Monday, April 7, 2008

Is a passport required to go to IKEA?

A few weeks ago Mark and I renewed our passports and decided to spend the evening at IKEA. Yes, it took us an entire evening to conquer and see every last inch of IKEA. We met in the oversized parking lot at 4:30 PM and I did not arrive home until midnight. (Granted, we did some other things besides IKEA but still....) We spent three hours of our life at IKEA! I am still debating as to whether it was a good use of my time.

So we started upstairs in the very large IKEA. We found these comfy chairs right away and sat there for a while catching up on old times. That was basically how the entire night went. We walked for awhile, commented on stuff we saw, sat and chitchatted, and then moved on to the next display. We acted as if every display was our house. We slammed the kitchen doors, sat on the sofas, looked in the closets, laid on the beds, helped ourselves to the stuff on the bookcase, etc. You get the picture. It was a very hands on experience.

Here are some things we learned:

I have the strength of ten men. I accidentally ripped off a handle in one of the kitchen displays.

Not all the kitchen cabinets have the slam protected feature.

At least one of the TVs in the displays actually works.

All of the books on the bookcases are in Swedish. (I'm not really sure it was Swedish because neither Mark nor I speak Swedish, but we both know it was NOT English!)

Everything we thought would be expensive was cheap and everything we thought should be cheap was expensive.

The food in the restaurant was delicious and well worth the few bucks we spent on it.

There were some things that neither Mark nor I were sure what to do with??

Two out of every three women between the ages of 18 to 50 that we saw were pregnant. (I told Mark to stay away from me, especially when we were trying out the firmness of the beds!)

Imaginations are a must.

The boxes of games on the bookshelves do not contain the games. (They were empty boxes.)

The employees are not very happy if you take the place setting from the kitchen displays and use it in the restaurant.

I am not a very good driver of a shopping cart when Mark is in it.

The carbonated pear juice in the wine bottle causes a lot of air in the stomach which results in some pretty good belching.

Apparently every man in America needs 100 tea lights, according to Mark. I'm not really sure why?! We did learn that you can't light a tea light from the cigarette lighter in a car. (All it will really do is create smoke which really kills the mood.)

There you have it! My review of IKEA. It was nice to go there once, but I hope to never do the full tour again! Sorry, Mark forgot his camera so there are no pictures. I'm sure if you call IKEA and ask for their security surveillance tape from that evening, it will have caught all of our investigations.