One of our family's best adventures was living in Stockholm Sweden. We left there over 6 years ago, and our stay was only 18 months; but you'd think we'd been there much longer for all the love of things Swedish we came home with. We sing "happy birthday" in swedish, we eat some (not all; no thanks on the pickled herring) swedish meals, and we celebrate swedish holidays like midsummer (coming ever so quickly) and Santa Lucia Day. John actually has some swedish ancestory, so we take full advantage of that fact and exploit all we came to love about the culture as just being part of who we really are...
Well, recently in the Salt Lake Valley one of Sweden's best contributions became available. IKEA. Cheap, cool stuff in a giant warehouse. That is what IKEA is. A place where awesome design meets chinese production know-how and the company passes along it's dirt cheap production costs on to the consumer. Brilliant Swedish thinking. I haven't personally visited IKEA yet, but the day is soon coming. Been waiting for the crowds to ebb a bit (truly, our most congested freeway became unbearabley jammed with traffic for over a week just because of the store's grand opening). I know I'll buy lots of cheap things I don't really need. It's o.k., its IKEA, you can afford to splurge a little...
Difference is, I won't just be savoring the awesome textiles or the fun kid's plates, I'll be enjoying the Swedish farm cheeses and Saft berry drink concentrate in the store's food imports boutique. This is what makes me a self proclaimed partial SWEDE; I know what they'll be selling there, and I will know what it will taste like when I serve it for dinner next week because, hey, I've had it before, in SWEDEN. Make no bones about it, I love it that some of my life was lived in a foreign land, and that people in that foreign land speak a foreign tongue, eat foreign foods and live a foreign life (1 year maternity leave and 50% tax rate, totally foreign to me). I feel happy to have adopted a little of the Svensk tradition, and my pilgrimige to all things designed for swedes by swedes is just one way I show it. IKEA, here I come! Valkommen!
2 comments:
i went to the grand opening. traffic from downtown wasn't any worse (at 9:15 a.m.) than usual. parking on the other hand was beyond ridiculous! and when i finally walked up TO the store (with my catelog earmarked and ready to actually buy stuff), i discovered that the disney-esque lanes snaked not only in front of the store, but all the way down the west side, then all the way over to the east side along the back of the building. we shuffled along in formation for 45 minutes...and this was just to get IN the store!
it was bedlam. walking through the doors we were greeted with such cheers you'd think i was julia ROBERTS or something. but even arriving that early, i wasn't one of the first 2500 adults to cross the threshold...so no gift card for me. and it was so packed that moving from place to place was a trick. i heard parent after parent freaking out that they couldn't find their small child (why would a single adult bring multiple kids to keep track of into a situation like that? 25,000 visitors expected that day...jonnie's bound to duck around a corner and disappear!)
by the time i checked out, walked the mile to my car (in a neighboring housing tract), made my way BACK to the store front to load the furniture, and then exited the premisis, it had taken me 6 hours to get through. but the fun didn't end there. that was wednesday. that following saturday i had to go BACk to make some returns on some furniture that was scratched upon opening the box. this time the whole family went. it was a totally different experience! front space for parking. easy to navigate through the store. i thought being a holiday weekend it would be horrid, but it was fine. Then the following tuesday i had to do another round of returns/exchanges. so i've been there 3 times so far. it's fine now. totally possible. even with 6 kids (there is that play area if you're the right height!)
have fun!!!
Julia ♥
I can't wait to experiance this in my own state! Trying to display self control by not flying out there now! Let me know when your going to go....
Mandee
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