radio about a “subculture among young people that glorifies gangster life”. Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson, went one further, calling for gangster rap to be banned.

Mats Lindström, a policeman involved in fighting gang violence in the area around Rinkeby, told Aftonbladet in March 2021 that he thought the Swedish media should stop giving publicity to the young rappers.

“Aftonbladet would never interview a Nazi singer, or a person who praised Islamic State or religious violence,” he argued.

Even if you accept that Yasin and Dree Low were never fully fledged gang members themselves, arguably, by turning a real-life conflict into a crime soap opera followed avidly by teenagers across Sweden, their music raised the stakes for the actual participants.

“The rappers write lyrics about each other. We have impulsive boys who are easily offended,” argued Gunnar Appelgren, another Stockholm police gang expert. “Now there is a culture that focuses on violence for the sake of violence.”

In an interview last month with the YouTuber Victor de Almeida, Yasin acknowledged that Swedish gangster rap did have a relationship to crime.

“There’s no smoke without fire, they have their point. Stuff happens out there, we can’t deny that,” he said of the criticism. But he said the idea that banning gangster rap would bring an end to the violence was “bullshit”.

“To lay the blame on people and shout things right and left, you can do that, but how much it will lead to any actual change is another thing,” he said. “I’m not a politician, so I don’t know. But I just notice that we aren’t getting any more youth centres [fritidsgårdar] as a result of music publishers stopping giving prizes to rappers and people with convictions.”

In his new album, Pistoler, Poesi, och Sex (Pistols, Poetry and Sex), Yasin claims to be reporting a reality rather than glorifying it.

“I write what I see, but they would rather criticise what I write than criticise what I see,” he raps in the track Rap är ingen konst (Rap is not an artform).

The SVT journalist Diamant Salihu, in his book on the Rinkeby conflict Tills alla dör, agrees that gangster rap reflects an underlying reality rather than causes it.

He traces the Rinkeby conflict back to the decision in 2007 to fuse Rinkeby with the much richer nearby Kista district. Over the next few years, the offices of the Swedish Public Employment Service, the post office, the high street banks and the police all closed down.

“However much opinion-makers criticise their texts glorifying violence, however much the artists themselves promote their lifestyle, it doesn’t change the underlying reasons,” Salihu writes. “The more people I speak with, the more investigations I read, the clearer the connection between changes in society, closures [of government agencies], and poor school results which lead to exclusion, in the wave of violence we are seeing today.”

Rap, ghetto fashion, and the way young men pose in photos with weapons and luxury cars is “just a desperate attempt to make meaning out of the chaos”, he argues. “It’s a way of trying to take control of a hopeless situation”.

The main driver of gun violence in Sweden’s suburbs, Salihu told The Local in the Sweden in Focus podcast is the huge amount of money that can be earned from distributing and selling drugs.

“Everybody that buys a gram of cocaine or cannabis should know that their money is being used to buy the bullets and guns that are killing people in Stockholm,” he said.

As Yasin himself writes in his 2020 song “Pistol Whip”, a collaboration with his friend Jaffar Byn, the whole of Swedish society bears some of the responsibility.

“You asked us for this gangster shit. Supply and demand, motherfucker.”

Death toll

Mehdi Sachit (Dumle, Alawee) This 27-year-old rapper, known as Dumle, was shot dead in Rinkeby, one of the most troubled suburbs of Stockholm, on Christmas Day 2022. Sachit was reportedly with the 19-year-old rapper Nils Grönberg, known as ”Einár”, when he was murdered in October 2021. He was a convicted rapist and he was thought to have a central role in the Dödspatrullen gang. Find his track Våldsbenägen, meaning “prone to violence” here.
Nils Grönberg (Einár). Grönberg, was shot dead at a distance of 1.5m in a gang execution in October 2021. The son of the prize-winning Swedish actress Lena Nilsson, Grönberg ended up collaborating with rappers with tough backgrounds in Stockholm’s crime-ridden suburbs, breaking through in 2019 with the song Katten i Trakten, which won the Guld-priset, or “Gold prize” from Swedish Radio’s P3 channel for best song. In 2020, he was kidnapped and forced to perform for humiliating videos.
Ziad Elhassan (Debenz). This rapper from Borås, was shot dead in 2020, four years after surviving another shooting.
Rozh Shamal (Rozh). This rapper was shot and killed, aged 23, in an attack near his apartment in Blackeberg, Stockholm. Find his track Dras till problem, “Drawn to problems”, here.
Robin Cortas (Roro/RC). Cortas was shot dead in Varbergsgatan, Helsingborg, southern Sweden, aged 25 in June 2019.
Aiman Qabli, Aiman. Qabi was stabbed to death in an underpass at midnight in Alby, south of Stockholm, back in 2015.

Serving time

At least six of the big names in Swedish gangster rap — Dree Low, Yasin, Jaffar Byn, 1.Cuz, Haval, and Z.E — have been in and out of prison. They have often, indeed, been behind bars at the same time as their songs have topped the streaming lists on Spotify.

Salah Abdi Abdulle (Dree Low). Abdulle was arrested in 2021 on suspicion of robbing a shop of 5,000 kronor worth of snus, cigarettes and sweets, and in November 2021 sentenced to a year in prison. He claimed he had an agreement with the owner of the shop to take goods on credit, and he certainly didn’t need the money. In April 2022, he was charged again, this time for weapons offences, and sentenced to another year in prison that November.
Jafar Ahmed Sadik (Jaffar Byn). Sadik was sentenced to four years in prison in 2017 for serious weapons crimes, and released in October 2020.
Yasin Abdullahi Mahamoud (Yasin). Mahamoud was jailed for weapons offences in May 2018 and released in November 2019, after which he was arrested again in July 2021 for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of Einár, sentenced and finally released in December 2021.
Haval Khalil (Haval). Khalil was jailed in November 2021 at the same time as Mahamoud for involvement in the Einár kidnapping, and, like Mahamoud, released that December.
Abas Abdikarim Bakar (1.Cuz). 1.Cuz served two years in prison, launching his career after his release in 2018.
Jozef Wojciechowicz (Z.E.). Wojciechowicz was jailed for robbery in 2017, like 1.Cuz only launching his career on his release. Wojciechowicz broke through with a collaboration with the singer Cherrie.

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