'The biggest shock in Sweden was how little people talk to each other'
Advertisement
In this week's episode we hear from Canadian entrepreneur Francisca Leonardo as she explains how she first came to Stockholm as a tourist and immediately felt it was a place she could see herself living in.
In her recent conversation with The Local's editor Emma Löfgren she talks us through how she went from being a master's student in biotechnology to setting up a flourishing tour company showing visitors sides of Stockholm they might otherwise miss.
And what was it like working through culture shock as first impressions gave way to a more nuanced understanding of how Sweden works?
Membership+ subscribers can listen to the interview in the latest episode of Sweden in Focus Extra, out June 4th.
Get Membership+ to listen to all The Local's podcasts
Sweden in Focus Extra is a podcast for The Local's Membership+ subscribers.
Sign up to Membership+ now and get early, ad-free access to a full-length episode of the Sweden in Focus podcast every weekend, as well as Sweden in Focus Extra every Wednesday.
Please visit the link that applies to you and get a 40% discount on Membership+
Read more about Membership+ in our help centre.
Already have Membership+ but not receiving all the episodes? Go to the podcast tab on your account page to activate your subscription on a podcast platform. If you prefer to listen on the site, you can find all episodes at the bottom of our podcast page.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Local Sweden
2 days ago
- Local Sweden
INSIDE SWEDEN: Northvolt and how NOT to prepare for a crayfish party
The Local's Nordic Editor Richard Orange rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter... and makes a confession. Advertisement It's time for crayfish parties or kräftskivor, which I'd argue are more of a rite of passage in Sweden even midsommar. At the very least, managing to devour a pile of succulent salty crayfish and knock back snaps while keeping your dignity is a challenge, as our reporter Lee Roden found back in the day. As your Swedish hosts will inform you, you start by pulling off the heads and tails, then peel the shell off the back, discarding the bits in a bowl. At this point, if you like, you can suck out the salty juices through the trailing legs. In my experience a Swedish person, mostly likely a man, will demonstrate this manoeuvre to you, while telling you it's their favourite part. Some will also suck out the contents of the crayfish's head. You then pull off the legs, and eat the meat, normally laying flesh from several crayfish on a slice of buttered bread, and eating them like an open sandwich. Eating the crayfish is far from the only challenge, however, as at a kräftskiva it is also customary for guests to bring their own crayfish, and perhaps another dish in a kind of potluck dinner or knytkalas, which leads me to my confession (which you'll find at the end of the newsletter). Advertisement Crayfish aren't the only reason for celebration. On Thursday, the bankrupt Swedish battery company Northvolt finally found a rescuer, something I admit I'd given up on. US battery start-up Lyten announced that it had agreed to buy almost all the company's remaining assets, restart its factory in Skellefteå and research laboratory in Västerås, and rehire workers who have been laid off. There's a lot that still needs to happen, but I went through the main things that came out in the press conference in this explainer. Next week, I'm hoping to interview unions and others about how many of the company's international employees are still in the country and how many could get rehired. Advertisement Sticking to the subject of employment, we got a fantastic response to our survey on how readers got their first job. It seems like when hiring internationally, Swedish companies still primarily use job advertisements or recruiters, but once inside Sweden, networking appears more important. Read some of the interesting insights readers provided here. There was bad news this week on the economy, with employment still rising, inflation increasing, and growth forecasts downgraded. I made a chart showing where in Sweden unemployment has risen the most. I also wrote an article on whether foreigners living in southern Sweden, which has the highest unemployment rate in Sweden, should look for jobs in Copenhagen, where there's a major shortage of workers. When it comes to social life and leisure, Paul O'Mahony wrote a great article about how joining his local chess club had helped him put down deeper roots in Sweden. He also provided some brilliant phrases in Swedish to help you get back in the groove on returning to work after the summer. Finally, he today picked out the highlights of the three free music and culture festivals happening in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö in the coming weeks, which has inspired me to go to Malmö's crayfish event. When it comes to migration, Eric Peterson, the computer programmer turned citizenship campaigner, published an op-ed with us on why plans to tighten citizenship rules are incompatible with Sweden's need to attract high-skilled labour. The Migration Agency also provided us with some figures showing that it has so far carried out 3,500 of the 'in-person appearances' now required as the final stage in a citizenship application. Advertisement Finally, it's time for my confession, which will hopefully prevent other foreigners committing similar social crimes. Ahead of the first crayfish party I was invited to, I bought my frozen pack of crayfish too late, I think on the actual morning of the party or perhaps the evening before. So to speed up the defrosting I left the box out in my kitchen rather than in the fridge. I don't know if it was an unusually hot autumn that year, but by the time I arrived at the summer house out in the Skåne countryside, I was starting to worry about whether they were safe. To solve the problem, I buried my box right at the back of the fridge under some salad, hoping no one would spot them, and sat down. To my horror, five minutes later one of the women at the party came in to the room carrying two large trays artfully laid out with crayfish, combining all the crayfish everyone had contributed - including my own. I wanted to confess there and then but felt I couldn't as there was no way of knowing which crayfish were mine, so it would have meant none for anyone. The dinner started off fine, but after a while, one of the women started to complain. One of the crayfish she had eaten, she said, had tasted a little funny. There followed a debate during which I kept resolutely shtum. Most people carried on eating and the crayfish party continued as before, but the woman who had complained ended up leaving early. I'm not sure if my crayfish were to blame. In the end, everything worked out more or less OK. No one got food poisoning. But it does mean that nowadays I am quite obsessive about timing when defrosting crayfish. Should I have confessed and brought the event to an early and disappointing finish? Tell us in the comments below.
Local Sweden
30-07-2025
- Local Sweden
LISTED: The jobs that could be exempt from Swedish work permit salary limit
Sweden's Migration Agency last week published a list of job titles which could be exempted from a future new salary threshold for work permits. Engineering, technician and IT roles made up eleven of the 20 jobs paying below median salary which have seen the highest international recruitment. Advertisement The Migration Agency was in February asked to propose a list of job titles which could be exempted from a future salary threshold for work permits, which the government has said it plans to set at Sweden's median salary. This is currently 37,100 kronor, but the Migration Agency has based its analysis on a salary of 35,600 kronor, which was the median salary in 2023. The Migration Agency included all 152 job titles put forward in an analysis by the Swedish Public Employment Service, which The Local reported on here, marking which of these represent a "heightened risk of workplace exploitation or abuse", which require workers to be Swedish citizens, which have been subject to labour migration in the past, and which the government inquiry into the new salary requirement proposed should be ineligible for work permits. As we reported last week, only four jobs - cooks and pantry chefs, cleaners, personal assistants and berry pickers - were excluded from the exemption list because of the last two reasons. Only three job titles on the list - officers, special officers and soldiers - required Swedish citizenship. This brings the number of jobs the Migration Agency is proposing as possible contenders for exception from a future salary threshold for work permits down to 145. It is important to remember that for more than a year the government has delayed moving forward on its proposal for a new salary threshold for work permits set at the median salary. That means that this list is purely advisory and there is no way under current legislation that these exceptions could be applied. Rather than repeat the public employment service's list (for which you can find our English translation here), we have decided to strip out the jobs for which people were in fact hired internationally in 2023 and 2024, starting with those which have seen the highest amount of migration. Advertisement READ ALSO: Engineers "a big group" Hanna Geurtsen, the Migration Agency official who oversaw the analysis, told the Local that it had shown that many high-skilled jobs for which Swedish employers recruit internationally offered lowest salaries below the Swedish median. "Engineers is a big group. You might think that cleaners and pizza chefs make up the largest portion of labour migration. But that is just not true," she said in an interview about the list. "A large proportion of labour migration is for job titles that earn higher salaries, well above median, but there are skilled jobs in the middle section, salary-wise, where you will have to weigh wisely here so that you don't put up obstacles to labour migration that that you don't intend to." Engineering, technician and IT roles made up eleven of the 20 job titles on the Migration Agency's list of jobs proposed for exemption which have seen the highest recent levels of labour migration. Advertisement In its report, the Migration Agency opted not to limit the list of proposed job titles to those for which employers have recently recruited overseas, with Geurtsen arguing that it would be "unwise not to exempt a job title from a heightened salary threshold just because in the past, there have not been any applications within that field,' as this did not necessarily mean that employers would not want to hire internationally for these roles in the future. The agency did, however, mark which job titles have experienced recent labour migration, so we have stripped down their list to show the 95 job titles which qualify where there is labour migration. Of these, there were three job titles where the shortage was only regional: Geologists and geophysicists and specialists in environmental protection and environmental technology, which were both required in Upper Norrland, and taxi drivers, for which there was only a shortage in Stockholm and upper Norrland. Membership Plus subscribers can hear an in-depth interview with Hanna Geurtsen from the Migration Agency on the list of work permit exemptions in the Sweden in Focus Extra podcast, out on July 30th.
Local Sweden
19-07-2025
- Local Sweden
Inside Sweden: Is it possible to get good airport food?
The Local Sweden's editor Emma Löfgren rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter. Advertisement Hej, I'm almost nine months pregnant, so I'm staying firmly on the ground, but for a lot of The Local's readers it's that time of the year when they hop on a plane to spend at least part of their summer holiday abroad, visiting friends or family. Earlier this year we asked readers to share their tips about the best places to eat, before or after security, at Arlanda Airport, the largest airport in Sweden. Personally I wouldn't even dream of stopping to eat before security, but I'm also the kind of person who shows up at the airport two hours before my flight is scheduled to depart, which has led to many a disagreement in my family. There are two types of people, etc... Anyway, we didn't get enough responses to that survey to publish an article about it, but my hope had been to find this tiny hidden gem that actually serves good food for a reasonable price (or överkomligt pris, as you'd say in Swedish). I was flat out of luck, because the restaurant picked by the highest number (still less than a handful) of respondents was, drum roll... McDonald's. Some of the reasons were that it's comparatively cheap and it's a safe option in that you know what you get (so I guess you don't have to come face to face with the disappointment of taking your chances with a more unique eatery). Advertisement I half suspect it picked up the protest vote, though. Or maybe this was the reason, as shared by one reader: "Did you know that the McDonald's at Arlanda is the only one in Sweden where you can grab a beer? Might not exactly be fine dining – but hey, beer at McDonald's? Can't say no to that." Hawaii Poke and La Neta were the only other two restaurants that got more than one vote in the survey. I love La Neta on Södermalm (it used to be door-to-door with The Local's old office), but haven't tried the airport version. Overly expensive airport food made headlines in 2023 after SEB bank senior economist Johan Javeus shared a picture on X of an "extremely ordinary prawn sandwich and a normal beer" he bought at Landvetter Airport for an eye-watering 422 kronor (around 36 euros or 38 dollars at the time). A Swedavia spokesperson told us at the time that they were planning to roll out a price cap on food at their ten airports (which include Arlanda) at some point by the end of 2025. I contacted them to check whether this has actually happened yet, but it's the summer holiday season in Sweden, so... Maybe for now the best option is still what several readers recommended: just bring your own food. But if you find that hidden gem, please let me know! Advertisement In other news Sweden is set to make it significantly harder to become a citizen from next summer, which the government has argued will make citizenship "mean more" than it does today. So we asked The Local's readers what becoming a Swedish citizen meant to them. Thank you to everyone for your thoughtful comments. After a freeze on new citizenships earlier this year, Sweden's Migration Agency is again processing cases. So what do the statistics say about which nationalities have received Swedish citizenship in the first half of 2025? In the past few months, a number of Swedish gaming companies have gone bankrupt or laid off staff amid funding struggles. The Local's Becky Waterton looked into why this is happening, and how it is affecting foreigners in the industry. More than half of the non-European immigrants who left Sweden last year had tertiary education, new figures have shown. Unemployment in Sweden is already high, and rising. At the end of last month, around 19,000 more people were unemployed than the same time last year. There are almost 30,000 islands and islets in the Stockholm archipelago and each of them is different from the next. Here are ten worth visiting, whether you're looking for a party night, a relaxing weekend, seafood or family fun. Have a lovely weekend, Emma Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
