We moved to southern Sweden 16 months ago. That's the biggest news.
There have been a multitude of chapters under this experience and I have been remiss in writing about it. Maybe when one is deep into a new experience there is still limited perspective and it's a bit tricky to pick apart the exciting from the crazy.
The Why.
We decided to take a leap of faith and see what living in Europe could afford our family, especially our son, who just turned into a teenager. Neither one of us had lived in this region of Sweden (Skåne) before. I lived in Stockholm when I was young, but it's really quite different. Skåne, the flatlands, the deep south, is the breadbasket of the country. The city we moved to is Lund, famous for its university, and filled with charm, students and professors from all over the world. More than half the population is under 30 and everyone speaks at least two languages. An intellectual epicenter surrounded by farming.
There is a stout public transportation system and Lund is next to Malmö, a larger gritty city, that has a thriving art scene, music and good food. An even larger hub, Copenhagen, Denmark, is a 45 minute commuter train ride away.
Lund and the vicinity is indeed a great place for kids/teens to grow up. It's safe, progressive, easy to get around, lots to do, and and kids here have autonomy that would not be possible in Taos.
The Flybrary has a new permanent home in Portugal. Thanks in part to this relocation we managed our relocation. I like being close to my favorite creations..pictured below.
Logistics.
The actual logistics around a move like this from a small rural mountain town to a larger city in northern Europe is complex. Managing large scale sculpture projects, moves and house-builds over the years definitely helped with the thousands of details involved with this kind of independent relocation. Unlike most people we meet, who work for a company which handles the basic logistics such as schools, rental housing, visas, registration, healthcare and shipping; we did it all ourselves. It took several reconnaissance missions and in-depth planning which we had been working on for about a year before we even made the move. We even brought our dog.
And yet, upon arrival, there was so much more "adulting" to do and I feel I am barely keeping up with the amount of digital paperwork it takes to restart a life in a new place. Sweden runs a very transparent banking system, and is pretty much a cashless society. Those are HUGE differences and end up impacting everything from how to buy a coffee, pay rent or to how to register a car.
I basically use my smartphone for everything-paying for everything, food, bills, art and building materials, train and bus, anything involving a store, insurance, healthcare, my sons allowance.
Yes, it seems to work well, (it's like internet magic), and yet a part of me feels that it's a vulnerable system. What happens if the system is hacked, compromised or there's a cosmic disturbance? I mean have you listened to Radiolab's episode: Bit Flip?
One day I'll write about the how to move to Sweden/Europe on another blog; it could indeed be helpful for future expats.
The Emotional Ride.
Moving to another place has a trajectory of emotions that are well documented and more or less accurate. Of course the more different the place, the bigger the effect. Add pre-teen/teen kids to the equation and it can get quite tricky.
It was tricky. Culture shock is a process, and the only way out is through.
We are all going through the adjustment with cultural differences, language barriers, the latitude change at our own pace. I feel pretty good now, and I see that Kodiak is finally also getting his feet planted. Christian is past the so called "honeymoon phase" and is restlessly working his way through the remaining phases of adaptation.
With the short perspective I have now, I would say it's harder than I thought.
Life is life wherever you are though, it's simply more difficult if you can't understand the ways.
Midway.
Midway into this leap of faith, we decided to make yet another leap- which is stop paying rent and buy a property instead. This has been a fail safe way for us to invest our humble earnings with sweat equity into future dividends.
We learned the how-to-buy a property in Sweden by trial and error, and wow, I can't believe we managed to pull this one off. Like most all things in life, if you lean into the completely unpredictable roadmap with your eyes wide open, you end up where you need to go, somehow.
We ended up with a traditional Southern farm house, actually three buildings on almost an acre of land just outside Lund. It's old, and run down, kind of perfect for people like us, and best of all it has a shop building! Old in Sweden means over 170 years old..the beams in the building are likely that old and the two huge maple trees flanking the entrance to the property where probably planted right around then too.
I just had two young bad-ass women arborists climb and trim the trees, to asses their health and they guessed they were over 150 years old. They trimmed the trees, with chainsaws and hand saws in an active hail storm no less.
The Farm.
Of course after we bought the property, we decided to just renovate the bathroom...then the kitchen, and then it somehow extended in to the entire house, including opening up the second story, new wood floors, exposing and rehanging the beams, new plumbing, new electric, fixing a mold issue; it was extensive.
Where there is a vision, there's a way.
We learned a ton about building and renovating, and modernizing an old Swedish brick farm house though. Good skills to have!
Now the space is how we love it, and it's a really sweet home for us. We moved all our books, the newly painted piano, and other random stuff from Taos into our new space and it feels like a new home. We have only really been living in this house for four months, so it will take some years to fill it with memories with friends.
Next we are focused on the shop building. We moved all the inherited crap, and our stuff out of the shop building and dispersed it into several other out buildings, sheds and the middle building. The previous owners had a mechanics business out of the space, so we inherited a car lift and all kinds of random car mechanic tools and parts. Again, kind of perfect for us, as we can repurpose much of this for artistic projects.
We sectioned off a a bit of the middle building for a wood shop- which will help with the renovation of the shop building. Basically we are blowing out the low ceiling and making it a larger space so we can have a taller space to build and have a gantry crane in the shop. Here's a short video of Christian at work..
Renovation is slow moving as it's generally dark and cold at this latitude in winter. The shop is unheated and it needs some serious TLC. We are going to insulate and paint and repair the ancient cracking walls- all in due time. I am trying to be ok with going slower (not easy for me)...
We hope to finish the shop in the next few months, and outfit the shop with the basic tools and keep setting up spaces to become work spaces for us. My days vacillate between a deep reckoning of all of the amazing work spaces we left behind and just getting it going in our new home. Those are the completely crazy and exciting parts to this puzzle.
We may be crazy.
The broad brushstroke plan.
The whole plan was to provide more opportunities for our teenager, and to experience a new way of life in a highly progressive country in the middle of Europe. So here we are in our new base of operations, seeing if it will hold us and our creative visions through Kodiaks' high school years. Once he graduates high school in Sweden he has access to FREE universities all over Europe.
We are not the first, and surely wont be the last to try this out. We have been fortunate to be able to hold on to our shop property in Taos as well, a place that will always feel deeply like my hearts home. The mesa and I met in my early 20's and I love that land like no other.
Race Against Time.
This is the only real hiccup to the plan above. There is still much hard labor to make our place work for us and sometimes it does feel a bit like a race against time. The time I'm suddenly more concerned about is the small and less small aches and pains that come with age. I have used my body hard all my life, built many homes, smithed many railings, fabricated many large heavy sculptures and hung from many circus apparatus'. That's what I do. My body is complaining more lately, and I'm trying to navigate this situation gracefully. I'm really not that old, but I guess not unlike an athletes body, mine is older than my years.
I know I'm in good company here too, so working with it...I'll be an adaptation queen by the time I'm done.
