There are a lot of wonderful things about life in Stockholm. Most amazing to me is the public transit. You can get almost anywhere in Sweden with public transportation. Buses, trains and boats are all efficient and somehow there is a lot of logic to the timing. It is also great to see the university every day, and know that it is free for the students. The library is world class and the students don’t end up having to pay back loans the rest of their lives. Now there is a lot of diversity, with people here from all over the world. The nature is beautiful, and well protected. I can go on and on about the advantages of not worrying about health care, or about having a place to live when you get old.  I love how parents get time for their children, and in the parks, there are sleds for the kids to use, for free.

But there are some things that could be better. First, I am surprised how difficult it is to recycle here. In San Francisco, we just put all the glass, plastic, paper and other recyclables in the blue container, and it gets picked up, and sorted. Then I am pretty sure it goes to China. Here we have to take the recycling to the public depositories. They are often in parks or else dispersed in neighborhoods. But it is always a walk. That extra effort makes it harder to recycle. There is not compost either. If I were the mayor of Stockholm, I would introduce compost and recycling.

You can’t take bicycles on buses or subways here. This is really different than San Francisco, where bikes can easily go on buses and BART. Copenhagen has bikes on trains. I am sure that at some point, it will become more bike friendly here.

Over the last few years, the homeless population has increased rapidly. There are people from Romania begging at every subway station. They aren’t only in Stockholm, but everywhere throughout the country. This is a new phenomenon and Swedes are discussing it a lot. They don’t know whether they should give money to the freezing Romanians. I heard that the Romanians come here on cheap buses, after hearing that they will get a lot of money from the generous Swedes, but now there are simply too many. They also heard that after three months, they get a free bus ride home.

 

Everyone knows that the weather is pretty bad here, but I heard that Boston is worse, especially this year. But it is slippery out on the sidewalks, and you often see women with broken arms. My mom slipped on the ice a couple years ago and broke her wrist.

I retired my hiking boots. Somehow the cold here has made them crack, and the soles fell off. They have been with me since 1997, when I finished graduate school, and started on new adventures. They have been to 5 continents, from the jungles of Africa and Peru, to the highlands of Alaska, and the crowded cities of India. I bought some new ones, and expect they will have similar journeys.