Late last night, Linus decided to have a play around with the box of bits that Telia had sent out for our broadband package. They hadn’t given us an installation date, but had mentioned it could take “up to 30 days”, so we pretty much assumed it would not be up and running until after Christmas. But he wanted something to play with so decided to plug everything in and see what happened. And lo and behold, we were connected!

And, if I may add, it works pretty damn well. The speed is nice and nippy and the router was preconfigured so that everything worked right out of the box. The package also includes broadband phone and TV, but the phone part is not active yet and we don’t have a TV so have no idea if the TV part works. So far, we are most impressed.

We headed out this morning for some shopping, heading first to Ikea where we picked up a few kitchen bits, some more towels, curtain rails for the kitchen, christmas decorations, and assorted odds & sods. Then we went to the building store next door where L found his Christmas present (a nifty compact B&D electric screwdriver) and some plain white paint for the two small bedrooms. We looked for a heated towel rail but only found a few and they were a little small and disappointing. Then we hit some electronics stores and picked up a Christmas present and got some information about LCD TVs – but we’ll wait until the mellandags-rea (“between-day” sales, the sales held between christmas & new year) before buying one.

All done with shopping, we then went to Kinnas for a delicious lasagne dinner and to pick up some of the stuff that has been living in her loft – a few wedding gifts from last year and a Christmas parcel from NZ.

Tomorrow we need to go in to Skatteverket (the tax authority) to register L as living in Sweden again, and to see if I can get a Personnummer – the all-encompassing ID number for Swedish residents, that I will need before I can get health care, a bank account, a mobile phone, and so on. Rather than having one number for the Inland Revenue, another on your passport, another on your driver’s license, another for the NHS, and who knows what else, the Swedes use this one number for all occasions. The number consists of your birthdate plus four other digits (do they really not get more than 9,999 births a year? maybe some people get an extra digit) so it’s actually easy enough to remember.

Apart from our visit to Skatteverket, the other top priority is to go to the car dealership that is holding a Saab 9-5 for us. Hopefully it is everything we are looking for in a Saab, and we will be driving it away tomorrow. Yay, new car, with heated seats!