Swedish Language Blog

As a Swede living abroad, the monthly trip to IKEA is big treat. Not so much for the flat packs and the tea candles, but more so for the mouth watering food department. Lingonberry jam, pickled herring, knäckebröd, Daim cake… Well, you probably all know what it’s like. Or, what it WAS like, I should say. Because over the past years, IKEA have slowly but steadily changed the stock from familiar Swedish meatballs-sausages-cookies-herring-bread-coffee-brands to IKEA’s own brand IKEA Food. Pretty much all food you buy in IKEA nowadays are IKEA Food labelled or will be in the near future, and this makes the expat in me quite sad. A bit pathetic, I know. But there was something quite fulfilling about seeing the familiar brands of meatballs-sausagge-cookies-herring-bread-coffee on our kitchen shelves. Not to mention, the quality of it the ‘proper’ stuff.  It’s of course rather obvious why IKEA is doing this and understandable as well, I suppose. But it doesn’t change the fact that I still want my Leksand’s Knäckebröd and my Pågen’s Hönökaka.

One good thing being a Swede living in the UK is Totally Swedish. It’s a Swedish shop based in London which has become so popular it is now a chain (read more here!). The deliver all over the UK for a reasonable price and it’s like Christmas Eve all over when the delivery guys knock on the door. I have a few friends in USA who use Sweden’s Best  for their Swedish food fix and someone once recommended Sverige Online for deliveries worldwide.

Where do you people turn when you need a dose of Sweden? And what are your absolute favourites that you would happily pay loads for in your local supermarket?

My top 5 Swedish foods are the following tasty five:

*Almond Cake made from the chocolate brand Daim. Cake heaven.
*Falukorv, my favourite a sausage that you must and should eat with…
*…Snabbmakaroner, the pasta of all pastas – and they are ready in only three minutes!
*Hönökaka, a sweet bread from the west coast of Sweden.
*Leksands knäckebröd, read Katjas post about this deliscios type of bread here!

Hey there all of you, In this post I will post all of the things you thought were Swedish. Hopefully our Swedish blog team can write posts about some of the different things as well. Then I have extracted 15 of all the things and hopefully they will be the most representative of them all.

1. Abba

2. IKEA

3. Pippi longstocking

4. Beautiful Blond Women

5. Volvo

6. Vikings

7. Nobel prize

8. Absolute Vodka

9. Gamla Stan (The old city in Stockholm)

10. Socialism

11. Annas pepparkakor

12. Kanelbullar

13. Swedish Chef (from Sesame Street)

14. Snow

15. Lucia

Because it is Sveriges nationaldag (Swedish National Day) today, let’s celebrate it with a light-hearted look at “swedishness” at its finest.

This installment is about one Swedish institution we all love and cherish – IKEA.

So, you know you’re from Sweden when…

1. You trust IKEA more than your government.
2. IKEA is your home away from home.
3. You grew up in a house looking exactly as if it would have been in the IKEA catalogue.
4. You fear beyond death not getting the IKEA catalogue if you put up a sign for the postman saying that you don’t want any adverts.
5. You know the names of a multitude of IKEA items.
6. You know how to pronounce these names and sigh when non-Swedes don’t.
7. You live abroad and virtually all your furniture is from IKEA, even if there are still no IKEA stores in the country. (Note the word “still” as in: you are expecting IKEA to one day be found in every single country in the world.)
8. You rarely visited IKEA when you lived back in Sweden but once you are abroad you think visiting IKEA is a small trip back home, which makes your eyes damp and feel even more homesick than before.
9. Going to IKEA abroad, you end up loitering in the Swedish Food Market and buying more food than furniture.
10. While on the one hand you praise the Swedish Food Market, you feel betrayed since the “svenska bullar” they sell are clearly not anything like what you had back home.
11. In addition, you just have to stop and explain to the locals shopping in the Swedish Food Market what they are buying and exactly how delicious it is.
12. When living outside the borders of Sweden you panic when IKEA has sold out of “julmust” before Christmas.

Now it’s your turn – feel free to add your own IKEA points to the list.

And tomorrow, if you are eligible to vote in the European parliamentary election, please go and cast your vote – you CAN make a difference.

Happy National Day!!!