Now almost a week has passed since I arrived in Sweden.
As being a foreigner living in Sweden, every day is a new discovery, so I thought it’s going to be interesting to start a new category in my blog Life in Sweden.
From time to time, I would like to share some interesting lifestyles and other discoveries in Sweden.
Snow Snow Snow
When it comes to living in a Scandinavian country, you would imagine that there is an uncountable amount of snow.
If you are going to live in the southern part of Sweden, Stockholm, Gothenburg, or Malmö, then the story might be different but the county I live in is very up north called Västerbotten.
Sweden is a vertically long country so the more north you go, the more snow you have.
Even though you research on the Internet in advance and expect that there will be plenty of snow, when you land in the northern part of Sweden, you will get freaked out.
This is the picture of Stockholm at the end of January
And this is a picture of the street in the northern part of Sweden at the end of January.
Depending on where you are in Sweden, the weather can be very different which means that you have to be ready in terms of a proper outfit to be able to survive the hard winter in Sweden, especially in the northern part.
Sweden is a cashless society
The second thing I have realised after spending a week in Sweden is that Sweden is an extremely cashless country.
I have never seen anyone, literally no one, using cash to buy something.
Payment is always cashless and this is actually one of the reasons why I have moved to Sweden.
The cashless society is exactly the ideal society for all minimalists; you don’t need to carry around lots of banknotes or coins, and this is totally minimalism.
So if you come to Sweden to travel or to live, you have to be ready at this point and make sure you have a valid credit card that you can use in Sweden.
It is said that the reason why Sweden became an extremely cashless country is that transporting cash during hard winter time will cost a lot of money and time and Sweden wanted to avoid doing that so that the society became extremely cashless.
Importance of Personal-Number in Sweden
In every country, there’s something or a social number for personal numbers.
It is very important but having some type of personal number in Sweden is so important because if you are without some type of personal number, you can’t even register a membership at the supermarket.
It is very different from what I know in Japan, and I think this is very efficient because, in Sweden, everything is connected to your personal number even the supermarket reward card, so you do not need to carry around so many reward cards with you.
The above article will be interesting for you if you want to do the so-called "human-detox" because Sweden is a great place to do the human-detox and digital detox at the same time.
I will try to publish interesting posts about life in Sweden so if you are interested in what it looks like, please stay tuned.
Thanks for reading.