When you get back from vacation, your friends and family do this really cruel thing to you: They talk about how surprised they are that you came back. And you restrain yourself and politely laugh, all while thinking about how the only reason came back is you're about to run out of money and getting a job in a foreign country is difficult and eventually the immigration or border control people would find you and ask whether or not you really should still be in the country.
For me, Scandinavia has been a small obsession for several years. Maybe not the most perfectly researched one, of course, but certainly on my radar, and whenever I can choose a product from a company like IKEA or Nokia or Volvo I do so, consequences aside, because I like those products and I like the countries they represent.
Unfortunately, a vacation, especially one as jam-packed with tourism and events as ours was, is a hard way to judge a place for its livability. If I judged my current home town purely on what it's like to visit during a peak tourism season, I would have abandoned the notion of living here forthwith.
We did get a few slower moments though, and a few opportunities to head off the beaten Eurovision path. Whenever we did, Europe's livability and pleasantries showed themselves. Both Malmo and Copenhagen are very walkable, and transit of multiple types on different tiers means getting around doesn't need a car at all. Plus, even the higher tiers of transit, such as the Øresundståg are deployed in such a way that they operate very frequently and are rapid within reason. On the other hand, everything is old enough that sometimes, the systems that should work very efficiently have some problems. As an example, the bridge over the Øresund has rail signaling technology that only allows for six trains to pass in an hour. This is not that big of a deal on normal days, but it caused some strain as the Eurovision event encouraged people to stay in both Malmo and Copenhagen, and of course almost the entire city of Copenhagen (and a lot of the rest of Europe) ended up on the train over the sound.
Other than that, the main problems I had while vacationing were problems I would have had in the United States, too. I didn't know, for example, what the convention was for ordering at some of the food places in the train station.
One of the funnier things is that getting things (or not getting them) is different in each country. For example, I saw Burger King in Denmark, but not in Sweden (keep in mind, we kept to a fairly limited part of each city, and of course we only went to one city in each country.) In United States terms, this seemed a lot like hopping the border from Washington to Oregon, and suddenly the only thing that's available from one side on the other is McDonald's. (They were everywhere.)
The amenities, while inconsistent, are good, however. I was pretty easily able to find things we wanted and although I didn't see very many of them, I'm sure pharmacies and similar things were close at hand. Even if something is far away, it was easy to get to in a reasonable amount of time, and if you miss your stop on the train, just hop off, head to the other platform, and take the other train in the other direction in a few minutes.
I suspect the most difficult element of moving to Scandinavia really would be the languages (or five languages, depending on what I consider my average range of travel to be) and of course, finding a job. With those things out of the way, (either via independent wealth, having a job I can perform in English via the Internet, or having learned the language and gotten a local job) I suspect I could do it. The hardest part will be doing without convenient access to Dr. Pepper, but good Fanta that uses sugar from the local region is of course easy enough to find.