Caroline

On this page I’m comparing my country, Sweden, to your state, Oklahoma. You might ask yourself if it is really fair to compare a country to a state. In this case, I would say it is. Most of you would say that there’s a big difference between Oklahoma and other states. Comparing Sweden to the U.S. would be wrong, since I’ve mainly experienced this part of your country.

Some of the things that I’ve thought about, I’ve already discussed in various posts. On this page I don’t want to discuss minor issues (as the horrifying discovery that people are eating enormous pickles at the movie theatre or the fact that I at first was offended at the restaurants when they gave me the check before I asked for it). No, I want to discuss the way of living. You see, there is a big difference between you and me.

Growing up
Let’s start from the beginning. Most people I talked to here tells me that they were spanked during their childhood. They say that it did them good and that they will spank their kids. Where I come from, hitting your kids is a crime. As a parent, spanking is completely out of the questions, unless you feel the urge of going to jail.

School pride
Oklahoma State University is a lot different from my school. First of all, you guys love your school and you are proud to be a part of it. You wear orange clothes with your schools name all over it. You even have some weird grouch against Oklahoma University (do you even know why?). In Sweden, it is very rare to see someone wear a shirt with the university’s name on it. If you want one, you don’t have much of a choice – there’s only one to choose from.

College sport
For some of you, college sport is life. For me it is a completely new thing. We don’t have that. If you want to do sports, you have to do it in your spare time. And you know what, football and basketball, two of the biggest sports here, isn’t big at all back home. Soccer and hockey, is what it is all about.

Financing you studies
It doesn’t cost anything to go to school in Sweden; we don’t have tuitions as you do. The only thing you pay for is books, apartment and food – just as you do! Some of you have nice parents that pay for all these things. That’s not they way it works where I come from. We have something called CSN, were we get our money every month. If we go to school full-time, we usually get around 800 dollars per month. One part of this is a grant that we don’t have to pay back and the other part of it is a loan that we have to pay back before we retire. We are entitled to six years of grant/loan. This means that almost anyone can go to the university, no matter what your economic situation looks like.