Conside moving to sweden and want to know about life there?

Hi moika, welcome on Expat-blog!

I wish you good luck and i hope you get response soon.

All the best,
Christine

I was an immigrant in Sweden - several times actually, but only the first time around I did not speak Swedish (now when I go to Sweden I appear so Swedish to the locals they tend to think my Swedish accent is that of a Swedish-American, not a foreigner, since my Swedish is still very good, save for the accent.

But when I came to Sweden the first time I spoke no Swedish, but a passable English and had no trouble with integration, being a university student at the time and later marrying a Swede and his social and family circle. Besides I am as blue-eyed blond as a stereotypical Swedes are "supposed" to.

My daughter, who came to Sweden when she was 8 years old had a harder time becoming integrated, as unfortunately we bough a house in a far suburb of Stockholm - in the Stockholm's archipelago, with hardly any immigrants at that time - and the Swedish  kids there were awfully harassing her, so after a couple of years we decided to move to America - and I am glad we did.

We moved back to Sweden again and my daughter went to an international high-school ( a private school, not a school in an immigrant area), where kids were a lot more "wordly" than Swedish population in general and she integrated well, still having a lot of Swedish friends from that time. But it was a very expensive school.

Perhaps the Swedish kids in the Stockholm archipelago would have been equally unwelcoming to a Swedish kid from a different part of Sweden, since to them anybody not local was "foreign", so watch out for small town and rural attitudes,
I can only imagine how hard to integrate it must be for people who look foreign: dark hair, dark complexion. Your best bet would be then to live centrally in mixed areas ... and when in doubt put a kid in a private school.