I’ve been here in Stockholm just over a week now, and I’m sure you’re all keen to hear how things are going?
Where to start? I could pick up after the last installment, I was awaiting my baggage at the time, which arrived shortly after I sent that entry. Outside to find a taxi, I ended up in a Volvo driven by someone who thought he was in the film, whisking me along the highway at 160km/h flashing his fellow taxi drivers to get out the way. I survived, but was slightly more full of adrenaline than I would perhaps have liked given it was time to sleep.
Up early for work the next day, and I was rather surprised to find that my boss was actually expecting my arrival that day, somehow I’d gotten it into my head that there was a disconnect in the message somewhere in the sea of agents between me and him. He introduced me to a number of people whose names I’d forgotten by the time he finished, and then sat me in a meeting room with a tatty printed document while I waited the arrival of my computer. This is typical of tech companies – less typically the computer actually arrived before lunch. The next day I was joined in my meeting room by another new starter. Then over this weekend we moved to our new locations, along with the rest of the team, one floor down.
I’m not sure theres a great deal more to say about the work or the office – I suppose I could tell you how everyone speaks very good English, although some of the people from other places get confused about which language they are speaking, both Swedish and English being foreign to them, they start speaking in the wrong one sometimes, but soon realise that I don’t understand them.
Lunch is at the cafeteria in a building over the road, Ericsson seem to occupy half of the buildings in the area of Kista (pronounced Shista), with Sony Ericsson only having three or four, other notable presences in the area are Nokia, Flextronics, Saab Technologies and IBM.
Kista is very much tech central, there are plenty of the above kinds of tech companies, theres a technical university and theres a whole bunch of new development, it seems everything here has been built in the last thirty or fourty years. And with that, the whole area is laid out with large roads and a wonderful network of cycle and pedestrian pathways. Although a number of the cyclepaths are closed at the moment because of various pieces of building works going on.
It takes me 20 minutes to walk from the hotel to the office, which is quite a pleasant distance except when the weather is being miserable.
Around Kista station is the Galleria, a shopping centre containing a good selection of shops and a fairly extensive food court.
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