Sweden is a very organized country. Everything has its place and there are rules and regulations for just about anything. Some rules don’t even need to be officially written down, they technically don’t exist, yet people here follow them anyway. That of course makes life a lot easier in many different situations – when boarding a local bus, for example. Everyone lines up neatly to get on and waits their turn. Even when it’s raining.
When entering a store, library, clinic, even ER, everyone lines up nicely to get a “nummerlapp” (= queue number, which you get from a special machine that dispenses them, normally somewhere near the entrance) and then patiently waits their turn. Nummerlapp is not a strictly Swedish invention, I have seen it utilized in such far-flung locales as India and Cape Verde, but Sweden, without a doubt, is the country that has turned it into an art form.
