About Sweden (and a little bit about Norway)

"One of the morestriking feautures of Swden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean, here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go there are grossly intoxicated people - in train stations, on park benches, in shopping centers. I don't understand it.
But then I don't begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It's as if the inhabitants are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that is like two weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It's bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in Sweden is walk around a semidarkened shopping center after it has closed, looking in the windows of stores that sell wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford.
On top of that, the Swedes and Norwegians have shakled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a bartender to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It's also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Saturday or Sunday. Well, thank God for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people on the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn't surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners' lamps."

From "Neither here nor there - travels in Europe" by Bill Bryson