Swedish Summers

Summer Vacationers

They're not kidding when they say Swedes are on vacation during the summer! Salaried employees start the year with 25 days of annual leave whereas Americans earn their leave throughout the year. Most Swedes take 3 to 4 weeks of vacation during July and August. Many companies require employees to take at least 3 weeks off during that time and many places actually close down.

We're coming across more restaurants we can't check out because of their stängt (closed) signs. Our corner bakery just had a half-off closing sale because they shut down for the summer. The buses and remaining open places away from tourist areas are noticeably less crowded. It's weird that the nicer weather means there's less people around enjoying it. We still see many people in the parks and along the waterways soaking up the summer sun but it seemed like there were more people around last weekend.

I've heard many people in Stockholm have places in the country and they head out there to enjoy the weather. There's also a lot of people that travel to other countries during this time and I don't fully understand that one. The weather here is nice now with a recent high of 81F feeling very hot without any air conditioning. It's been around mid-70s on average since we got here so I don't understand the Swedes missing the few good months of the year here instead of escaping in the winter.

We plan on doing our traveling during the less desirable months so we can get away from a dreary winter. That's our plan at least even though the first thing we're working on booking is the Ice Hotel near the Arctic circle in Sweden. It looks like the rest of Europe picks now to swarm Swedish tourist spots and museums so maybe we'll save some of those local places for later in the year.

First Work Week and Gamla Stan (Old Town)

I started work this week and am already using a good variety of the training they gave us. I've done a bit of everything including systems administration, communications, and tipping fiber connections on a new network cable run. Tipping fiber isn't something that comes up often, but I was lucky enough to get to do it again in my first work week. I've already been in some other things they didn't teach us, but overall I would have to say the initial training at FSI was well matched for starting work as a newbie. Probably only my classmates are interested in these work bits, so let's get to some fun parts of living in Sweden.

Arrived In Sweden

We arrived in Sweden on Friday and it's been a non-stop whirlwind of a weekend getting settled in and acclimated to the new time and country. Above is one of the many graffiti marks I found during our walks even though crime isn't a big issue here. I'll start this post with the flights.

Pets Are Gone And We're Next

My wife finished all of the pet work and it was definitely some work. Our dog and cat had to be RFID tagged before their latest rabies shot. That was already done. Then they had to go to the vet within 10 days of departure to fill out the Swedish forms which was done on Monday. It can't be done any earlier so they know the info is as current as possible. Read my friend Brian's post about Pet Panic on how the deadlines for India are in conflict with the normal usage of a calendar.

Hmm, I wonder if my phone's NFC capability can read their RFID tags... a Google search tells me I can't because they operate on different frequencies. Darn, I wanted to do my own "cat scan" when we get there to verify they didn't spray paint a replacement cat. :-)

The vet was done early on Monday because the airline wanted the vet's paperwork earlier than when they were dropped off to fly. They didn't tell her this until late last week after already talking to them several times about what was needed. She faxed the paperwork to British Airways for a pre-check where they said it needed a correction so it was back to the vet to fix it. She tried emailing them a scanned copy but their email was down (in 2014?!?) so she had to revert to faxing it (in 2014?!?).

Tuesday was spent driving to Richmond to get USDA approvals on the paperwork in person. Scanned or faxed copies aren't adequate for whatever archaic reason. FedEx wouldn't have been quick enough for us and we didn't trust that there wouldn't be a problem with giving the paperwork back or losing it. She had an appointment but there was still an hour or so of waiting before they handed the paperwork back with their USDA approvals.

Our flight is this evening with about 7 hours to London and another 2 1/2 to Stockholm. Our layover is only an hour, which isn't long enough for the European Union entry processing of our pets. They wouldn't let us carry them on the plane with us so their flight plans deviated from ours. They left on a flight last night and will be on a different flight to Stockholm tomorrow morning arriving about an hour before we do. It was around $1,200 to ship them both this way.

I'd like to imagine that they're currently touring London with the breeze in their fur on top of a doubledecker bus. However, given that the cat was already trashing her crate trying to get out because of the car ride, I can only imagine that they're not having a good time at all. Hopefully there's nice people in London taking care of them as they process them. Once these pets are no longer with us then I seriously doubt we'll continue to have pets in the Foreign Service.

This morning we're packing back up our suitcases, wandering around here for one last time, and then heading to the airport to go catch up with our pets!

Homeless and Carless - 4 Days To Go

We're homeless and carless! OK, we're not literally homeless because we're staying in a hotel and we're not truly carless because we rented a car. My wife still needs to run our dog and cat to a predeparture vet appointment. She also needs to drive down to Richmond to get approval from USDA for pet export to Sweden. I rented a car from the airport so I can just turn it in on our way out.

We're not paying for our own housing at this point and I don't know when I'll have to do that again. It's a nice feeling. We have to pay for the rental car because we need it here but then we can just pay for buses and subways in Stockholm. It's a nice feeling that we won't have any surprising car repairs in our future. The only things we have to worry about right now are ourselves and the stuff in our suitcases.

I made it to our old place in time to see them pack the last of the storage items. It was kind of weird watching that stuff get carried away. We don't know how many years or decades it'll be until we live in the states again and request the return of those storage items. It'll be like getting a bunch of presents and memories of the past when we finally reopen those old boxes. It's like storing things up in an attic or a neglected closet except we won't be able to pull things out anytime we feel like it.

Selling Cars

We didn't have the time to properly clean up, advertise, and show our cars to sell them. It's kind of hard when you're actively using them and lack free time to deal with the entertainment that private buyers provide. I also worried about a buyer messing up the paperwork and not transferring the title. It may sound like a weird worry but my dad sold an old car when I was young and the new owner didn't transfer the title. The police called him a few months later to say he needed to remove his broken down car from the side of the highway or they'd impound it. He explained it wasn't his anymore and they could do whatever they wanted with it.

I want every aspect of Virginia residency gone so they won't have any rationale for taxing my income after we leave. This helps reestablish Texas residency. They were older cars and long paid off so I think we've used our money's worth. I didn't mind just getting the trade-in value as long as it's quick, easy, and relatively fair. If they were newer cars with loans on them then we'd probably have to go with private buyers to recoup the money in them.

There are some easy car buying services around here including CarMax, which is pretty much all over the country at this point. We previously bought a vehicle at CarMax and it was a good experience so I thought of them for selling our cars. Here's an article that explains how CarMax does so much volume which allows them to provide better offers to certain kinds of sellers: Should You Sell Your Car At CarMax? Last week I took the better one of our cars to another place and CarMax in Reston to compare their offers. CarMax was the better offer by $500. The offer was only valid for 7 days but they ended up appraising it at the same amount again today which was almost 2 weeks later.

Both of the cars had been in accidents which hurts their resale value. CarMax has a very streamlined operation with no haggle prices on buying or selling. They inspect them and put the results in a computer that also gets the accident records. Their system gives them pricing based on actual demand for that vehicle in that condition so it isn't something made up by the appraiser. Apparently it's fairly accurate for them to keep tight profit margins as they sell lots of cars to buyers and auctions. We did get around the blue book trade-in value for both of them after about 2 hours of waiting. There were several people in line ahead of us, otherwise we might have been in and out with our checks in about an hour!

I'm sure we could have made more money in a private sale but then we'd have to do all of the work to make that successful and lined up with our needs and departure. This was the easy way out for us. That's another major task done today and one less thing to worry about as we leave Thursday. Just 4 more days and a wake-up!

Predeparture Allowance - 9 Days To Go

We're all packed up and living in a hotel now since this is the start of our 10 day predeparture allowance. The movers don't come until Thu and Fri but I want the full use of my predeparture allowance. I haven't been collecting per diem as a local hire so I'm taking advantage of the one allowance I do get during training. It gets us out of the chaos of our apartment to a simpler environment. We can better figure out if we've forgotten to pack anything this way. We'll also stage things better for the movers instead of being organized for living there.

Most of my classmates have been living in temporary furnished lodging and collecting per diem since February so this is old news to them. One interesting tidbit about their per diem is it drops over time to 50% at 61 days and 25% at 121 days. The State Dept lodging program companies take this into account so people don't have to make up the difference. I don't understand the logic for providing per diem but then cutting it over time but that's the system. Meanwhile, I've collected 0% per diem over the same timeframe just because I already lived in the local area when I was hired. That's the rules even though we sold our house over 2 months ago and needed temporary lodging like everyone else.

My non-local hire classmates also received 10 days of predeparture allowance but it was for any temporary lodging expenses prior to arriving for training, so hardly anyone knew about it to properly take advantage of it. Many people tried to stay cheaply with family and friends because they didn't know their hotel and food expenses would be reimbursed for up to 10 days. It's definitely a big challenge for new hires to try to figure out what will be reimbursed when they haven't even inprocessed to the job.

Housing Pictures > A Thousand Words

The adage of a picture is worth a thousand words minimizes the true value of a picture in my opinion. Maybe it doesn't take into account inflation since it's an old phrase. One set of pictures I try to take during a move is a visual inventory of our stuff. Another useful set of pictures is what the nice housing people at post can provide.

Visual Inventory

We didn't have digital cameras when we first moved with the military. Who wants to mess with developing film or the expense of Polaroids for household stuff? We only had the inventory sheets on which the moving companies always checked off that every side of our stuff had marks and scratches. They also wrote in that they couldn't verify if electronics worked even if they just saw me unplug the working TV. I forgot to take pictures for our short local move from the house to the apartment so there are some new scratches here and there. It's mostly old furniture so we don't care about that as much as things going missing or arriving broken.

I quickly wandered around the apartment with my phone's camera and they're automatically saved to Google cloud storage. It was the fastest I'd ever taken inventory pictures. I even remembered to get some of the model/serial numbers for the electronics.

Another nice thing about our digital age and buying things online is having a lot of our recent purchases in emails to prove what we bought and how much we paid. I always intend to keep the receipts but can't always find them after I've filed them somewhere. Receipts are definitely good to have with the pictures.

Some people suggest taking videos and describing your things while you do it. That sounds like a bit more work and I don't go too crazy with move preparations. Selected still shots are easier to send to insurance companies instead of cutting down a video or saying "just watch for 20 seconds around the 12 minute mark and look close because it blurs a little as I'm spinning wildly around the room."

Hindsight is 20/20 so I may regret not having a video I can overdub with some sappy remembrance song and describe how everything was horribly destroyed in transit or is forever lost at the bottom of the ocean. Reference this NPR story Lost, Then Found: Shipping Containers On Seafloor. Yep, this is how our belongings make their way overseas...

Provided Apartment Pictures

We're moving into a Stockholm apartment they picked for us and it's hard to see how our stuff fits into it when we've never seen it. This is even more important with Stockholm being one of the few unfurnished posts. They provided an initial set of pictures which mostly consisted of one angle of each room along with a separate list of room dimensions. Some of the rooms could be used for different purposes so it was confusing trying to keep the 2 correlated since I've discovered the names didn't match.

We just got an excellent new set of pictures of various angles in the rooms that were just taken after the current occupants left. This is where a picture is worth way more than a thousand words. I think the value increases exponentially when you have multiple pictures so 3 pictures may really be worth 9,000 words. Does anyone really want to know the exchange rate on multiple pictures to words?

There's a very narrow 3rd bedroom about 6 feet wide that we were going to use for the spare bedroom. However, the dining room has sliding doors that can close it off and I'm told the previous occupants used it as a bedroom. I think it would make for a better guest bedroom. It has a small balcony which means our daughter wants it as her bedroom. There's 2 other big bedrooms to choose from so we'll see.

The living room has 2 areas so it appears we can use the smaller part as the dining area. The narrow bedroom can be demoted to a computer room or storage. I'll post pictures after we move there and replace the sparse temporary furniture with our stuff. Only 14 days to departure!