hey hey everyone i hope you are doing amazingly today i'm gonna share the craziest most wonderful
and best swedish traditions that i think you should try too from how we cut our
pizza to how we raise our children to how we sleep here are some of my favorite swedish
traditions that i think everyone in the whole entire world should do so let's get started
we cut our pizza with scissors this is also a minimalist hack because you no longer need to use
a silly pizza cutter that you literally cannot use for anything instead just use your kitchen
scissors to cut pizza cutting pizza is such an easy and fun way to slice pizza one of my favorite
hacks for a happy marriage and a swedish tradition that i grew up with is to have separate duvets
having separate duvets makes so much more sense it is so much more comfortable you never have to
fight with your partner over a blanket and it just makes a world of difference if you have one duvet
it's big and bulky and it's crazy just try two duvets and see if it makes you feel any better
speaking of duvets and bedding the next thing that is really important that you should try that we
all do in sweden is that we have a duvet cover and a duvet inner and a sheet to make our bed
we don't have any top sheets we don't have any blankets that is absolutely disgusting
sorry but it is cause you don't really wash them as often you need to have a duvet if it's cold in
your country and you need to put the duvet inside of the duvet cover and then you wash the duvet
cover weekly and this way you have a very clean bed when i first came to new zealand i was taught
about the idea of a top sheet and you sort of put the duvet on top but you never really encase it
but that means that when you move around throughout the bed your body will touch the duvet
inner and you simply cannot wash that once a week because it doesn't last as long as if you do that
so absolutely if you have a duvet and it's cold in your country put a duvet outer on it and in the
summer when it's too warm you just put the duvet in away and you just sleep with the duvet outer as
a blanket easy one of my favorite swedish sayings is something like there is no such thing as bad
weather only bad clothing very literal and very swedish but as a child this was normally printed
on our weekly mail or at kindergarten or at school which basically meant for our parents
to remember to put proper clothing on us because we would be outside all day no matter the weather
i think most people these days tend to stay inside when it's bad weather outside instead
of just going out there but by putting on proper clothing it makes it so much easier to be outside
in all weathers and it's so much better for your health to be outside and breathe in the microbiome
rather than just staying inside and watching tv another swedish health hack for you guys one of
the things that i didn't think was weird but that became obvious to me the moment i moved abroad
was the fact that we don't talk about race the first time i heard the word caucasian i was 20 and
living in japan and before that i had never heard any of these words and it's just not something we
talk about which brings me on to the next point is that you never have to disclose this information
if you for example go to the bank or going to the university and that information is absolutely not
necessary for the bank to know when i'm opening my bank account and frankly it's ridiculous
so do what the swedish people do i guess whilst we're speaking about politically sensitive
subjects let's speak about children in sweden we treat our children with respect and we treat them
as already humans which is something i really really enjoy and i think everyone should do kids
don't have to address older people in a certain way kids don't really have to act in a certain
way kids are really allowed to be kids which means they're allowed to make mistakes they're allowed
to be upset they don't have to hug someone if they don't want to they don't have to kiss someone if
they don't want to just completely reasonable things that i think every country should adopt
kids are the best thing in the world so i absolutely think we should treat kids with
the utmost respect now this one i don't know if it's for all sweden but it's definitely something
i've experienced a lot of times but that is people when i get invited to dinner parties people ask me
is there something you don't eat my goodness is to save so much trouble having a dinner party
or going to a dinner party i normally tell my best friend when i go to dinners at hearst that i don't
eat coriander or cilantro because i really really don't like it and it makes it a lot easier one of
the most important swedish traditions is being whole and clean now what does this mean this is
a deeply rooted tradition that goes so far back in swedish history but ultimately it means to always
present yourself as best as you possibly can every time we had friends over my family would
just massively clean the entire house not because it was necessarily dirty but it's so important to
uphold the standard of being whole and clean in swedish society another thing that i think is
crazy that other countries have and that we don't have is that we don't really use the expression
from scratch growing up i didn't know that you could buy cake mixes i had only seen on tv i
had never really heard of it i didn't know you could buy any sort of pre-made food or something
that we call hal fabikot which technically means half processed foods of course this might differ
a little bit but in general we don't say that we make things from scratch in sweden if you make a
cake you will make it from scratch that's that's just how you make a cake there's no other way to
make a cake you either buy it from the bakery or you make it from scratch and i think that's
also one of the reasons why we are quite a healthy country one of the best swedish culture traditions
that you've probably already heard about is fijia afrika is when you have a coffee normally or a tea
with a sweet treat and you normally have it in the afternoon but you can actually have it whenever
and this is one of the most common things we do when we go on dates or meet up with our friends
it's so cozy it's really fun i also really like that it's one of the few things in sweden where
you can date someone or meet someone without drinking alcohol now filiga means different
things in different languages especially in italian so i would use it with caution
and use it only when you're in sweden going back to child care another thing that i really
appreciate about swedish culture that you should try if you have children is co-sleeping my parents
co-slept with me and my brother everyone i know i think koslapped my sister co-slept with me or
with her parents when she was with them and i've never ever had any issues heard any issues or hear
anyone talk badly about co-sleeping co-sleeping with your baby makes so much more sense because
you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night and go into another room also your
baby's brain is not developed enough to know that you're not in the room which makes it feel unsafe
co-sleeping is literally the best option for sleeping with your baby my dad built this really
clever little half grip that he put next to the bed with a mattress and made it level to the bed
so i could be in the bed co-sleeping there at the same time as my mom was in the bed
co-sleeping shouldn't be a term i don't think it shouldn't be a trend it shouldn't be an idea
it should just be the most common way for sleeping with your baby another thing that is common in
sweden that isn't very common abroad is that both men and women call themselves feminists in sweden
people are generally more educated about feminism than in other countries and i really like that we
use the word more casually and without so much attachment to it that comes from other countries
a weird thing about sweden that i thought was a bit very quite strange is that our school is a lot
easier than any other school in the world now i don't know exactly how accurate this is but i know
that in general in sweden we are very educated however our school especially i think middle
school and preschool is a lot easier than for example in england or in new zealand we have way
less assignments way less homework but somehow it still works unfortunately this trend is changing
and we're becoming a bit more like the rest of the world but i really think homework is ridiculous
and we shouldn't have it so that's that one weird thing we do in sweden but i think we shouldn't do
so disregard this one is that we don't really date although i'm swedish i've never dated a
swedish guy because i think i've only have two swedish guys ever hit on me in my entire life
but in general we don't really date we don't really have a period of dating where you can
see other people or normally you're just sort of not together and then you're sort of together
dating in sweden is very weird uh that is why i've been so unsuccessful at it
and yeah i find it uncomfortable and i think sweden in fact should adopt how people date in
other countries because i think it makes way more sense and it's a much more adult way of dating
something we do in sweden is that we learn english very early this also makes so much
sense because it's easier to learn a language when you're young and voila most people speak english
which is such a useful skill to have if you want to live in another country or have any job
where you don't work in sweden alright so we're going even more political time for religion
one thing we don't do in sweden is we're not really religious or go to church
even though wikipedia might say otherwise so this has changed since then but when i
grew up in my entire generation we couldn't choose to be enrolled in the swedish church
system that just happened automatically when we were born no matter if we were baptized or not
we just went straight into the swedish church system which is also the system you have to
be in if you want to be buried in a church yard or if you want to be married in a church
if you want to get baptized in a church et cetera et cetera so this is a quite fun fact compared to
other countries because if you look at wikipedia it says most swedish people are religious but
that's simply because we are enrolled in church now say what you want about religion that i for
one am a person who thinks that we should practice what we preach and since most people have lots of
sex before marriage drink a ridiculous amount of alcohol and do all other sorts of gluttonous
things um i think it makes complete sense that most people don't go to church i remember going
to church in kindergarten for our summer ending and i remember my priest had leather pants and
played a rock and roll guitar which we all thought was very very fun we are a land of wonderful
and quirky weird strange traditions in sweden we have something called yantelogen which practically
means be humble but also never talk well about yourself so there are pros and cons about this
law as an unwritten law but one of the good things about it is that swedish people are in general
very comfortable and quiet or maybe better as to say not loud people so it's very nice to be around
swedish people no one ever yells no one ever tries to really be the center of attention no one really
you know speaks really loudly one of my favorite things we do in sweden which does not work in
english is that we don't really have a word for please now you can use snella which means like
most kindly or can you kindly or you can use tak which means thank you but we don't really have
a word for please i love learning languages because this is those little parts about a
language and a culture that you won't really learn unless you know the language so i love
speaking english i love using the word please but i also love speaking swedish and being able
to sneak in attack or snella where swedish people normally don't and sound like the most friendly
and polite person in the world so it's a win-win so okay my friends i did not think we'd go this
political i have written this video down it's very funny because when i translate these very
regular swedish ideas to english they suddenly become so much more political swedish people are
generally extremely nice and it's such a nice culture to live in and i think that's why so
many people move back to sweden when they want to have a family because it's such a safe and
reasonable and wholesome place for kids to grow up and part of that is because these lovely and
quirky ideas that we have thank you guys so much for watching this video i had so much fun speaking
about my swedish traditions especially since i'm not in sweden anymore makes me so happy to
be able to share something of how i grew up with the rest of the world especially the useful parts
let me know in the comments below if you have any specific traditions to your home country that you
think are really valuable for everyone and like this video if you like this type of content and
cause it really helps the channel and thank you so much for watching and i will see you next week
why is it so shiny guys it's supposed to be sunny