Being Thwarted By Swedish Appliances: Part 1

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 31, 2026] ©2026

One of the benefits of living abroad is that one has the opportunity to experience how people in other cultures live.  Also to be thwarted by their appliances.

Olof and I met when we were 17 spending our senior year of high school as exchange students in Brazil, a life-changing experience for both of us.  Exactly 40 years later, we arrived in Stockholm for what we dubbed our second “Senior(s) Year Abroad”.  It was meant to be an eight- month work assignment but turned into two years. Fortunately for me, the Swedes aren’t exactly balls of fire when it comes to deadlines.  I was delighted; it was the best two years of my life.

What we weren’t prepared for when we arrived, however, was being stymied by the appliances in our apartment.  It’s not like we were in a third world country.  We’d been operating stoves and washers and dryers all our adult lives.  But our first week was characterized by cold food (we couldn’t work the stove) and 500-degree wet socks.  (More on the latter next week.)

When we first arrived in Stockholm in the dead of winter, our “fully furnished” apartment didn’t even have so much as a roll of toilet paper or even a shaker of salt, all of which we had to acquire on foot at the closest market. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff we needed right away was pretty heavy or bulky:  laundry soap, dishwasher soap, milk, toilet paper never mind coffee, cereal, and actual food.  One thing we concluded is that it is amazing how much stuff you’re willing to do without when you have to lug it home a considerable distance on the perilously icy sidewalks. We would make a list every day prioritizing what we needed most.

We ultimately managed to acquire a Swedish shopping trolley with which all of our shopping was done for the next two years.  It’s amazing how the smallest things can make such a huge improvement in your life.

Given our lack of groceries, our first at-home Stockholm meal had, by necessity, to be really simple.  I decided to poach some salmon in water with salt and pepper (my entire spice collection at the time.  It was so exciting when Italian seasoning made our shopping list cut.) Only I couldn’t turn on the stove top.  Our La Jolla stove had been fondly dubbed the Star Ship Enterprise for its complicated control panel. But the Swedish stove top stymied both Olof and me in its simplicity. I should mention that my husband has a degree in nuclear physics from Cal Tech. He was very clear he was not going to be thwarted by a mere appliance.  Until he was.

The Swedish stove top had only four symbols – a plus sign, a key symbol, a vertical line and a horizontal line.  We pushed them all repeatedly and nothing happened.  Surely the landlords would have told us if the cook top didn’t work?  A very hungry hour later, for reasons unclear to both of us, the next time I touched the vertical line symbol, some red lights began blinking.  Must be all in the wrist?  We were then able to make the burners heat up with the plus symbol. But we were not sure we could ever replicate this experiment.

But ultimately, my Swedish stove top and I reached an understanding. It really was all in the wrist. The Star Ship Enterprise, our digital stove in San Diego, required one to press fairly firmly on its display or it wouldn’t respond.  In fact, there were times when I tapped the Start button on the stove only to come back a half hour later and discovered that it hadn’t come on at all.  My Swedish cook top display, however, was the polar opposite: a high-strung prima donna with pretensions of being a sound system.   Press its little buttons with any conviction and it had a complete snit and wouldn’t perform. It wanted the faintest possible tactile connection.  In fact, I think it preferred that you just wave your finger tip vaguely in the area of the control you wanted and your aura would communicate with its aura. But if that’s what it wanted, that’s what it got. If there’s nothing else we learned there, you don’t argue with a Swedish appliance.

Another thing that initially puzzled us was the bedding in our fully-furnished apartment.  All we could find in the apartment were small single-bed blankets for our king-sized bed. Clearly an oversight.  I went in search of a king-sized comforter at the various Stockholm department stores and was surprised when I couldn’t any.  I finally queried the bedding department lady at Åhléns who was genuinely puzzled as to why I would want a blanket that big.

Couples, the bedding lady explained to me, should each have their own separate top sheets and duvets. So nobody is fighting for the covers, she added, as if this were obvious.  So nobody is snuggling either, I thought at the time, thinking I finally understood Sweden’s negative birth rate. The sales person and I stared at each other across the counter each thinking the same thing: “Their system is completely screwy.”  But as Olof and I traveled through Scandinavia some months later, we got our own separate duvets all the way through Norway too. 

Stay tuned next week for Swedish Appliances Part II: “Laundry Times” and fried socks.