The Past
One year ago yesterday, my fiancé and I pulled up outside an apartment a few kilometres south of Stockholm at 11am. We’d just spent the last four days driving through equally driving rain from the UK through France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. We’d camped each night in the rain. We were wet, our tent was wet, our stuff was wet.
We breathed a sigh of relief. We were happy to finally arrive, even through our journey had been gruelling but a lot of fun. We’d stopped by the Nürburgring and the world’s largest model railway on the way, both of which were amazing. We took a 15 minute break before hauling all of our stuff up three flights of stairs into our apartment.
We’d just moved to Sweden. We were both nervous and excited about the time ahead, comforting ourselves with the fact that we could “just move back to England” if it didn’t work out.
The Present
One year later, and we’ve just moved into another flat — one with no maximum term, which we’re happy about since we can stay here for decades if we want to. Both my fiancé and I have jobs at Spotify, which we’re both enjoying more than we thought a day job could be enjoyed.
Living in Sweden is completely normal now. We get up and go to work, then come home again. Drive to the supermarket to do our shopping. Have LAN parties with our friends. Living in the UK seems like a distant dream — not a good one, at times.
Occasionally I’ll be doing something thoroughly normaland the enormity of the last year will smack me in the face. Last time it happened, I was driving, in my Volvo, to IKEA. A completely normal, British thing to do. As I was driving, I noticed that the forest was nothing but pine trees, which I thought was odd. Then, I remembered. “The forest is nothing but pine trees because I live in fucking Sweden!” A smile spread uncontrollably across my face as I remembered the year and a half long buildup to moving, then one day packing as much stuff into the car as we could and starting the trip across Europe.
I still can’t decide if what we did was “big” or not — I’ve met quite a few people who travel between countries a lot, so if you ask them what we did is no big deal. Then again, I remember talking to some of our friends in the UK before we left and trying to convey to their confused-looking faces why on earth we’d move away from the town where we’d grown up, much less the country we live in — if you ask them, what we did would probably be an enormous thing.
The Future
After all the uncertainty and worry that it’d be a disaster, we’ve only been here for twelve months and I think we’re here to stay. Between my fiancé and I, we have around 48 years of collective experience of living in the UK and, well, we both were kind of expecting to miss the UK at least a bit. Personally, I miss a few of my friends but otherwise wouldn’t care if I never set foot in the country again. My fiancé is the same, albeit also having a tightly-knit family in the UK. Sweden is by no means perfect, but we seem to get on with the Swedish way of living much more than the UK way.
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Sweden is beautiful. Of course, the UK is beautiful in places too, but the following snapshots were taken within 30km of the capital city. Try that around London!
