Hej!
We are Evrim and Igor and we left Holland last november to start a new life in Sweden. On this blog we will be sharing our stories and pictures with you. This way we can keep people back home and new friends up to date. But mostly it is a brilliant way for us to capture this exciting, and sometimes maybe nerve-racking, time in our lives.
A short little history on how we got here:
Evrim and Igor started ‘De Bio Basis’ 10 years ago in Zeist, Holland. The first years it was an organic food store with a little coffee bar and tea room, later Evrim transformed it into a restaurant and catering company. Three and a half years ago Evrim and Igor moved to Epse (near Deventer). Igor had been studying acupuncture these years and started his practice in the surroundings of Epse. Evrim continued her catering activities and started cooking for the retreats that the Swedish Nysnö organises in Holland. Sweden and the Swedes entered our lives! Last summer we got a crazy idea: Let’s sell our house and start a new life in Sweden! A couple of months later we stepped in our van and left Holland…
And now we found our dream spot! Not in Skåne, where we were first looking, but in Blekinge, near Ronneby. Follow us in our quest to make our dream come true: to make it a place where people can unwind, relax and learn new things!
Oh and one little thing: Igor is also professional photographer, so expect a lot of pictures 😉
Hey there!
Hey there! Yes, it has been more than 4 months since our last post… There was just so much going on that we had to leave the blogging for a while. But we’re doing great and we have some great news: our guesthouse is now available for bookings on Airbnb. Actually, for summer there are only a couple of vacant weeks left!
And some other news: Evrim is in Ireland at the moment to attend a three month cookery course at the famous Ballymaloe Cookery School. This was already planned before we decided to move to Sweden, so Evrim is being really international at the moment 😉 She’s having a lovely time and will return in about three weeks.
In the meantime Igor is busy painting our house, mowing the lawn, making pictures, giving Qigonglessons and enjoying the nice Swedish summer. So never a dull moment!
Almost there
Hi there! We’ve been living in our (soon to be) guesthouse for the past two weeks now! Apart from a Covid infection for both of us we’ve been loving every minute of it. The guesthouse itself is very well built and only a couple of years old. In fact, it even still smells new! But the garden and the surroundings are actually what amazes us most. Here’s the look from the deck of the guesthouse:
We’re pinching each other regularly to know if we’re not dreaming 😉
In a couple of weeks time we’ll get the keys to the red house and we’ll be able to start making it our own. Until then it ‘ll be the hard practice of making long walks while shooting nice pictures. And of course filling in lots of forms for starting up our businesses!
For the ones who like it, some more photos of the surroundings:
We bought two houses!
Great news! After two and a half months in Sweden we’ve found our dream home. Even better, we’ve found our dream homes! We bought a piece of land in Blekinge, near Ronneby, with two houses on it: a house for us and one for the guests. The place feels like the ideal starting point for our big dream to be able to organise holiday retreats. We’re thinking of Qigong training weeks, cooking holidays, photography week courses and more… Who knows what the future will bring? On the picture below it’s the red house and the grey house to the right of it, including the land until the big road. We’re very excited and are waiting eagerly to move there!
Yes, we’ve been a bit silent…
It’s been a little while since our last post. In this case it was a good sign, cause we were quite busy with our househunt. Actually, the view below might just become our everyday scenery… Expect more news any time soon!
Happy new year!
We hope you all had a nice Christmas holiday and wish you all the best in 2025! Our days were quiet and peaceful, with lots of nice walks and of course some very good food 🙂 And Twinkle (our little Spanish dog) had her most relaxed New Year’s Eve in years! The days of fireworks frenzy in Holland were always very hard for her, but now we could even have our walks with her on New Years Eve! Tack så mycket Sverige!
Now that the holidays are almost over (we still have ’three kings day’ tomorrow, which we found out is a thing here), it’s time to make some good plans and move forward! We hope we will find our dream home somewhere in the next coming weeks, so we can start making those plans reality. In the meantime we will be enjoying the beautiful and tranquil Swedish winter, which is not a punishment at all! Here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks…
Our progress…
Six weeks have passed since we moved here, time flies! Did we make any progress in our quest? Well, to buy a house we need a Swedish bankaccount, because of all the recent money laundering scandals in the world. Even worse: to bid on a house we would need BankID, a system of identification that is coupled to your bankaccount. Sadly to this day we don’t have a Swedish bankaccount, but we’re getting close! To open a bankaccount which has BankID (and Swish), you need a Swedish ID-card. And to apply for an ID-card you need a ‘personnummer’, the famous Swedish identification number. Actually, when you don’t have a personnummer you’re nothing more but a tourist.
So, the first thing we applied for was a personnummer, which took 3 weeks. A couple of days later we applied for an ID-card, which took around 2 weeks, because of the holidays. After receiving it a couple of days ago we went to the local bank for opening our account. But of course this also will take two to three weeks! And then, finally, we’ll be able to buy our dream home… Which we haven’t spotted yet, but that’s another story 😉
In the meantime I have been able to send in the registration forms for the company I want to start here. And guess what? Next to my acupuncture practice and my qigong training I’ll also be taking up my work as photographer again! I’m really excited to welcome this old love into my working life!
Dark days
Yes, we were warned by Evrim’s Swedish colleagues: November and December would be the worst time to be in Sweden and Skåne. Dark and gloomy days! Well, actually it is dark early around here… The total daylight time is only about half an hour less than in Holland. Not a big difference you would say? The thing is that we’re also located quite a lot more to the east and still in the same timezone as Holland. So it gets light earlier in the day, which is nice. But then at around 15:30 it gets dark very fast! That certainly takes some getting used to, sometimes we feel like it’s time for bed at 18:00. Well, only 2 nights left before the days start getting longer again 🙂
Snow!
Ever since Evrim and me got together we have had dreams of moving to another country. One of the reasons Sweden only recently got on our radar is that we’re both not very fond of the cold, let alone snow… So when we by chance stumbled upon the possibility of living there, we were very delighted to find out that the climate of Skåne is not that different from Holland. Even better: there seems to be significantly less rain and more sunshine!
Of course life has it’s own form of irony: five days after arriving here it started snowing! And guess what… we loved it! Maybe Dutch snow has a different energy than Swedish? Or maybe it just looks so much better in these surroundings? Decide for yourself:
Kullaberg
Evrim and me have developed a deep love for the rocky coast of Cornwall, England over the past few years. The high, almost alien cliffs, and the rough sea pounding the rocks has left me speechless numerous times. It’s as if this rough nature always made me feel totally alive.
Every time we got home I felt sad living in oh so flat Holland. This is where my dreams started of living in a place surrounded by nature.
While Skåne (the place in Sweden we’re staying now) is considered one of the flattest parts of the country, I’m really loving the rolling and sometimes hilly landscape here. And guess what…? There are even some rocky coasts to be found! A couple of days ago I did a hike around Kullaberg, which Evrim and me are already calling ‘Little Cornwall’. Here are some pictures I took that day.
