Swedish Queues

Having queueing “skills” in Lund can be the difference between night and day, Mo Kudeki discovered.

Before coming to Sweden, people warned me about the queues.  I found out they weren’t kidding on Arrival Day, when I waited in the housing line for two hours (causing me to miss all the daylight that day), just to sign a sheet of paper and be handed a key.

Queues (or “lines,” as we  call them in the States), are everywhere in Sweden.  What I didn’t realize is there are TWO types of queues.

The first type is the day queue.  It is fair and just.  It involves no pushing or shoving.  You enter a store and get a little slip of paper that tells you your number in line.  Eventually, your number is called.  Everything is in order.  Finding the machine that dispenses the slips of paper is a different story, but I’ve even had Swedes help me out with this task.

However, the second type of queue, the night queue, is a test of willpower.  I’m talking about the hour-long waits to get into a club.

In America, waiting for an hour outside a club is unthinkable.

Yes, there are occasionally short lines, but American impatience always wins out and we simply go elsewhere.  Plus, the people waiting to get into a club in America are not the kind of people I want to be clubbing with anyway.

Do they really have nothing better to do than wait?

In Lund, everyone seems to have accepted the huge night queues, which means that no one gives up, and no matter where you go there will be a long queue.  Thus, it makes no sense for you to leave either, and everyone is just stuck in line.  Gridlock.

Last Friday was my saddest queueing moment.  I was with a group of seven friends – three Swedish, and four international.  We were all pumped to see the MOVITS! show at Sydskånska.

We queued up around 9:30, and were about halfway back by the time the doors opened.  When the club was half full, they stopped letting people in because some people “had been shoving”.  We were instructed to back up.  A few people were let in at a time.  Soon, I realized we’d lost sight of our Swedish friends.

At 11:30, after two hours of waiting in the windy cold, we realized we were now at the very BACK of the queue, with just 15-20 other people.  “Sorry, all full.”  How did we end up at the BACK?!  What happened to the Swedes from our group? Turns out they made it in.

Shivering and disappointed, the four of us headed for the closest shelter we could find — the Helsingkrona club.  Of course, there was a queue to get in there too, which gave us time to bemoan the fact that we had just been pushed out of the way trying to get into a concert called “MOVITS!”  Ha ha.

I talked to a Swedish friend about this traumatic experience, who responded, “Oh yes, Swedes tend to be good at queueing.”  GOOD at QUEUEING?

I was unaware that standing in order and waiting was something that required skill.  He may be right though — only the internationals in our group fell victim to the treacherous queue.

So, a note to the future organizers of Arrival Day: the subtleties of queueing may be something to discuss during that massive Housing line.

As for me, I’m currently taking applications for a tutor in Swedish queueing technique — payment will be in fika.