Coming as I do from Australia, I'm very much a warm weather person, so it is somewhat cruel that fate sent me a man from a country where reindeer roam free and Santa spends the off season.

Today, I'm celebrating the anniversary of my arriving here seven years ago on a dark, cold, grey, misty and blustery winter's day.




When I left Adelaide back then, I remember wondering about how cold it would be in Sweden, though it was low on my list of prioities, as I was filled with both relief at getting everything done in time and anxiety for relocating to the great mostly unknown. It has been an interesting seven years with something new nearly every day.

Relocating from say Adelaide to Melbourne isn't the same as expatriating to a place where everything including the language is utterly different from anything you've experienced before. It's a radical change even when you know what to expect. I hadn't had time to prepare myself for most of the issues that face expats and it was at least a year of difficult times and difficult language classes.

As the wind howled and whistled through the bedroom window that first night, I started to wonder why I couldn't have fallen in love with someone from the Maldives or Fiji. :) We spent the next six months moving to Nynäshamn, buying the boat, renovating the old boat for selling and taking Swedish language classes, so I didn't really have a lot of time to ponder the depths of the insanity of moving to Sweden until midsummer and by then I found that I had grown quite fond of this small corner of the Nordic lands.

I don't really have any words of wisdom or insight on being an expat because I have seen that nearly everyone has a different experience. Adjusting to Sweden has been difficult at times and easy at other times, but it hasn't been dull. You can prepare yourself for the larger obstacles, such as the language barrier, but the little things like not finding peanut paste or vanilla essence where you expect to find it in the supermarket are what will send you into bouts of petty despair. The dark, foggy days of November sneak up on you when you aren't looking, too. It has been a few years of challenge and adjustment but I am now at the stage where Sweden has become as familiar and comfortable as home. I do still enjoy the newness of everything which people don't get the opportunity to enjoy very often in life, especially now that world is becoming a smaller, more familiar landscape all the time.

Lately I've seen a lot of the use of the word "expat" to mean people who move from one country to another. When I first saw the word, 10 years or so ago, I thought it was just a word for an immigrant/emigrant. Nowadays I see it used a lot by Americans here, and the usage seems to have differentiated from "immigrant": the people who came from the third world to the civilised world tend to be called immigrants and the people who move from one civilised country to another tend to be called expats.

Does the word "immigrant" have so many negative connotations now that people need to find another word for "nice immigrants"? Or is there something else at work here? Historically, this is not that case: expatriates were considered to be people who had formally renounced citizenship in their native country. So why do we refer to ourselves as an expats instead of emigrés or immigrants?

Expat, is a bit of a funny word. It conjures pictures of embassy cocktail parties and the international jet set which, I can assure you, is not at all what 99.9% of expats might experience. I'm not even sure if I have a dress and a pair of suitable high heels for cocktails at Fortress Australia in Sergels Torg (aka Aust. Embassy) if they had parties. The quaint idea of expatriate life being a high society affair has in reality been replaced with armed guards, locked doors and a grimace. I'll hazard a guess that the word expat, given the grim reality vs. the lofty image, will gradually change towards a less romantic notion when used to describe someone who relocates to another country.

So then there's immigrant. It evokes the image of the Titanic full of Irish peasants jumping around in the hold or a group of Mexicans sneaking across the US border into a country where they can get paid $1 an hour so people can buy cheap produce. The romantic age of immigrants has long since past. When Australians speak of their ancestors, they don't say that Grandpa who came out from Greece was an expat, they say Grandpa was an immigrant. I don't think that people are forced to be immigrants as that would make them refugees. It's certainly a puzzle.




Anyway, whatever I am, I think Lars-Göran is happy to have me here. Today he came home with this pretty flower arrangement that really went a long way to describing how I feel. It was an Amaryllis, the typical Swedish Christmas flower, wedded with Australian greenery in the form of the characteristic rounded leaves of the juvenile snow gum. All intertwined with a silver thread. It spoke volumes to me - I'm looking forward to the next seven years to see what it will bring.