I haven’t written a lot about the place I’ve been visiting. Stockholm. The city, like its people, is tidy, precise, beautiful, homogeneous at it’s core and somewhat threatened by change. It’s such a livable place that you can basically wander from park to park island to island for years and just feel good. You see people with handicaps fully accepted to society and public space accommodating them by default. The average Swede seems to be athletic and upbeat, at a club you have all parts of society from the business type with gelled hair to the very alternative “pandas”, the local variant of goths which seem to comprise a variety of lifestyle choices, both sexual and demographical. People are not recklessly drunk and just like Japan, this country has strong social pressure in the form of “Jante”. The concept is interesting because it is actually a satirical term that came about when a dane, Aksel Sandemose, wrote about his small backwards hometown Nykobing. He made fun of what we call Kleingeister in German, small minds that can only see more achieving people with jealousy and resentment. The entire Scandinavian community though has taken the rules those villagers were governed by as an accurate summary of good behaviour. People don’t brag, exaggerate, impose themselves on others. Society feels very egalitarian. And like in Japan my friends here are quick to point out that their unwritten system is sometimes holding them back, but they wouldn’t like to change it under any circumstances. For the simple tourist it’s a pleasure to go about one’s days ere, although I can’t see below the surface. From a language learner’s perspective the fact that all Swedes speak English is interesting, because it stems from the fact that their television broadcasts everything in the original language with subtitles. Immersion learning, language exposure by interest. The language seems to be undergoing extensive simplification, with politeness forms being abolished in the 60s and even formal speech being foregone in favour of fluent, snappy vernacular, be it in everyday conversations or serious newspapers.