the key that opens the door

Imagine having a room with treats and comforts inside. You know that things like your pillow, sunglasses, your favorite coffee mug, salt, honey, a chocolate bar, and hot running water are inside the room; those things that add comfort to your life. The only thing is THE ROOM IS LOCKED. At some point you know that the key will be mailed to you but you don’t have any idea when. It’s out of your control, you must wait.

Here our key is a personnumber and the room is the Swedish system. Once we have a personnumber we are allowed to hop onto the tracks of everyday life here in Sweden. We are officially acknowledged as residents in this country.

Today, Monday January 30^th, a bit more than a month after being here, our keys arrived in the mail! We momentarily jump for joy. Yeah! Now we are covered by the Swedish health care system and have been told about other benefits that we will receive. For instance, I will receive a small stipend for being a stay at home mom. Amelia is entitled to 15 hours a week of free preschool. However, now that we have a key, we walk through the door to find a maze in order to gather up all these comforts and luxuries.

We walked downtown today at 4:00 to open up a bank account, which requires a personnumber. The door is locked, lights out. The bank closes at 3:00 everyday of the week except for Thursday. A man coming out of the bank says, ‘Oh you can do it on-line.’ He says it as if it is SOO easy. We believe him. We got on-line at home and after lots of Google Translate we give up and decide that we’ll just go back downtown on Thursday. We need someone to show us how to do the internet money transfers anyway. I don’t think there is much cash flowing around Umeå, instead bank transfers. I asked if I could pay for Amelia’s dance class with cash since we didn’t have a bank. The response was ‘Um, no. You can just wait to transfer money once you have your bank account set up.’ Even some yoga classes ask for internet money transfers.

Here we go in the maze to figure this all out. On the list of things to do now that we have personnumbers also include getting a phone and a frequent shopper card at the grocery store so we can attempt to cut some costs there. Can you believe it? You even need a personnumber to get a phone and to save on those special deals at the grocery store.