1st Week

So it's been just over a week since I arrived in Skärholmen, a borough of Stockholm (it's pronounced something like "wharholmen", but really enunciating the "wh" and aspirating it to the point of blowing out a candle) and have been doing my best to get settled in as quickly as possible. I picked this apartment because they were the only people to respond to my email to their apartment listing in time and really knew nothing of it before I arrived. Nevertheless, the location seems to be a good spot for me to begin my fieldwork. According to statistics it's 70% immigrant, though I would have guessed 50 or 60% based on my initial observations. The borough is part of what was known as the "Million Program" to build 1 million new homes so that everyone in Sweden could afford decent housing. Not surprisingly, those neighborhoods filled up with immigrants pretty quickly. Skärholmen also has the world's biggest IKEA and a mall called "SKHLM: The Capital of Shopping." I'll have to hang out around there and get the lay of the land.
My roommate at the apartment was born and raised in Sweden, but of Spanish descent. At first, I thought that my plan to exclude Swedish citizens that aren't 3rd generation might be too limiting, but after meeting this fellow I'm quite vindicated. He's been very helpful, outgoing and amenable to conversation, entertaining my many questions and eagerly asking about the US in return. In other words, nothing like a typical Swede, whose reticence is the stuff of legends. I'm going to stick to my original plan of focusing primarily on ethnic Swedes, or as they are sometimes known, "Svenssons". That said, while getting the opinions of ethnic Swedes will be important, I won't discount anybody who might have some good quotable information, if the situation comes up.
I've also found that getting Swedes to speak Swedish to you once they even get a hint that you're an English speaker is an uphill battle. Sometimes this is understandable; some Swedes I personally know rarely speak Swedish to me explicitly because they want to practice their English, especially since it is somewhat rare to find native English speakers here. But the same thing will happen at stores or banks, if you slip up a single word they'll be tempted to go to English. I know that they mean well—they have almost the opposite view of the "This is America! Speak English!" mentality—and English is admittedly the international trade language, but it can sometimes come off as incredibly patronizing. Immigrants, on the other hand tend, to be more willing to go along with my ventures into Swedish and I can sometimes understand them better than Swedes. Maybe it's because it's a little easier for us to understand one another because we speak slower and enunciate more carefully than Swedes. Maybe it's because they understand how difficult it is to learn a language if people constantly switch to another language when speaking to you and they're trying to help me out (that's my personal reason for why I almost never speak Spanish to Mexicans when I'm in Tucson). Maybe they're just more sure of their Swedish than their English. Who knows?