Canadian Woman Moves To Sweden, Lists The Culture Shocks She Experienced In A Viral TikTok Series (17 Culture Shocks)

To INCENTIVIZE you to take time off

In Australia we receive 17.5% leave loading when we take a holiday. Have since the 1970s.

I have a friend in Sweden and she was shocked to learn that we often have fundraisers in America to help people pay their medical bills so they won’t go broke and lose their home. Why are we allegedly considered the “Greatest country in the world” and yet we have this?smh

This is pretty common in Canada too...

In Canada we get told "It's not our problem and your child is not our employee, so they don't count as you being sick. You can take a personal day off, but it's going against your reliability." Or at the really heinous jobs "You can't just take him to daycare and have him stay there the whole day? Can't someone else look after your child? We need you here. This is what you contractedly agreed on, to come in for your shifts. Don't bother coming back. We're going to have to let you go."

Ffffuuuu...... okay, Sweden is sounding better than Canada. But I know there are still drawbacks to living in Sweden.

In our company, anyone who takes the emergency phone home with them gets an extra day off per week. I have a total of 46 vacation days a year. It barely rings. ;)

But here in the US, with all the taxes we pay, we can't even have our roads and bridges fixed or count on social security that we HAVE to pay in to. I basically see it as I'm funding my mother's retirement and knowing I'll have to figure out my own. But thank goodness our politicians don't have to waste THEIR money on taxes, so they can afford luxury items, staff, vacations, schooling, etc. we wouldn't want them struggling like the rest of the country does

Books are not free and everything costs much more in Sweden but tuition is covered for nationals. The allowance is just that, a small token like what parents give to children.

Ah, but you haven't really spoken about the process for immigrants to receive a long term visa to live in Sweden, or how difficult it is to obtain this visa when you're not married to a Swedish national. It's not like you just decided to move to Sweden and all of these benefits were immediately available to you.

You can take a f*****g year off!?

I think this is pointing out the fact that in Canada standard mat leave is 35 weeks, for one parent, split it with a partner. There's no banking on these mat leave days.

I am SO jealous Canada, 1973: I got six weeks, but I had to choose the start date, which meant predicting possible early birth and thus taking time off before the baby was due

Wow. I was lucky I got 7 whole weeks unpaid off rather than the usual 6 weeks allowed.

We can have up to 12 months off in the UK!

But this cant be just Sweden? I have travelled a lot in both europe and asia like that.

So this person's friends live within driving distance to Malmö, I suppose. The quality of the public transport network probably depends on where in Sweden you live. In a lot of European countries, rural areas don't have good public transport. Where I'm from, there's a bus every two hours, on a weekday. Less on weekends. It's designed to transport school children back and forth. As an adult, you probably own a car, since you are going to have to. However, if you live in the catchment area of a larger city, many people rely on public transport to commute to work.

England is like that, too.

France here, I have a car but no legal permis de conduire, so no insurance, etc, my village has no public transit, and it's an 8 km walk to the nearest arrêt bus. All the job offers I receive require me to have a legal driver's permit or access to public transportation within reason. An hours walk to the nearest busstop is not within reason.

In France, my drugs for my diabetes and antidepressants and all of the medical tests pertaining to them as well as all of my Dr visits are free. What sucks is that psychologists don't want to get paid by the state, so their services aren't free or supplemented by France. It makes you wonder if they're actually good as therapists if they're only concerned with the fee they'll get paid.

I have such severe seasonal depression that even living in New Mexico (a literal desert and one of the sunniest places in the country) I have to take antidepressants and antipsychotics to stay sane during the winter. Bugs me when people act like SAD is "depression lite". And fwiw, it's not like SAD is an "easy fix" either. Recalibrating your broken brain chemistry is never a walk in the park, whether there's an external component or not.

Yeah it’s pretty dark here alright. I suppose I’m used to it, I don’t pay it much mind, but if you’re not born here I bet I can be tough on you. On the other hand, during summer the sun stays up all night in some parts of the country and a long time in the rest.

Malmö isn't the most southdrn city in Sweden, that's Trelleborg

I presume by city you mean like. The literal definition lmfao. This makes it sound as if there aren't towns south of Malmö