Warning: the words 'Sweden' and 'Swedish' feature a lot in this post

Famous in my mind largely for Ikea, Ace of Base and Thomas Brolin; I used to think of Sweden as 'just a small municipality in Denmark.' It is then perhaps a little odd that a 6 month sabbatical (I refuse to call this a gap year) in India has provided me with an education in all things Swedish. This has a great deal to do with the school being run by a Swedish expat named Maria and therefore attracting many volunteers from Gothenburg and various other small towns I haven't taken the trouble to remember the names of. That being said, approximately 2 out of 3 people I meet on my travels seem to be of the Swedish persuasion. Remarkable really for a country that has the same population as London.*

The fact is, Swedes get around.

The good thing is that their English is excellent and so is their company, which is lucky because i'm currently living with 4 of them. Living with so many people from one place, you begin to pick up a lot of juicy tidbits about the country that some people at Ryanair are calling "my favourite country in Europe". Not me, I like England.

Anyway, some of those tidbits:-

• Swedish children don't start school until they're 7 years old. I can't work out if that is mollycoddled or sensible. That wikileaks chap seems OK. Apart from all that unpleasant business, of course.

• They also don't believe in using formal names in education. So, instead of, "Please miss, may I have some more gruel" or "Thankyou Mr Erikson", you would be more likely to hear, "oi Frieda, chuck us the ketchup" or "Ta Sven". Frankly, I didn't even like teachers trying to be friends with kids at school, let alone this flagrant show of disrespect for the rules.

• Swedish delicacies include Salt Liquorice and Rotten Herring. Both sound disgusting. Yet they can't get their head around something as delicious as Marmite.

• The English language has taken 2 words from Swedish: Smorgasbord and Ombudsman. Smorgasbord is a buffet and an Ombudsman was something I never quite understood in A-Level politics because I never bothered to read about it. Things haven't changed.

• Don't worry Kevin Costner fans! Robin Hood is alive and well and living in Sweden as the Prime-Minister. As something of a social policy fan, it shocked me to the core that the highest earners in Sweden pay 60% tax on all their earnings. 60! Now I consider myself a bit of a lefty but that has got to hurt. Although nobody seems to mind as I am told it is one of the most balanced countries in the world with very few poor. Apparently, if anything, they want to raise taxes on the rich. It has to get to the point soon though where the capitalists just cannot be arsed anymore.

• They don't much like them Norwegian folk. There are a set of 'Norwegian' jokes that the Swedes use and apparently the Norwegians use exactly the same jokes about the Swedes in return. The relationship seems a bit like that between the English and the Scots. The young Swedes i've met readily admit that the jokes aren't particularly funny and i'd tend to agree. More 'ha' than 'haha' certainly.

*Yes, I do love to bring up that fact at the dinner table as much as possible in order to belittle their kingdom.