The most charming thing about moving to a new place are all those new tiny everyday things in your surroundings. Flow of the traffic, getting used to the public transportation network, interesting food in the stores, differently looking people on the streets, the sound of the local language, the scents. You know, all those things to which the locals respond with “What? I’ve never noticed that!” when you mention them.

Most of the things I’ve already gotten used to, although there are still a few  that keep my gerbil running in my cranium. What follows is a medley of both.

All Swedes are blond. This is probably the most often heard generalization about Swedes. Not just by other Europeans, but also by their immediate neighbors such as Finns, for instance. Yes, Swedes are blond. Not all of them, but there are a lot of blonds. But surprisingly not really because of some odd genetic strain or isolated gene, as people like to believe. The reason is much shallower and more mundane: hair dye.

This is a wild guess, but I would say that Swedes are the biggest consumers of blond hair dye in the world. I have not figured out this one yet, but obviously they have been using it persistently enough to make everyone else believe that they are blond by nature. Which leads to another equally wide-spread cosmetological wonder of this land: orange skin.

It’s a bit difficult to comprehend this until you actually see it for yourself, but people in Sweden often have orange skin. It’s a fad. Male, female, young and old, all orange. I guess that geographical location of the country is too far up north for the sun to make the population tan naturally (especially during the winter). So they frequent their private artificial sun, i.e. solarium. Great.

But whatever the reason for their exposure to artificial UV rays, it seems like they don’t like to use the mirrors all that much. For the first few weeks of being here that was probably the weirdest and most uncomphrending novelty for me. Later this switched to picking out the most orange in a group or on the street, but amusement did not cease. Now I’ve gotten used to it so I only turn my head after the really exaggerated specimens, but still it’s fun.

To be continued.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Culture, Sweden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.