Which country in the world currently has the best functioning liberal democracy?

[Jon Miller]

No, I meant in general. What do you mean 15 years behind socially/culturally?

The darkness is the hardest thing to get use to. Also I am walking like 16km per day which I was not use to either (I need to get a bike).

JM

[BeBMan]

They talk funny.

Everyone outside Germany does. Even inside Germany, there's Bavaria

[Kitschum]

No, I meant in general. What do you mean 15 years behind socially/culturally?

Let's see. Norway is not in the EU, they have a weird populist-libertarian party in parliament, and a state church. All of which is true for Sweden ca 1994. But mostly, I got a similar feeling in Norway as I did visiting friends in a small town in middle-western Sweden, like people, attitudes are changing more slowly.

I don't mean that they're bigoted and Swedes are enlightened, they're just slightly more conservative, and seem to be following us in a lot of ways. We don't listen to their music, but they listen to ours and so on.

The darkness is the hardest thing to get use to. Also I am walking like 16km per day which I was not use to either (I need to get a bike).

I know. It's somehow demoralizing to go to work/uni when it's dark and then when you're going home it's gotten dark again. I always try to get out and walk somewhere for lunch just to catch the light. I even had friends who moved south from growing up in Luleå, and they always said it felt darker in the south on account of there never being any snow on the ground that illuminates things around it pretty well.

It will keep getting darker until the winter solstice, but once past that, I tend to stop noticing it so much as the light returns pretty fast anyway. Here is a handy website to play around with: http://www.prognosen.se/sol.php

By the way, welcome to Uppsala:

[Kitschum]

Everyone outside Germany does. Even inside Germany, there's Bavaria

With Norwegians I'm suspecting that if they just stopped adding Prozac to the tap water they'd sound just like us.