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416 pages, Paperback
First published February 6, 2014
'...every year we have had unemployment at 10 per cent.’
‘Which would suggest there is a fixed level of unemployment, irrespective of the level of immigration . . .’
There seemed little point in getting bogged down in statistics – Myrin was hardly likely to have a Damascene epiphany
Several revellers have climbed on to the tables and are dancing gingerly, but with enthusiasm, arms in the air, silly hats akimbo, their shirts still tucked firmly into their shorts. It is time for me to crawl off to a darkened room.
This is Sweden.
This is so not Sweden.
Every race and language has their affirmative 'uh-huhs', their quizzical 'hmmm?s', and their verbal tics, but the Scandinavians seem to have turned them into a key mode of communication.
Throughout all of Scandinavia, gymnasium (high school),graduates celebrate by parading through their home towns on the backs of an assortment of open-aired farm vehicles, trucks and buses, clutching festively chinking carrier bags, and getting off with each other. In Denmark and Sweden, for some reason, they wear vaguely nautical-looking, peaked white caps, which make them look as if they are part of a sailing club.
"[The animosity] is there in the grudging way the Danes react to Swedish economic success and the global domination of IKEA (it hardly help that the Swedish company insists on naming its least dignified products - door mats, and so forth - after Danish towns).
At the University of Helsinki a couple of years ago they had 2,400 applications for the 120 places on the master's programme.
[The Swedes] would rather take the stairs than share a lift...
We don't know how to talk to people we don't know. That's really interesting, because mot people like to talk. In southern Europe it's the best thing in life. I have a French colleague and when she came to Sweden she was convinced it was forbidden to talk on buses. She couldn't find any other explanation.