English as a Second Language in Scandinavia

Europeans, other than the British, commonly speak more than one language, and English is the most common second or foreign language spoken. The highest rates of English speaking outside of Britain or Ireland are in the Scandinavian countries (other than Finland) and the Netherlands, where approximately 85-90% of the people can speak English. [A joke sometimes told in Europe is: What do you call a European who speaks 3 languages?: trilingual; 2 languages: bilingual; 1 language: British.] A Norwegian explained to us that English is so commonly spoken there both because they learn it in school and because there are too few Norwegians (~ 5 million) for it to make economic sense to dub movies in Norwegian, so they watch movies (and often TV) in English. This makes travel very easy for both of us, since we are both essentially unilingual [even Peter, who, despite growing up in Montreal, never spoke French outside of French class at school].

It's been very hard for us to find "local" cuisine during our travels. We find lots of restaurants that serve pizza and kebabs, and outside of the large cities we almost never find any other options. Even in the big cities, it's far easier to find sushi, Chinese, or Indian food than anything that might be considered "local". So lunch on our travels today was a pleasant exception, when we stumbled on a small roadside restaurant in the hinterlands that served Swedish food, and we dined on the daily special of Swedish meatballs.

Today's destination town is Orebro, the sixth largest city in Sweden with a population of 107,000. After hunting for a restaurant here, we ended up dining at an upscale ribs and Tapas restaurant. Nothing "local" was to be found.

A pretty town on our route today -- Bjorn Borg, the 1970's tennis star, did not live here

A treat for lunch -- Swedish meatballs

A more typical roadside restaurant

Cycling into Orebro