Food & Drink

• You’re going to want avoid eating in restaurants as much as possible if money is a big concern for you. I’ve found Swedish restaurants to be expensive. There are many great restaurants in Sweden, but higher quality comes at a price. Learn to cook instead! If you have to eat out for a meal, choose lunch over dinner because a lot of restaurants have lunch specials that offer huge savings over the dinner prices.
•  Since we’ve already established that you probably won’t be eating at restaurants as much as you might be accustomed to, familiarize yourself with the weekly ads from grocery stores (i.e. ICA, Lidl, Hemköp, Coop, etc.). These fliers are easily accessible on each of their respective websites, and I’ve found some great specials on various types of meat. Also, it is advisable to buy your groceries in the suburbs or away from the city center if possible. Unfortunately, the most convenient stores are typically the most expensive.
• Alcohol is more expensive in Sweden than in most other countries in the world. If you’re planning on going out to a bar and having more than a couple of drinks in a night, it would be a good idea to have a pre-party somewhere. This will save you a ton of money over the course of time because the prices at Systembolaget are much more affordable than any bar.

Entertainment

• Many museums are either free or have a reduced entrance fee for students and/or youth. In Gothenburg, the Konstmuseum (art museum), Röhsska Museum (design museum), Natural History Museum, and the City Museum are completely free for people who are under the age of 26!

Entrance to the Gothenburg Art Museum. Photo: B. Seward

• I know I keep touting the archipelago in Gothenburg, but it’s completely free to access and explore with the purchase of a Västtrafik card or ticket. It’s an easy and fun way to cheaply spend an entire day when the weather is cooperative.
• Certain movies are 50% off at SF Bio on Monday – Thursday. The selection of movies rotates weekly, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.  There are many other deals on the Mecenat website that will be available to you once you possess a Swedish student card.

A student ID card similar to this one offers many opportunities to save money if you know where to look. Photo: B. Seward.

Transportation & Exercise

• Unless you’re really into heavy weight training or other specialty types of exercise, I don’t see much of a reason to buy a gym membership in the late spring, summer, or early fall since the parks in Sweden are outstanding. There are dozens of running trails and lots of pick-up games of soccer, volleyball, etc. in the park.

A running trail right next to the Chalmers Johanneberg campus. Photo: B. Seward.

• Buy a bike. Use it year-round if you’re adventurous. Despite the winter weather I’ve noticed that a surprisingly high number of people commute via bicycle for the entire year. If you either can’t or don’t want to buy a bike, then public transportation (Västtrafik in Gothenburg) is still pretty affordable for a student since the price is discounted from the normal adult price, but the cost will add up over time.
• If you’re traveling out of town, the largest train company in Sweden, SJ, offers special discounts for students and anyone under the age of 26. Additionally, tickets are typically cheaper if they are booked far in advance of your travel date, so advance planning (~90 days) is rewarded financially.

Scenery in Slottskogen. Photo by Lauren Meiss.

The first cookout of the spring. Photo by Lauren Meiss.

Apart from the nice views and activities occurring from all sides, Slottskogen is a great place to have a cookout since it has special trash receptacles for used charcoal and single-use grills. Also, from what I’ve been told, alcohol is allowed within this particular park, which is a nice option to have on a warm spring day. I’m not sure of the actual laws in the park, so don’t go blaming me if the police fine you for having an open container. Just be responsible and clean up all of your trash and you shouldn’t have any problems.

The third or fourth cookout of the season. I’m starting to lose count now. Photo by Brett Seward.

It might be hard to believe, but by my count there are approximately 18 hours of daylight now in Gothenburg. I’ve noticed the first signs of light around 4 AM recently (don’t ask me what I was doing awake at the time of day) and there are usually traces of light until 10 PM. The crazy thing is that we still have another month of increasing daylight hours before Midsummer, so the situation is only going to worsen (or improve depending on your outlook). And Gothenburg is situated fairly far south in Sweden, so I can only imagine what the north is like this time of the year. While the increased light is awesome for outdoor activities, it has made it harder for me to sleep in on the weekends (I am cognizant of the fact that this is a first-world problem). The sun starts telling me it’s time to wake up well before I have any aspirations of leaving my bed, but so what if my Cirdcadian rhythm is all messed up? The spring and summer aren’t meant for sleeping, right?

Sunset in Slottskogen. Photo by Lauren Meiss.

In unrelated news, this past week I made a great discovery: the music room in the Chalmers Student Union. Well it wasn’t exactly a discovery since I’ve known of its existence for over 9 months, but it was my first personal encounter and use of the space, so that has to count for something.

The music room in the Chalmers Student Union. Photo by Brett Seward.

I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two pianos in this little room hidden away on the second floor. They are both a little battered and out of tune, but I’m never going to complain when I have what essentially amounts to unlimited access to a Steinway piano. Scheduling time in the room is incredibly easy too since it’s all done through an online booking system. I have a digital piano back in the US that I’ve just recently realized that I was starting to miss, so I’m going to try to start playing a few times a week to get back into the swing of things musically. I’m kicking myself for not taking advantage of this resource earlier on in my time here, but better late than never I suppose.

This weekend I made another trip to the countryside! Here’s how the last few days have gone…

Thursday
Lots of thesis work (whilst looking out to a green field with Lake Mälaren in the background), followed by a 5Km walk around the countryside (think pin drop silence except for the humming of a tractor and the twittering of birds, think the smell of grass and blooming flowers, think of nothing and you’ll feel how I felt…totally relaxed!) The evening came with the smell of grilled sausages (aka hot dogs). This made me think of a school trip where we camped in wooden huts, and sat outside around a fire and ate hot dogs straight off the grill! Anything that takes me back to fun times had on school trips is a good thing in my books!

                                   No bad place to write one’s thesis!

Friday
Lots of thesis work again! But this time I was able to look forward to an even longer walk: 8Km! Oh such fun again! This time it was the changing scenery that I loved the most, from forests with trees so high that looking up made your head spin to vast expanses with nothing but rolling field after rolling field! The evening was, yes you guessed it, grilled food! This time grilled steak together with Bernaise sauce, salad, sweet chilli sauce, buttery asparagas and roasted potatoes! Let’s just say it was heaven on a plate! The evening didn’t end here! We decided to take a car trip around the countryside, along the way we saw deers, sheep, horses and even a rabbit hopping cheekily over some fields! We caught a glimpse of local history with a ruin stone! We saw the sun setting around the clouds! We marvelled at the beautiful ripples being made by folk returning home on their motor boat! We enjoyed every minute just taking in the scenes!

The future’s bright!

Saturday
Today is actually the sunniest day here yet! And all I can think of is ice cream! Our plan for today a trip to the local ice cream parlour!!

Hope your Summer has started well! As you can see thesis writing for me is being perfectly balanced with sunny days, grilled food and countryside fun times!

This is the end goal. And I’ve tried to make it impossible (or at least more difficult) for you to steal my identity from this picture. Photo by (and of) Brett Seward.

I’m going to briefly walk through the steps outlined here on Migrationsverket’s (Migration Office’s) website. I’ll attempt to make them as easy to understand as possible since the amount of information on the website can be a little overwhelming. I actually just went through this same process online a few days in order to renew my permit for another year so I don’t kicked out of the country before I finish my degree. That would be tragic. Anyway, paraphrasing from the website:

• A passport: scan the pages with your name, picture and expiration date
• Acceptance letter from your Swedish university
• Document of health insurance that is valid in Sweden (only necessary if you’ll be in Sweden for less than one year)
• Documents showing any/all scholarships you have been awarded to study in Sweden. Make sure the amount you will be receiving is explicitly shown on the document.
• A bank statement in English showing that you have enough money to support yourself in Sweden. Migrationsverket defines this as having 7,300 SEK per month, or enough for 10 months per year (i.e. 73,000 SEK in total) if you are planning to stay for at least one calendar year. The funds must be in your own name and account  and cannot be shared with another person, parent, or friend. OBS: the required amount of funds increases if you are bringing a spouse or any children along with you.
• A credit card to pay the 1000 SEK fee (which may or may not be necessary depending on where you’re from)
• If you are a fee-paying student, then pay your first semester tuition fees before the stated deadline (i.e. June 15 for the fall 2013 semester). Your residence permit application could potentially be halted or canceled altogether if you fail to do so!

I would strongly advise that you take the time to scan and digitally organize all of these documents before beginning the online application. It will make the actual application process much quicker and less stressful in the long run.

It’s supposed to take approximately 3 months for Migrationsverket to make a decision on your residence permit, but like I said before, it’s best to play it safe and apply as early as possible. Like most government dealings, it can be a pretty bureaucratic process. You will want to have ample time to answer any questions they may have for you and provide additional information/documentation if necessary.

After your residence permit has been approved, there is still one last step to complete: getting your fingerprints and picture taken. If you require a visa to travel to Sweden, then you will need to complete this important step at an embassy or consulate in your home country. Your residence permit card will then be mailed to you in your home country before you depart for Sweden. If you are lucky like me and don’t need a visa to travel to Sweden, then you can just show up at the nearest Migrationsverket office soon after arriving in Sweden to complete the biometrics. Your residence permit card will then be mailed to your local address in Sweden as soon as it is ready.

A “common” sight in your new home. Photo by Brett Seward.

Once you get your residence permit you are probably not quite done with filling out government paperwork. If you’re planning to study in Sweden for longer than a year, then you will want to stop by ‘Skatteverket’ (Tax Office) soon after arriving in Sweden in order to apply for a ‘personnummer’ (personal number). The personal number is basically a social security number that is necessary for an individual to obtain in order to be eligible for many important things, such as employment and healthcare… grown up types of things. A personal number is absolutely essential if you have any long-term plans of assimilating into Swedish society. As far as I know, it is impossible to get a job without one. The good news is that you are eligible to work with your education-based residence permit; there should be no need to apply for a special work permit once you have received your residence permit. Like pretty much any government office, the earlier you arrive at Skatteverkert, the sooner your queue number will be called and the quicker you can get out the door of the rather dull, but completely necessary, tax office.

Any questions? Did I forget something important? Let me know down below in the comments, and I’ll do my best to get it sorted out. Lycka till!

Several of my pictures from Cortège are displayed after the jump. The captions below each picture provide a brief explanation of what the heck is going on in each scene. I also included a few shots I took while on a walk around Gothenburg with a friend (shoutout to Michael for visiting!) on May 1st, which is Sweden’s Labor Day. Unlike April 30th, May 1st is actually a rather serious political day where many people take to the streets to voice their support of their political parties and beliefs.

I apologize for the mobile phone quality of most of these pictures, but the best camera is the one you have with you! There are some higher quality images available here on Göteborg Daily’s website.

In addition to my experience in Gothenburg, I have heard firsthand from friends in attendance that Uppsala and Lund have insanely fun Valborg events too. So if you’re a student who likes to have a good time outside celebrating spring amongst your peers, then get yourself to one of these cities on April 30th!

To start with cook the rice as you normally would. When it is done add some salt, vinegar, and a little lime juice. Lay out the nori and add a layer of rice. Then add whatever sliced ingredients you wish. You will end up with something looking like this:

Now you cut it up into slices and eat! Simple, right? To be honest I don’t know if this is the exact recipe for making sushi, but this is what we came up with. What fun is making food if you can’t be creative?

The dental system in Sweden differs a little bit compared to the States. Back home if I had an emergency with my tooth (that was not bad enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room) I would make an “emergency appointment” with my local dentist and they would usually move their schedule around a bit to fit me in right away. That is not possible in Sweden. Though there may be exceptions, the appointments set by the local dentist are rigid. I cannot simply walk in and demand to by seen right away. Instead I had to go to an “Akut tandvård”.

When I arrived I went up to the welcome window to present my information, and they gave me a number and pointed to the waiting room. I sat down and waited along with about 5 people ahead of me in the queue and I was to wait until my number was called. Waiting took 2 hours, though I have heard when the clinic is busy you can be waiting for up to 4+ hours, so make sure to bring something to do if you ever find yourself in that situation. The trick is to come early. The earlier you show up, the less waiting time you will have. When it was my turn to see one of the dentists, I told him about my pain and he took an x-ray. This showed us that my wisdom teeth were impacted and I had to take them out sooner rather than later. Though there was not anything he could do for the pain (I guess Sweden is much stricter about handing out pain medication compared to the States), we made an appointment for me to come back and extract my wisdom teeth once and for all. For anyone’s reference, the full price for the extraction range’s between 1000-2500 SEK depending on the complexity of the extraction.

The quality of dental work here is similar to the States. It really will depend on the dentist him/herself and how much effort is put into the work. I was lucky to have a very skilled and engaging dentist.

After a month I am happy to say I have taken out the trouble makers and never have to worry about the random pain events again.

If you are interested in making an appointment or visiting a dentist I recommend you start here: https://www.folktandvardenstockholm.se/

The akut tandvård by St Eriks sjukhus – Photo by: Kazem Behbahani

• Accommodation: 3000+ SEK. Accommodation is the hardest thing to find when coming to Sweden because it requires you being in a queue for some time and may be the reason that some people won’t come. So if you are able to find a place to stay consider yourself lucky. On the low end you can be paying about 3000 however you will probably will be sharing a flat or a corridor. The more you are able to pay, the better your accommodation will be.
• Transportation: 560 SEK (student price). Getting around Stockholm is very easy with the public transportation system. You are able to buy a monthly SL pass that will give you unlimited access to that system for the month. For anyone new to Stockholm I recommend getting it so that you have a good chance to explore. If you are looking to save money though you might not have to get this pass if you live close to school and perhaps a grocery store. Some people also buy bikes a ride those around during the warm months and only buy a pass for a month or two in the winter.
• Food: 1200 SEK. This amount will depend on what exactly you eat and will vary. 1200 is the value that I spend on average a month for food.
• Insurance. Remember you have to get insurance, both home and health/dental. If you are a student find out what insurance you can get abroad.
• Phone: 150 SEK. I have a smartphone and use Google Maps a lot to get around so I had to make sure I got a plan with data on it. There are plenty of companies to choose from. The most popular one for students is Comviq. I have a prepaid plan from Telenor. I pay 150 SEK for 3000 minutes, 3000 texts, and 500 MB of data for 30 days. I have never reached any of those limits so I though this was the best plan for me.

Putting everything together, at the very least you will be spending about 5000 SEK per month living here. That does not include things such as: eating out, buying books, or any extra expenditures that you have. I hope this information is useful for anyone considering on coming over to Sweden.

Photo of an ice cream cone and Mehsum Rupani at Kista Centrum – Photo by: Kazem Behbahani

As I have mentioned in previous entries, my Room Acoustics class had the challenging task of designing a hypothetical opera house for a competition in Montreal. The two architecture students I was teamed up with produced the layout, CAD drawings, and renderings of the entire complex, while I focused primarily on the acoustical design and analysis of the various rooms. We spent the week leading up to the submission deadline completely engrossed in the project in the architecture studio since it was a re-exam week and we didn’t have any other scheduled classes or assignments. [Tangent: The idea of re-exams was novel to me when I first started studying at Chalmers. I personally don’t agree with the concept of a re-exam because I believe that it makes more sense to retake an entire course and not just the exam over and over again until a passing grade is achieved, but that could just be because I wasn’t used to this system before moving to Sweden. Regardless, I don’t plan on having to take a re-exam any time soon. I probably just cursed myself by writing that!] But anyway, despite spending the entire week working on the project, we still had to pull an all-nighter in the Architecture building the day before the project was due. Apparently this is a regular occurrence for a lot of architecture students around deadlines, but for me spending 30-some straight hours in the same building was a bizarre experience – fun and team building in some ways, yet hellishly exhausting and frustrating in others.

The war room for the week. Photo by Brett Seward.

The poster was due on a Friday and the following Monday morning we had a final critique with our professors and a panel of professional architects. Our design concept was inspired by a famous Swedish poem/opera by Harry Martinson called Aniara, which is a sci-fi story about a shuttle that becomes lost in space. It was rather difficult to condense three large posters worth of technical information into a three-minute speech, but we eventually managed to do so.

Beautiful rendering of our opera’s cross-section created by my teammate. Credit to Samuel Eliasson.

Each of the 20 groups participating in the class presented its proposal to the panel, but in the end our project wasn’t one of the three finalists selected to represent Chalmers at the competition in Montreal. If I’m being honest, I was pretty disappointed initially because I’m a competitive person and a little bit of a sore loser when things don’t go my way. In this case I had a hard time accepting failure since I had invested so much time and effort into this singular pursuit… but I got over it after a couple of days, and now I can absolutely say that the selected projects and people were all very deserving, both on the merits of their work and on a personal level too. Chalmers’ reputation in acoustics and architecture will really have the opportunity to shine this summer in Montreal with these high-quality projects carrying the torch for the rest of the class.

Poster critique. Photo by Brett Seward.

After sleeping in on Saturday, I went to celebrate my newfound freedom with a daytrip to the archipelago. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the archipelago is my favorite place in Gothenburg. It’s naturally beautiful, quiet and relaxing, and very affordable since the ferries that connect the islands to the mainland are included within the primary zone of the Gothenburg public transit system (Västtrafik). I plan to spend a lot of time island hopping this summer and would definitely encourage anyone visiting the city for more than a day to journey over to the skärgården via Saltholmen to check out the scenery.

En route to the archipelago. Photo by Brett Seward.

Cortège is coming… more information below. Photo by Brett Seward.

So if you’ve made past the first paragraph without becoming thoroughly depressed about studying abroad, then rest assured when I say that the new friendships, academic opportunities, and experiences that engender personal growth more than make up for the down times. Spring weather has finally arrived in Gothenburg, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. It has been fun to watch the city awake from a somewhat self-imposed state of winter hibernation. People are back out in the streets outside of small cafés, enjoying picnics in the not-quite-yet-green parks, and taking day trips to the peaceful archipelago. I hope (and believe) that the dark remnants of winter will be quickly surpassed by the light and life of summer.

I’ve been trying to spend more time outdoors in order to properly celebrate the sudden increase in daylight and sunshine. Yesterday was international Record Store Day, and thankfully a lot of my classmates are into music as much as I am; it’s a nice perk of studying acoustics I suppose. Gothenburg has quite a few respectable little record shops with varying inventories and musical focuses situated throughout the city, and exploring these stores was a great way to spend the nicest Saturday of the year to date.

The first stop for Record Store Day. Photo by Brett Seward.

A DJ and free coffee further down the street. Photo by Brett Seward.

After finishing up our music shopping and checking out the scene along Avenyn, we wandered back southward to Chalmers to check out the Cortège construction site. Cortège is an annual parade in Gothenburg and, from my understanding, is organized and operated solely by Chalmers students. It takes place every year on April 30^th, or Valborgsmässoafton (Walpurgis Night). May 1^st is a red day (public holiday) in Sweden, so I think a lot of the people in the city come out to watch the evening’s festivities since they don’t have to work the following day.

Cortège construction site at Chalmers. Photo by Brett Seward.

I’m honestly really not sure what to expect to see during Cortège, but I will be sure to report back here in a couple of weeks with the details. Yesterday I watched a bunch of students in white lab coats (sponsored by Pripps Blå) saw the top off of an old station wagon to make the base of their float for the parade, so now my expectations are high to say the least!