The Rawness

A round-up of vacation thoughts that were interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant individual blog posts:

The Illusion of Soft Culture:

In some ways, visiting a culture that is blatantly and outrageously different on the surface is probably better than going to some cultures in that seem to only have superficial surface differences from America. In the former, you get a really extreme and intense culture shock up front, which causes you to tread carefully and pay close attention throughout because you’re always hyper-aware and conscious of cultural differences.

Places like Amsterdam and Stockholm, on the other hand, are very superficially similar to America.  You’re surrounded by trendy clothing, hip-hop music at all the clubs, guys and girls rapping along to all the lyrics and grinding on the dance floor like they’re in a hip-hop video, lots of American slang and sitcom catchphrases (“How you doing?”), Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers everywhere, Coca Cola and McDonald’s everywhere you turn, posters everywhere for the latest American movie blockbusters.  So you feel familiar right away, become careless and don’t pay attention to cultural differences as much as you should.  This underestimation of cultural differences makes accidentally offending people and crossing boundaries actually more likely than they would be in a culture radically different than America because you get really comfortable, stop walking on eggshells and start assuming that everything that’s okay at home in America is acceptable abroad.

I found something off in a lot of conversations I had abroad at first before I figured this out. Great conversations would turn stale and then weird, and I didn’t realize until later that cultural misunderstanding was responsible. What helped was when I met some Europeans who spent significant time in America, and thus knew not just the soft culture of America, but also its hard internal culture too. These people were the ones who helped explain to me the little things I couldn’t figure out.

You should always be wary of countries that have a long history of being culturally and racially homogenous (which basically covers almost every country out there except America probably). These are particularly hard to penetrate because so many aspects of their social dynamics are intuitive and unspoken. As an analogy, think of interactions with your family versus interactions with new roommates. With your family, you’ve had years developing common context, you grew up with each other, and the background to every interaction doesn’t need to be spelled out and fully explained. You develop various communication shorthands because you share so much background and have so many shared experiences.  There’s a lot of implicit understanding that can be exchanged just through a look or a gesture that would totally fly over an outsider’s head if you tried it on them. Compared to an outsider, you can read between the lines with each other more, finish each others’ sentences and seemingly read each others’ minds. You instinctively know when the other is joking or not.

Now picture times of your life when you’ve had new roommates.  You’ve shared much less common experiences and background. Suddenly explicit explanation becomes more important. There’s no implicit understanding of boundaries and personal space, there are less shared habits and attitudes, a lot of lines need to be clearly drawn in the sand, and a lot of concerns need to be clearly voiced in order to peacefully coexist. You have to tread carefully to avoid misunderstandings. There is also less patience with putting up with roommates because you are not tied to them like you are to family. Idiosyncracies that your family would either share with you or have learned to ignore from you now become an issue.

America is the country of “new roommates.” Because we’re such a mix of cultures, and have been from almost the beginning, and that mix of culture keeps changing with the constant addition of new immigrant groups, we don’t have quite the same level of implicit familiarity you find in countries where cultural and racial homogeneity where the norm for most their existence. For many countries outside of the U.S., diversity is still a new relatively concept, an experiment if you will.

European countries are countries that have been “families” for most of their existence that have only recently started allowing new roommates to move in with them. And the more culturally and racially homogenous a country remains, the more it is like a close-knit family. People are used to being implicitly understood. People are not used to explaining everything in explicit terms as possible. People are used to reading between the lines and understanding each other’s motivations for doing things, as they all come from similar backgrounds, races and shared cultural experiences.

I had lunch with some people in Stockholm and they explained to me all the differences in culture I wasn’t picking up on. I consider myself pretty good at spotting social dynamics, and even I was shocked at how much social nuances I was missing. They also explained that Scandinavians were not as used to explaining their culture to people because they didn’t have to until recently. Immigration was not as widespread as it had become recently, and it was not as popular with tourists as some other countries where the tourism industry is so huge that tourists become part of the fabric of the country’s daily life. On the flipside, American culture seems easier for outsiders to understand because we talk, dissect and explain our culture constantly and openly, in our opinion news articles, our movies and TV shows, our documentaries, and our social science books. Because we don’t assume the existence of shared backgrounds and experiences as much as most other countries, we unconsciously have become used to dissecting and explaining and learning about our cultural idiosyncracies.

The “roommates” dynamic is what is called “low-context communication,” the “family” dynamic is what is called “high-context communication.”  Americans are used to low-context communication, while most other cultures are more used to high-context communication.  In fact, this is a big reason as to why Hollywood movies and foreign films are traditionally so different.  The films of Hollywood are traditionally extremely low-context, which is why they have such broad appeal, domestically and abroad.  European films however have always been high-context, requiring the viewer to pay more attention to subtext, implication, body language and subtle facial expressions.

The Americanization of popular culture throughout the developed Western world makes Americans believe that the similarities between all cultures in the west are much deeper and more profound than they actually are, leaving them oblivious to just how different values can be from country to country in the West. (On a side note, this is also starting to happen in other places as well.  The Westernization of much of the Eastern hemisphere is starting to create the same fallacy, which is why western leaders often make mistakes in assessing the cultures and governments found in places like China, North Korea, Russia and Muslim countries. Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order talks about this problem, for example how a young Muslim may put on a pair of Levis’ jeans, put on an Ipod playing pop music, drink a Coca-Cola and take off to bomb an embassy. His superficial appearances and habits imply a total acceptance of Western lifestyle, but his core internal values are still fundamentally those of his home culture. The post-9/11 world really made this problem apparent.)

Flip-Flops

My whole time there, I did not see that fashion scourge popular among American women, the dreaded flip-flops. Not a single girl was wearing flip-flops outdoors, even to Sunday brunch. This post is a scathing critique of flip-flops. Flip-flops have even become acceptable for reporters to wear on the national news. Flip-flops have become so socially acceptable among the 20-something and younger set that members of the Northwestern University female lacrosse team wore flip-flops when meeting the President at the White House in 2005! The last straw was when a friend of mind told me he saw a young douche on the subway headed to work in a dress suit and…flip-flops!!! My friend asked what was up with the flip-flops and the guy said he just wore them on the commute for comfort. What the fuck?! Just the sound of hearing the clop-clop-clop sound of heel slapping plastic all around you as you walk around New York is enough to drive you crazy. The sight of the accumulated black dirt on a girl’s heels make it even worse.

In Stockholm and Amsterdam, I never saw flip-flops. Not once.  Also although I didn’t go to Eastern Europe, I met many Eastern Europeans while in Western Europe and not only did they never wear flip-flops, they never even seemed to even wear flats. I asked a woman, a Latvian, about whether my observation about Eastern Europeans was on point or not, and she said it was true. She said she actually didn’t even own any flats (and saw no reason to), except for one pair of sneakers she used if she had to hike or exercise. I shed a tear.

Part of me thought she was exaggerating or pulling my leg until someone showed me these two videos out of Russia:

Rules:

You can see evidence of a country’s overall national character very much in the little things that country’s people do. For example, in Stockholm no one would cross against a traffic light. Even if there were no cars coming from either direction as far as the eye could see, no one would cross unless the traffic signal gave them the okay. In NY, people are itching for any break in the traffic to exploit in order to cross the street, regardless of what the traffic signal displays. I think it speaks a lot about each country’s attitude toward symbols of authority. This country, after all, was founded on resistance to authority figures if you think about it.

Legs

The legs on women in Stockholm and Amsterdam were great. I don’t think I saw a pair of bad legs or cankles at all while there. It’s got to be all the walking and biking.

In Stockholm you walk all the time. Unless it’s an impractical distance to walk or you are in danger of being late, you are going to be walking to where you have to go. Even if you have a long distance to cover to go home, you’ll probably walk. Going to the afterparty while drunk and in your club clothes? You’ll probably still do the walk, even if it’s 15 or 20 minutes. Drunk off your ass and a twenty minutes or a half hour from home? You may still walk.

Distances that most Americans would call a taxi for are totally natural to walk for Swedish people. I walked everywhere all the time, and no matter what time it was there were plenty of other people taking long walks too. I could be walking back to my hotel at 5 AM and see someone else taking a long walk at 5 AM too, walking in front of me for 20 minutes.

I love walking, so I was right at home. While there though I thought about all my friends back home, some of whom are even gym rats and exercise freaks that will kill the cardio machine, that absolutely hate real world walking. I can have friends that crush the stairmaster daily but bitch if we have to walk a block too far from the car to the bar. Even as a gym cardio lover myself, I’ve got to say that I never got weight loss results as drastic as what I got from walking everywhere I needed to go in Europe. I would just add an extra 15-20 minutes for everywhere I had to go and instead of taking a train or bus or taxi I’d walk. Over the course of a day I must have covered miles. I also spent my mornings and afternoons doing walking tours from my guidebook and inviting total strangers along.

I hate to sound like a typical American Europhile snob (and anyone who reads this blog knows I hate that type), but even I have to admit: I totally see why Americans are so much fatter than Europeans. Gyms aren’t even fashionable there as they are here in America yet people looked great and were on average in better shape just by being less lazy and incorporating more activity in their every day lives. Cumulatively all that walking really adds up over time.

In Amsterdam, it’s not just walking but bikes also. People bike everywhere. The whole city is built to be bike-friendly, and there are actually more bikes than people, estimated at 1.5-2 bikes per person. You see businessmen in suits commuting to work on bikes, hot girls made up and dressed to the nines in eveningwear headed to and from the supertrendy club on bikes, stumbling drunk guys and girls getting on bikes and cycling groggily home. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning and you will see people biking around. Apparently bike theft is so common people don’t want to invest too much in a nice bike, so you won’t see much of those multithousand dollar bikes that are popular with yuppies here. Bikes are the hot commodity there.

There is no bicycle stigma. I didn’t meet a single person there who owned a car, and you can even show up on a date with a bicycle and not be labeled a loser if you are a guy. A woman can get made up and look glamorous yet show up to her date on a bicycle too. No expectations of the guy showing up in a nice car like in America.

Anyway, it’s no wonder that great legs are so common there. No homo, but even a lot of the guys had great legs too. Guess that’s why so many of them can get away with those skinny jeans. I met one chubby, Seth Rogen sized guy there, the only fat guy I met on the whole trip. Life sucked for him, he said. I told him to come to America where he’d be “average.”

True Stereotypes:

I did my research for this trip backwards. Rather than study the cultures beforehand, I did no research on cultural etiquette. I didn’t want to be biased and arrive with prejudgments. I wanted all my conclusions to be made from firsthand experience or from things I learned directly from natives. After I came back, though, I did a lot of cultural research to see if the conclusions I made matched what the accepted stereotypes were.

Even though I was only in two cities, Stockholm and Amsterdam, I met tourists and transplanted Europeans from a lot of different countries, to the point I feel comfortable in making generalizations about more than just two European countries. Based on what I experienced myself, I think this series of links below from the site Daily Candor are the most accurate descriptions I’ve seen of European stereotypes that are true:

• What Americans Think About Europeans – Great piece, first goes into what insular white Americans thnk about Europe, then discusses what American subgroups like blacks, latinos, Asians, Indians, gays and hipsters think of Europe. Uncannily accurate.
• What Europeans Think About Each Other
• 10 things you probably didn?t know about the Dutch and the Netherlands

Muslims

Based on my readings before I arrived in Europe, I expected the political correctness in day-to-day life there to be utterly oppressive and stifling. So I was quite surprised to see how open people were about Muslim-bashing there.

It seems that in public discourse, in political speeches and initiatives and in the mass media, political correctness and avoidance of offending Muslims is the norm. The political correctness of our media has nothing on what goes on there. It’s so bad that you can basically tell when a crime story there is about a Muslim because they’ll conveniently omit any hint of name, race or religion.

So it caught me quite off-guard when I found the people on the street to be incredibly blunt about their frustration or outright dislike of Muslims. Once people felt you out and could tell you wouln’t be offended, they’d cut loose in one-on-one interactions, especially when liquor was involved. People there seem sick of the political correctness, of the refusal of Muslims to assimilate, and the supposedly disrespectful way Africans and Muslims approached the white European women.

Apparently Muslims hear so much about the hedonism of the West that they expect European women to be total whores that require minimum effort to bed, and often approach them in such a way. They then get disappointed when the reality turns out to not be true, or a total media-fueld exaggeration. I heard about the frustration Muslim immgrants experience over this disconnect is even worse in Eastern Europe. I heard many Europeans in these supposedly open and egalitarian cities making approving remarks when a bouncer would refuse a “ghetto” African entry, saying things like “Thank goodness.” One girl even told me “We’re not racist, they just don’t know how to act civil or treat women with decency. You’re black, but you’re classy, handsome and well-mannered. If they could be the same as you, they wouldn’t have the problems they do.” I didn’t know if I should be offended or not. It’s like when I was growing up and white kids would tell me I was one of the “good blacks” like it was supposed to be a compliment (hated that).

That being said, I began to understand their dilemma. First off, multiculturalims is quite new for them. It’s that “family” vs. “neighbor” dynamic I described earlier in the post. We in American have always had a low-context “neighbor” dynamic. Getting new “neighbors” in the form of immigrants is not as big a deal for us. For them, they are going from a longtime high-context “family” dynamic to an open door unlimited “neighbors” dynamic overnight. And to make it worse, the “neighbors” don’t want to learn any of the family’s rules or traditions or customs yet still want to take advantage of everything the family has to offer.

You can definitely feel the tension betwen Muslims (both the Middle Eastern and black African variety) and Europeans all over. I even found myself starting to experiencing some of the same discomfort. I started understanding why even in simple encounters they can be off-putting. A lot of it stems from different social customs and body language rules. For example eye contact is much more intense and off-putting from the Middle Eastern muslims I met, and the acceptable personal space was very different. A guy would have no problem standing inches from my face with an intense, eye-to-eye stare while asking me for directions or where the bathroom was. I’d unconsciously take a step back to reintroduce distance and they’d just keep closing the gap automatically, oblivious to the fact that they were too close. It wasn’t done deliberately to make me uncomfortable, they guy was just socially clueless until I put my hand up to stop him from closing the distance again.

If it made me uncomfortable and I’m a big guy who can take care of himself, I can only imagine how it made women feel. Women have to constantly keep in mind that they are physically weaker than men and can be in danger at any time, so they are extra sensitive to sensations of creepiness and personal space.

I predict a strong, grassroots opposition movement of conservatism from Scandinavia and the rest of Western Europe that will blindside the sitting politicians and the mainstream obnoxiously liberal media totally off-guard in the next few years. I heard similar things have happened in Finland recently as conservatives won major election victories there last Sunday that no one saw coming.

Male Fashion

It’s harder to be a high-fashion guy in Europe. In America, the average man is so afraid of being bold and sexual in any way that he is constantly thinking in terms of what he is unwilling to wear rather than what he is willing to try. American men dress thinking how not to offend, how not to stand out and how not to be mistaken as a fag due to tight fit or bold colors. Grey, blue, khaki, repeat. Dullsville. Thus, over here, a guy like me who actually wears clothes that fit, takes a little risk with color selection and is willing to wear pointy shoes or shop at someplace other than the Gap is considered a top-notch dresser. I get complimented here as having a “European” style of dressing.

Over there every person has a European style of dressing. It’s Europe! I was told that I had to dress nice to get into the exclusive clubs there without being on the guestlist. I put on my best outfits, the ones that get me to skip lines and get into top clubs here in NY, and door people were utterly unimpressed. An outfit that an American guy would find risky was just tame and boring there. You have to dress at another level to have above-average style there.

I’m not sure if I want to ever be that metrosexual though, especially at the Stockholm level of male fashion. I’m 34 years old, fuck that. I accept defeat in that department.

Recommended Reading:

This is where I just touch on a bunch of topics that relate to Sweden but weren’t big enough to warrant their own posts or didn’t quite fit into the other posts contextually.

Skeletons in the Closet

Since coming back from Sweden and Amsterdam, I’ve been doing some research on both countries. I found out something utterly amazing about Sweden. From this article:

The revelations in Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, shocked the world: long admired as a model of the enlightened and humane social welfare state, Sweden had forcibly sterilized more than 60,000 people, mostly women, between 1935 and 1976. The sterilizations were part of a government program designed to weed out “social undesirables” in the pursuit of a stronger, purer, more Nordic population. Those undesirables included, as the paper put it in a subhead, “‘mixed race individuals,’ single mothers with many children, deviants, Gypsies, and other ‘vagabonds.’”

The program’s Nazi overtones were disturbing, yet inescapable. Under the headline racial purity in the welfare state, reporter Maciej Zaremba put it this way in his two-part series in August: “In Sweden, it was only under Social Democratic rule and in Germany only under Nazism that citizens could be deprived of their reproductive functions as a result of their origins or their disabilities.”

His stories may have been a jolt for Swedes, but it was no surprise that it was Zaremba who produced them. For more than a decade, Zaremba, 46, has been exposing the underside of Sweden’s welfare state in Dagens Nyheter, a 380,000-circulation morning newspaper that is Sweden’s most influential voice. He has uncovered abuses in trusted institutions: the State Marine Institute, the Ministry of Social Affairs, and Sweden’s celebrated judicial system. But this time he challenged the utopian vision Swedes hold of themselves and their government, and called into question a piece of their national identity.

The sterilization program is not mentioned in Swedish history texts. Like most Swedes, Zaremba didn’t know very much about the Swedish Sterilization Act, which was passed by the Parliament in 1935 and stayed on the books for forty-one years. Early in 1997, Zaremba came across an obscure book about sterilization, which was co-written by historian Gunnar Broberg of the University of Lund, but published only in the United States. Immediately, Zaremba knew he was looking at a major story: “The numbers of sterilizations Broberg uncovered convinced me this program was much bigger and more widespread than anyone ever imagined.”

So Zaremba read everything he could about sterilization in Sweden and around the world — including the U.S., where forced sterilization of the mentally disabled, certain criminals, and others was legalized in several states starting in 1907 and continued until the 1960s. In Sweden, meanwhile, Zaremba learned that the sterilization program was rooted in the study of eugenics, a pseudo-science devoted to the creation of a superior race. But the program was expanded in 1941 to include any Swedes who exhibited behavior judged by the state to be anti-social…

More disturbing, Zaremba discovered that the sterilizations had never been voluntary, as was believed in Sweden, and as they were portrayed on paper. In the largest group of cases, adolescent girls who fit the state’s criteria had been removed from their parents’ homes by state officials and put in reform schools or institutions. Then, as a condition for their release, they were forced to undergo sterilization. And the state’s criteria could be alarmingly arbitrary: people who fell behind in school were labeled “stupid,” people who were outgoing were “sexually promiscuous,” and people who were quiet or shy were deemed “anti-social.” All were grounds for sterilization. It was clear from the files that sterilization had been forced upon vulnerable and often terrified women, a point Zaremba drove home forcefully in his articles:

Freedom of choice was in fact totally illusory. The person concerned was either declared ‘of unsound mind’ — a simple procedure — or was subjected to irresistible pressure. Sign this or we’ll take the children, sign this or there’ll be no social benefit, no flat, no leave . . . and so on. Sweden went furthest in the way of legalized blackmail . . . .

That just blew my mind! This is something that really is hardly talked about in any shape or form. I was over there with multiple guidebooks, each of which had extensive, in-depth histories of Sweden from ancient times until now, discussing every last tidbit of Swedish culture. I went to many historical museums while there, and no mention of this. Apparently it’s still a very touchy subject there, much like slavery is among some southern whites today in the United States.

And think about it, 1976 is quite recent, and the sterilization program went on for decades. For many it was a requirement to receive welfare. I wonder if it plays any role in why Swedish people seemed to look so damn good. 40 years of weeding out “undesirable” genes? I’m not saying that this 40 years turned them from a homely people into supermodels overnight, but just that maybe it bumped them up a few notches from just good looking to ridiculously good looking. Okay, that last part is a stretch, I admit…

When to Visit Stockholm

I learned to interesting tidbits of info when I was talking to people from Stockholm. First, people get paid once a month, and everyone gets paid on the same day. If I remember correctly, that day is the 24th of every month. It comes into the bank accounts at midnight. On the days leading up to payday on the 24th is when people have the least money and are the most broke, but on midnight of the 24th when that money hits the bank account people will be flush with cash and drinking and partying even harder.

Also, the weather for most of the year can be pretty drab in Stockholm I was told. People will stay inside more during winter months, and there few daylight hours. So when May rolls around, it’s like coming out of hibernation. People have months and months of pent up partying in them, and I was told that as crazy as Stockholm was in August when I was there, it pales in comparison to Stockholm in May when the summer just starts. The streets are even more packed with people and the partying is even more rambunctious.

So putting these two pieces of info together, it seems to me that the best time to visit would probably be May 23, the night of the first payday of the first month of summer. Damn I’m brilliant. I have to jump back and kiss myself sometimes for the shit I come up with.

Swedish Rap

I went to a outdoor free concert thrown by the local urban radio station there, The Voice. Man was it a blast. I met some people from Gothenburg who were in Stockholm for the day just to attend the concert, and they took me with them. (Gothenburg people were by far the nicest people I met in Sweden, and when I go back I will definitely spend a few days in Gothenburg as well as Stockholm) The main act was American rapper Flo Rida, but almost all the opening acts were Swedish rappers. A few of them were wack, but two were quite good. One guy’s name I don’t know because everything he said was in Swedish, but the other guy, although a native of Sweden, rapped completely in English, so I was able to get his name and the names of his songs. His name is Adam Tensta, here’s his Wikipedia entry, here’s his Myspace and his videos are below. He raps totally in English with very little hint of a Swedish accent over hot electro beats, very much like N*E*R*D or Timbaland when they are on their A game and not phoning it in, or Kanye with better rhymes and less obvious samples:

I hope the dude makes it big in American music circles, but then again if that happened he’d probably start making duets with Justin Timberlake and sucking immediately, so maybe not.

Recommended Reading:

Partying:

Here in NY, most clubs are open until 4 or sometimes later, but by then it’s usually dead. Only the really hard partiers or desperate losers trying to mack on whatever is left are still out at 4. A bulk of the party is already out the door before closing time hits, except for a few stragglers, unless it’s just an exceptional party.

In Stockholm it’s different, almost everyone stays until closing and parties hard until the end. At the clubs that are open until 5 AM, when 5 AM hits the club is as full as ever, and may even be at peak capacity still. And no one budges. The music stops, and people just stand around and some people even try to go back to the bar for a last drink. The bouncers have to force everyone out, and reluctantly they leave, but they just stand outside continuing to drink, smoke, continue conversation and maybe do some last minute macking outside. Some people move on to find an after hours party, where I drew the line since I still wanted to get some sleep and actually do daytime sightseeing too.

I found the nightclub hip-hop to be way better in Stockholm than in NY. In NY, some parties still play some great hip-hop, but overall the more mainstream, trendy places play predictable, low-risk boring stuff. It’s usually only the latest and biggest hits, with some really played-out old school rap. A hip-hop party in NY usually plays the same 12 old-school hip-hop songs, unless you are checking out a backpack underground hip-hop party where someone like Stretch Armstrong is spinning. In Stockholm, the range of hip-hop music had a lot better range, from stuff you’d hear at an underground hip-hop party to the really good new mainstream club-bangers blended seamlessly together.

My favorite club there was F12, which wasn’t in the Stureplan area so I didn’t need to have booked a Paris runway show or sell my firstborn child and left testicle to get in, yet it was still stylish, plus the crowd was still beautiful but much more down to earth and the music was great.  You can see a picture of it below:

I heard an incredible house track get blended seamlessly into 50 Cent’s “I Get Money” immediately followed by the old school ultra-obscure gem “We Rap More Mellow” by the Younger Generation, which you can play below, and made it work:

My theory is that many of these European DJs learn hip-hop better than their NY counterparts and try harder to think about making a really deep and eclectic playlist out of an inferiority complex. Every hip-hop fan I met there kept telling me how I must be so disappointed by the DJs and hip-hop I hear in Sweden and how much more progressive and eclectic the hip-hop I hear in NY clubs must be. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.  They try harder because they imagine things to be so much better than they actually are in places like NY, the so-called Mecca of hip-hop.

I made sure to befriend a ton of Swedish people, both guys and girls, so that I’d have people to take me out sightseeing or for early evening drinks in the following days. One of the first things you should do, and that I didn’t figure out until a few days in, is to get a prepaid phone or prepaid SIM card to put into your existing phone, so that you’ll have a local number to make calls on and text people you meet. Having people call you at your hotel is unreliable and it’s not a good idea to give people an international number to call you at since it will end up being expensive for both of you. Get a prepaid phone as soon as possible and give out the number to as many cool people as you can and make them your tour guides in the city. These people were also helpful because they filled me in on Swedish culture (that’s how I found out about Systembolaget) and got me on guest lists at the more exclusive clubs. This tip worked so well that I’d recommend it to people on all vacations. Get a local cell phone number to give out as soon as possible.

Even better is if you can befriend people who live in Stockholm but aren’t originally from there but are instead from a nearby city like Gothenburg or the “boonies.” These type of people are great because they will know Stockholm well and often be just as savvy as a Stockholm native, but way friendlier and down-to-earth, which is saying a lot because I already found Stockholm people to be nice, at least to tourists.

Thanks to people I met and kept in touch with, I was able to get into more exclusive clubs like Berns hotel and Village, both of which were packed to the gills with beautiful people, almost to the point you couldn’t move, and had great, GREAT music, with people drinking and dancing up a storm. And really, REALLY drinking. Everyone I was with, even the daintiest girls, were drinking faster and more than me and pushing me to keep up. In no time at all the party would be all tore up.

I think I realized another reason people drink so much when partying in Stockholm, which I’ll describe in the next section below.

Swedish men and women on the make:

A reader Helena asked me on a previous post, “Dude, you have female readers – what are the guys like physically? Is that 6ft+, blond Adonis stereotype that’s making me particularly eager about my upcoming tour of N.Europe true?” Well, yes and no. I expected to see a Viking stereotype in Sweden of huge, blond giants. The guys were not quite as tall as I expected (Amsterdam fit that look more actually). But they were as good-looking as rumored. So many people had incredibly chiseled features and great cheekbones. Lookswise many of them hit the genetic jackpot, and they all dress with a high level of Euro trendiness, like a Zara or H&M mannequin come to life. Great looks, well-tailored clothing, very metrosexual air about them…but they may take it too far for your tastes depending on what kind of woman you are. For example it’s not uncommon for guys to be so vain they wear men’s makeup. And I was told by some women that it’s trendy now for straight guys to make out with other guys while out drinking. A woman told me about her straight friend that would go out with her, get smashed, make out with a guy, and still swear he was straight afterward.

When I got my first taste of Stockholm nightlife, I was shocked at how shy Swedish men seemed. The women there were absolutely stunning, and the guys seemed to just stand in the corner with their friends, stare inappropriately and just drink without uttering a word or making a move. By 2 or 3 AM though, it would be a totally different story.

The guys would drink to get liquid courage and then turn into total sleazebags. It was like Jeckyll and Hyde. They’d come up behind girls, looking visibly drunk and dancing horribly, and start grinding and thrusting on their asses. I heard guys actually open a conversation slurring things like “Hey baby, wannaaaaa fuuuccckkk…” and other off-the-wall things. They’d drink to get courage, but overdo it and just get sloppy instead, and sloppiness combined with total lack of game is a disaster.

I also saw guys use pickup lines, but not to be ironic or funny, but dead serious, like “Is your daddy a thief? Because he took the stars from the sky and put them in your eyes.” Keep in mind, it wasn’t bad on purpose to be cheeky or get a laugh, it was said in total earnest. Some Stockholm women I met set it wasn’t uncommon for them to be horny, break down and give a Stockholm guy a chance, and bring him home only to realize he couldn’t even get it up because he drank himself into oblivion (another way the liquid courage thing can backfire). So even though many Swedish guys are great-looking, their horrible lack of game often outweighs any benefits their looks give them. A female tourist even said to me “I find these guys so good-looking but they never approach and when they do the conversation is so revolting.”

Something else this trip made me realize. Growing up, we black people used to always joke about white people and their inability to dance. Especially during the late 70s and early 80s whenever we saw them try to dance to old-school hip-hop music and the R&B of the era. But now that we have generations of white people who have grown up exposed to hip-hop or have been around it for multiple decades, I have to amend that statement: white MEN on average can’t dance. I saw Swedish women doing everything to hip-hop from two-stepping, booty shakes, grinding like a stripper on a pole, the works. I already noticed the phenomenon here in the States with white women, but now I’m convinced it’s international. Apparently enough exposure to hip-hop brings out the skanky dancer in any woman, regardless of race or culture. White guys on average however, except the exceptionally cool ones, still don’t get it. They either don’t dance, dance ironically for laughs, try to dance seriously and can visibly be seen to count steps in their mind while biting their lip hard thanks to the excessive concentration, or worse, drink a bunch to get enough nerve to dance and just end up really making asses of themselves once they lose both their inhibitions and their motor coordination at the same time. If I had to give some advice to white men worldwide, it’s this: learn a simple two-step rhythm. Just learning something so simple can go such a long way and fill up a huge gap in your game.

The people I met while partying would be the same people who I hung out with during the day, so I made several groups of friends that I’d hang out with throughout my time there. They were a great resource of information as they explained Stockholm interactions to me. Just like the Swedish men are reserved and need to drink up to get courage, the Swedish women are similar, except due to the fact that they’re beautiful women it doesn’t really exhibit itself as social awkwardness the way it does with men. But Swedes would tell me that it wasn’t uncommon for a Swedish woman to be drunk and touchy-feely at the bar or club, but she would likely be shy to meet up with you again sober in the daytime the next day. She’d instead most likely tell you were she was going to be that night, and you’d meet again at night and continue where you left out, with both of you drunk and uninhibited. Eventually it would move on to daytime dates. Despite how touchy they can be when drunk, they are a very hands off people when sober. They are not as comfortable touching strangers the way Americans are.

Stockholm men, according to women I spoke to, are very judgmental of a girl who approaches a man, or a girl they see making out with a guy or getting a phone number. It is very easy to get labeled a slut there, and supposedly guys will waste no time spreading bad things about a girl. One girl even told me how she hated this, because she’d think a guy would appreciate having the burden taken off him to approach women all the time, but alas, that isn’t that case. So despite the reputation for Swedish women being among the most progressive feminist women in the world, there is still a stigma about women approaching a man first there, unlike here in the States where women can publicly be as sexually aggressive and forthcoming as a drunken sailor on leave and still suffer little in terms of reputation.

So it seems that both genders there use drunkenness to unleash inhibitions and do things they normally wouldn’t feel comfortable doing even more than we Americans do. Since they are more inhibited when sober, they have to get more drunk to counteract it when they hang out. I could be wrong about this theory though. Two Swedish women also told me that Stockholm girls, when on vacation as tourists, suddenly become as aggressive as the Stockholm guys back home. They said it’s due to the fact they can’t be as aggressive back home for fear of ruining their reputations, and also because when abroad in America in places like New York they know they’re hotter than all the natives and it makes them go crazy. (They claimed in America only L.A. gave serious competition)

This aversion by Swedish guys to being approached by women wouldn’t be so bad if they themselves seemed to have a clue what they were doing when they approached women, but on average they were horrible. Not only would they do those cheesy pickup lines I mentioned above, they’d also do things like “How you doin’?” like Joey from Friends. And keep in mind, this is delivered totally straight, not the least bit tongue in cheek. Apparently even though Swedish people like speaking to each other in Swedish, when it comes to pickup lines and curses they think it sounds cooler to deliver them in English (it doesn’t).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="201" caption="Some catchphrases don't translate abroad"][/caption]

And it only got worse from there. Some women asked me if I ever heard of The Game. I asked them why. Apparently the pickup culture is huge there. Huge. Neil Strauss’s book is a huge phenomenon there, but they follow it too literally. They just learn it like a script and run around doing opinion openers (a trick Neil Strauss used where a man starts an interaction by asking a female her opinion on some random topic). The women were laughing about how Stockholm men have been going crazy about the book and all using the exact same routines from it verbatim, asking opinion openers left and right. And now that Strauss’s next book is coming out soon over there, the women were worried about all the new bad routines they’d have to deal with soon. Even girls who didn’t specifically know about the book The Game felt something was up. For example, two non-Swedish European tourists asked me in a nightclub, “Why is everyone here asking our opinion about stuff?” I left a party with one guy to go to another party that was open until 5 at a club called Village. When we got there he asked me “Do you know a book called The Game?” Then he started talking about opinion openers, and how they just don’t work when said in Swedish. (I think the gist of what he was saying is that the Swedish language makes them even more long-winded than usual)

He also told me about his time in New York, and how he was surprised at how the people there, especially the guys, weren’t dressed anywhere near as well as he expected, and how the quality of women were disappointing. I told them that contrary to popular belief, while New York has some of the most stylish and beautiful people in the world due to sheer volume of population, per capita there wasn’t as much hotness and style as people I met in Europe seem to think. The average New Yorker, while maybe more stylish than a local yokel in smalltown America, was not a fashion plate.

Another thing that surprised him was how much muscle was valued in men in America. He said he hated American men and their muscles and how that made them a big deal with women in New York while he was there. (He was super-lean, like a top model) Apparently Stockholm women don’t like big muscles. One Stockholm woman told me they’re even afraid of big muscles. I met another Stockholm guy who had a great physique, and he told me he couldn’t get dates because of his muscles, to the point where he wanted to move because he loved working out and didn’t want to get super-skinny just to get girls. You can be slim with lean muscles, but mass is a no-no.

A girl told me that Stockholm guys watch what they eat more than the women and that it’s not unusual for them to starve themselves to stay skinny; they can be downright neurotic about it. I wonder if there’ll be a public campaign there about eating disorders for men the way there is here for women. That being said, as a man who is horribly obsessed with his own weight, I had to give them props on their incredible thinness. I was a little envious at their lack of body fat. I mean I’m considered a slim guy and I felt pretty fat there.

All is not lost though. There was a sizable minority of Stockholm guys with a strong cocky swagger, an alpha male vibe and good natural-seeming game. These guys were very smooth and laid-back and had great social skills. These guys were extremely cool and seemed to do really well in Stockholm. So don’t think the picture I painted above describes 100% of Stockholm men I met. The beauty of the bad game of a majority of Stockholm guys is that it gave a huge advantage to the minority of Stockholm guys (and tourists) who were smooth and had good game. Just being able to hold a conversation without being sober and intimidated or drunk and crass was huge to the women there.

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More stuff on Stockholm:

Drinking:

Liquor is extremely expensive there.H ard liquor drinks came out to about $20 USD a pop or more, beers came out to $10 USD. It’s not just a currency exchange thing either, I think even for Swedish people it’s not exactly cheap. If you’re American and are dealing with the shitty state of the US dollar, the problem is even worse.

My solution was to buy bunch of liquor for the hotel so that we could “pregame.” I’d spend all day walking around Stockholm sightseeing, expecting to spot a liquor store at some point and buy liquor then. I never saw one. By my third day, after two nights of spending a lot of money at bars and nightclubs, I asked someone, and he explained it to me. The government has a monopoly on the sale of alcohol, so you can only get it from the nonprofit, government-run liquor store Systembolaget. There are only a handful of them in the city. From Systembolaget’s own website, in their own words, this is their mission:

Having a monopoly is a good start. It means we can maintain a more comprehensive product range, more rigorous.

One reason only
The retail monopoly exists for one reason only: alcohol related problems are reduced if alcohol is sold in the absence of a profit motive. Our mandate obliges us to help limit the medical and social damage caused by alcohol and there by improve public health. Total alcohol consumption levels shall also be kept low by limiting availability by steering the retail outlet network and opening hours. Systembolaget also differs from other companies in that we are brand-neutral and do not engage in active marketing in an attempt to boost sales. Systembolaget also provides information on the risks associated with alcohol consumption.
Our responsibility
Systembolaget’s mandate is based on consideration for public health. Our goal is to establish a healthy drinking culture, whereby everyone can enjoy Systembolaget’s drinks without harming either themselves or other people. Systembolaget shall use its
expertise to inform customers both about the effects of the various drinks on people’s health and about their taste characteristics. Systembolaget shall inspire people to take an interest in what they drink and to adopt a healthy attitude towards alcohol.

Our mandate
Systembolaget’s mandate is to limit the medical and social damage caused by
alcohol and thereby improve public health. For Systembolaget, this means:
- restricting availability through
- the number of stores
- opening hours
- retail rules
- not attempting to maximise our profit
- not promoting additional sales
- being brand-neutral
- providing a high standard of customer service
- being financially efficient

Our vision
Systembolaget shall establish a healthy drinking culture, whereby we can enjoy
Systembolaget’s drinks without harming either ourselves or other people.

It sounds good, but I’m kind of skeptical on any law that exists to protect people from themselves. After finding out about this law, a lot of Swedish activity I noticed previously suddenly made sense to me. I remember reading about how during the Prohibition in America, public drunkenness was worse because people had to do most of all of their drinking at the public speakeasy. Drinking at home was difficult, and access to liquor was almost impossible except through illegal means, so when people went to the speakeasy they would hit the liquor hard because it was too difficult to drink any other time of the day or at any other places, then stumble home stinking drunk.

An anonymous commenter at a Swedish blog describes the situation as thus:

I don’t agree with Systemet one bit. For those living outside Sweden who think it’s a good idea try living with it before passing judgement.

Try living with the fact that if you decide at 5pm on Saturday to have guests over for dinner and wine that Systemet already closed at 3pm. Forget about buying anything on Sundays, Systemet is completely closed. Unlike in the US where liquor stores are typically closed on Sunday, usually wine or beer can be bought at grocery stores, convenience stores (ie 7-11), beer stores, and wine stores.

Oh, and want to try out that tequila you had in Mexico that was so good? Forget it. You have to choose between the two or three that Systemet imports (and Systemet imports the most vile crap I’ve ever tasted). Getting anything special has so much red tape that people just avoid it.

What about that draught beer machine you saw in Denmark that’s also available in the rest of the EU? Forget it. Unless Systemet has approved it you can’t buy it here, and the company who makes it will refuse to ship it to Sweden (and any beer that’s made for it).

Since you’re from the US here’s an example of where this breaks down? You know all of those very good wines from California and Washington State? Unless it’s a huge wine company (ie Gallo) you won’t find them here, and when you do you have to pay a lot more than usual for mediocre wine.

Government involvement and regulation is perfectly fine with me, but Systemet is not the correct answer. The correct answer is to license individual stores/outlets for the sale of alcohol (this includes online). Don’t decide what is imported nationwide, let the individual businesses decide based on their clients. If the business is located outside of Sweden but still within the EU then the sale should be governed by EU law, not Swedish law.

While the Systembolaget monopoly is not the same as an all out prohibition, it does really restrict how and when you can get drunk, which is why I think when people in Stockholm get a chance to drink at a bar, restaurant and nightclub, they are really overboard with it. At a party here, you see at the end of the night people who are drunk off their ass, people who are just moderately drunk, people who are just tipsy, and people who are sober. In Sweden almost everyone at the end of the night was seriously wasted. And since very few people drive to parties, there’s no need to worry about designated drivers.

So I’m not really sure how this monopoly goes toward promoting safe drinking. Maybe Sweden was just that much worse before the monopoly, and what I’m seeing is the improvement, but currently they are still some hard drinking motherfuckers. Even the classiest, ritziest looking people were drinking until sloppy drunk. I remember partying at the Berns hotel (ridiculously awesome spot, if you can get in. Highly recommended.), and when it hit 3 AM, watching the partygoers try to navigate themselves down the stairs at once. It was comical to see hundreds of people who drank themselves into oblivion try to all walk down a narrow outdoor staircase at once when they’re unable to even walk a straight line.

The public drunkenness is outrageous. Walking back to my hotel, I’d just see people straggling drunk in the street all over the place. A block from my hotel as the sun was rising I had to step over two decked out girls laying on their backs laughing and screaming hysterically, unable to even stand up and walk. They just laid on their backs, cackled, and screamed at the sky, then made a futile effort to stand up before falling back and cackling all over again. Apparently no one is afraid of getting raped there.

My recommendation would be to get as much liquor as allowed from duty-free at the airport before getting to your hotel, and after arriving, map out the Systembolagets in town, find the closest one to you and re-up there periodically, so that you don’t have to depend strictly on the bars and nightclubs to get drunk.

Part 3 about Swedish partying and Swedish men will be up in a few hours

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I’ve been putting off this post for a while because there was just so much to cover. My plan was to wait until I had enough time to write a long post about the whole trip, but because such an opportunity appears to be nowhere in sight, my new plan is to just break it up into multiple posts. My trip was in three phases: Stockholm for three days, Amsterdam for four, then back to Stockholm for another four days.

Keep in mind that these generalizations are based only on 7 days of exposure, so I’m sure there are plenty of flaws based on snap judgments, but I think overall many of the generalities can withstand scrutiny. But for people with more experience on Sweden, feel free to jump into the comments section to correct me or expand on my points.

I’m woefully untraveled. My flight to Europe was the longest trip I’ve ever taken by air. I left NY with a three hour layover in Finland. Then flew into Stockholm.

I was drained from the flight and immediately took a nap on arriving. As soon as I woke up, I hopped on my laptop, looked at my list of cool places to eat and drink and party and figured out how to get to those places using Google Maps. I walked from my hotel to the obnoxiously rich and hip Stureplan area and ate at East restaurant. This was the moment where I discovered exactly how weak the US dollar currently is and how expensive Stockholm is, as a single roll of sushi and a beer cost me $50. Once I properly figured out the conversion rate and was mortified, I realized I’d have to be careful or I’d end up overspending by a huge amount on this trip.

When I first arrived at the Stureplan area, I was taken aback at how beautiful the women were. Even the average girl working in a 7-11 convenience store looks like a model. No homo, but I have to admit that even the guys are really good-looking. They’re just a very beautiful people. You just can’t help but notice it. I’d love to figure out why this particular country has hit the genetic jackpot the way it has, but right now I have no clue. While the tall, blonde stereotype is a myth (there are a lot of bleached blonds, but the population of Stockholm was not particularly tall, I’d say Amsterdam fit that tall, blond stereotype more than Sweden), the beautiful women stereotype is not exaggerated in the least. I think I saw a total of two fat chicks in my whole time there, and I’m sure they were probably tourists or transplants or had some kind of thyroid issue.

The interesting thing about the sheer volume of beauty is that it really reminds you how relative beauty is, and how the human mind can adapt to and get bored by anything. First off, if I was a woman in Stockholm and I was a 6 or 7, I would either immediately move or kill myself. By my third day there a 7 would be more likely to make me do a double take than a 10. After being immersed in Stockholm for three days, my mind adjusted to the new beauty standard surrounding me. I reached a point where an average girl got my attention more quickly than a beautiful one because they were such an anomaly. The thought that popped in my mind when I saw an average women there was “Wow, I actually forgot they made women like you.”

Even as a tourist, I still observe and process everything in terms of how it relates to human nature, so in Stockholm I couldn’t help but notice certain things in how people interacted with each other there. I think people are somewhat numb to beauty there, which works in the favor of men in some interesting ways. Allow me to illustrate by going on a slight detour in my narrative. Be patient, I’ll tie it back into my original point by the end of this post.

At the hottest clubs in Sweden there is a strict guestlist policy, similar to what NY used to have. Currently in NY, the exclusivity of nightclubs have been ruined by the bottle service epidemic, which has replaced the old guestlist and tastemaker standard that used to get you entry:

Bottle Service has become the standard (and I don?t mean that overrated Andre Balazs hotel in Los Angeles either) for most high-end clubs all across the bubble. It has been popular in Miami and NYC for at least ten years, but my sources tell me it is currently popular in many C-grade cities and they even offer it in many D-grade cities as well. The advantages are still there, primarily, Bottle Service allows a group of Investment Bankers, Hedge fund guys, commercial real estate jerkoffs, or any type of weesh 9 to 5 guys the ability to enter a club with out too much hassle. But there are many problems that Bottle Service brings to nightclubs in general and nightlife in particular. There are also a few more reasons why I am not a big fan of Bottle Service.The Crowd Bottle Service Brings

In the 2000′s we have seen a corporatization of nightclubs. Now when you go to a nighclub everyone is some kind of corporate jerkoff. Interesting people are no longer found in Nightclubs. The artists, writers, intellectuals, underground DJ’s etc have been effectively priced out of the nightclub with bottle service. The only people that can afford it are the Investment bankers, real estate types, and Celebs (and of course, underworld figures). That is why when you walk into a club you see so many striped shirts that you think you are seeing some kind of 3-D optical illusion. The funny thing is that these are the type of guys who would have never gotten into a club in the old days (nights) when you were picked out because of how you looked, dressed, if you had connections, or by reputation. So today, clubs are full of people that normally would have been standing in line in nights gone by.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are shades of this bottle service epidemic in Stockholm, but it does not dominate the scene quite like it does in America’s big cities. Unlike New York City, true exclusivity is still practiced in Stockholm, and not just exclusivity in terms of your wallet like in NY.

But as I was saying about beauty and how people in Stockholm seem numb to it, in NY getting into a club is not just judged on how much money you’re willing to spend in the form of bottle purchasing, but also on the standard of beautiful women, as in are you a beautiful women or at least in the company of a ton of beautiful women? Actually, just being a woman in general is enough here, regardless of beauty. If she’s beautiful that’s just a bonus. This makes the nightclubs in NY horrible because the tone is set early that women are set up on even more of a pedestal than usual, and that pedestal only gets higher if the woman is beautiful. Plus you’re surrounded by simps with bottle service incessantly trying to bribe these beautiful women with free liquor to pay attention to them, which just elevates their egos even further, makes them more unattainable and unwittingly makes the social situation worse for all the men there, including themselves.

This creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation in top nightclubs in NY. In game theory scenarios, prisoner’s dilemma problems are those where it’s in the best interest for a group of people with a common goal to cooperate. But since there is no guarantee of getting everyone in a group with a common goal to cooperate, people start defecting. Once one person defects, everything starts unraveling as each remaining player is forced to make a choice: if I stick to my sound, rational principles as everyone else around me is acting illogically and defecting, I guarantee myself a loss, whereas if I also act irrationally and defect, I’ll sell out my principles and pride and contribute to the overall shittiness of the situation, but at least I have the possibility of salvaging some type of victory.

The current nightclub situation in NY creates a variant of this which I call the Simp’s Dilemma. A guy with decent game may want to stick to his principles regarding social interaction and not behave like a simp (running around and giving women free liquor, boosting their egos needlessly, all the while lowering his own value). He may have a much superior social strategy of laying back and relaxing, acting smooth and aloof, confidently presenting himself as a prize, and not lowering your value by displaying any neediness through bragging for attention or bribing for affection. But the problem is, these superior social strategies only work if a decent amount of other guys in the social setting are behaving similarly. This is just like in the classic snitching scenario of prisoner’s dilemma, where not snitching only works if everyone else doesn’t snitch either. One you know someone else may snitch, your only option to salvage any semblance of a victory is to snitch first and at that point it becomes a race to the bottom to see who can lose the least.

In the Simp’s Dilemma, the fact that you are surrounded by desperate guys showing off in flashy ways, boosting girls’ egos with desperate behavior and monopolizing their time by keeping them at their tables and drowning them in free booze, you are now faced with the choice of sticking to your guns and getting a guaranteed loss since it’s hard for your game to cut through all that simping, or join in playing the simp game to a degree, which might get you to hook up with a woman but lower your value and self-respect in the process. This means that you now lose even if you win because although you’ve managed to meet a woman and salvage a phone number or date, every step of the process will be excruciating because you’ve started off the dynamic by establishing yourself as a trick from the very start (A trick is a desperate, needy guy that needs to spend his hard-earned money to buy affection and attention from women). And also, the mere fact that you’re in a place so full of simps and tricks often makes people assume you to be a simp by association before you even open your mouth, simply because that is the default mode of a vast majority of men present.

Here’s a simpler analogy of Simp’s Dilemma: imagine an auction item that you want, but are determined to get a good deal on and buy on your terms. Now picture the moment the item comes up for bidding, a bunch of desperate yahoos start bidding furiously on it and driving the price up. Your original strategy of playing it cool, even though it was sound, is now useless, because it only works if others do the same. Now your choices are to give up on getting the item or acting more like the desperate bidders, which may get you the item, but on really shitty terms, which will make you feel like a sap even if you win and ruin your enjoyment of said item, since you lowered your dignity to get it and overpaid for it horribly.

Now some people think that the Simp’s Dilemma works to the benefit of NY women, but even they are losers in the end, because while they get the short term benefit of free drinks and fawning, ego boosting attention, in the long run they end up just meeting a bunch of supplicating men they can easily dominate that offer no challenge. This is why I hear women here constantly complain of the lameness of their dating options in NY. Women like the existence of these guys to subsidize their liquor intake and boost egos, but not as their main pool of dating options.

In Stockholm however, I saw large groups of model-caliber women routinely getting turned away by bouncers for not being on the guestlist. Women that could have easily waltzed into any club in NY, no matter how exclusive, based on sheer hotness, were routinely shot down by bouncers who didn’t even look at them twice. Beauty in a woman does not seem to equal automatic worship in Stockholm. This is the opposite of NY, where simply having a vagina regardless of beauty leads to worship, and a woman can be overweight and a homely 6 yet still have an attitude like she just booked the cover of Vogue magazine.

Also, in NY, I can often use some gift of gab to get into a club, especially if I’m all by my lonesome. And if worse comes to worse, bribing is also an option. Or I can pretend I’m going to buy a bottle and conveniently disappear after getting escorted in if I really want to get devious. In Stockholm, though, I’d sometimes get turned away from hot clubs despite trying everything. I’d bring up that I was by myself, I’d mention I was from NY, I’d dress to the nines, none of it worked. But even more interesting, even bribes didn’t work, which really shocked me. They would be adamant about the guestlist policy. I’ve heard both sides of the guestlist argument from Swedes; some would say that the guestlist is real, others would say that the guestlist was a fabrication used to keep undesirables and the uncool out. I’d say based on my time there that it’s a combination of the two. But the guestlist does truly exist to a degree because I did see some people who got turned away come back with the proper guestlist name and gain entry just minutes later. It’s definitely not a total fabrication as some people claimed.

So basically, compared to NY, there is a lot less simping going on in Stockholm. Women are beautiful but way more down to earth in terms of egos, making them way more approachable. And you don’t have a bunch of bottle service simps approaching women constantly while displaying low value and desperation and boosting their egos by buying them drinks. Well, it happens but not to the same degree and the dynamic is slightly different, as I’ll explain in part 2. Sadly, all these factors don’t help Swedish guys all that much because despite this ideal scenario, this perfect storm of social conditions, they really have on average no game at all. Zero. This also I’ll get into tomorrow.

The Stureplan area gets badmouthed by many Swedes for being excessively shallow and money-obsessed, and I can see their point, especially when compared to the more down-to-earth bohemian places you find in southern Stockholm, but because I come from New York City where the situation is much, much worse thanks to bottle service and excessive beautiful woman worship, I found it be a breath of fresh air in comparison. If you want to get an idea of what a Stureplan crowd looks like, you can check out this photo gallery here. Unlike the club photo gallery you find on a NY club website where they find a dozen or so hot women and take repeated pictures of them to create the illusion that they represent the caliber of the average woman in attendance at the club, the pictures in the gallery I linked to really do represent the caliber of the average women you can expect to see in a Stureplan club.

Once I got the hang of Stockholm, I started making friends left and right, and I started getting into places either with their connections or by just showing up to places extra early while they were still dead and the bouncers weren’t being very exclusive yet and just waiting for them to fill up. Places I went to included Sturecompagniet, Spy Bar, Hell’s Kitchen, F12, Village, Berns Hotel, East Restaurant, Sturehof Bar and some other places I don’t remember the names of.

I’ll follow up tomorrow with more insights about social interactions, how Swedish men behave and how Swedish people party in general. After that I’ll get into the class warfare in Stockholm between various sections (very big deal there), liquor availability and the difficulty in assessing and penetrating Swedish culture. I really found the country to be fascinating in its social dynamics.

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