Despite my seven long years in Sweden am still surprised to find myself smiling and waving at people I don’t know. This oft more than not causes me to loose my morning cheeriness and wipes my Xicano smile of my face and a small Homer Simpson rebuke, dope! can be heard in the back of my head.
I live in the Swedish Higlands, in the boonies to be more exact and the small towns are, well, really small, mine has a population of 800 or so and everyone knows everyone here.
I have also recently gained the insight that I carry some city behaviour to small town Sweden with the consequences above mentioned, people don’t say hi to each other in small town Sweden if they don’t know them. Let alone mingle with them but that’s another story. Anyways, I figured that, what I deem an odd behaviour, god knows they deem mine so as well, has to do more with city habits than small town ones.
In big cities there is a necessity to say hi to each other because in essence no one knows no one there but in small towns they don’t have this habit at all, since as soon as one steps in their territory they know a stranger when they see one.
However, this might seem an obvious feature just about everywhere there is small towns, but you have to remember that Sweden has a huge territorial extension of small towns everywhere making American habits like mine odd at best.
So yeah, that, in Sweden.