Ikea

Due to our recent move, we've been to Ikea 3 times in the past few weeks. Before that I think I had only been to Ikea twice in the entire time it's been at Rhodes.

The funny thing about Ikea is that it's considered really cool in Australia, whereas in Europe it's mainly known as having very bad quality furniture! When we took the night train from Stockholm to Kiruna, we got talking to a young Swedish guy in our carriage who told us there are 3 types of furniture stores in Sweden: the really high-class expensive ones, normal average ones, and then Ikea. I would have really liked to visit Ikea in Sweden and in fact I walked straight past one. Unfortunately I was doing a really stressful bus change from Sweden to Finland which involved walking 800m over the border and since the bus from Sweden was 20 minutes late, I had no time to stop.

I have fond memories of Ikea from my childhood when there was one at Gordon. We rarely went and it was a really really special trip! I remember being scared of losing my Hello Kitty hairclips in the ball pit. But the problem with going there as a kid is that you see all this ultra cool stuff that you can't buy.

I've also had a blast at the Ikeas in Germany. We could only ever go when Sebastian got the car from his dad, so they were really special trips as well. The best time ever was when Seb's brother drove us home after Christmas 2003 because we had so many Christmas presents that we couldn't carry on the train! We drove to Saarbrücken first to drop Seb off and went to the closest Ikea at Saarlouis. I still remember very clearly that it had been snowing recently and it was feeling very Christmassy and festive. We spent ages in there going through everything and playing with anything that took our fancy.

Now it's a bit of a different story because we were buying things for our new place! So for the first time I was properly shopping for furniture. It's a great feeling to know that you can finally buy all the things that you want and not just go "Mum! Can I have this?" knowing that the answer is going to be no. But on the other hand it is a bittersweet feeling to realise that I'm so old that I have to do such grown-up things as furnish a house. I feel like it wasn't that long ago when my parents towed us around looking for furniture too.

All in all, though, the "Ikea joy" in me remains. There is something indescribably fun about shopping at Ikea, regardless of whether you have nothing to buy, can't afford to buy anything, can't buy anything (this happened to us in Shanghai because we were leaving China soon), need to buy one thing, or fill an entire empty house.

What's more, it has been absolutely fantastic to discover the Marketplace so soon after our trip to Sweden. The first thing I always want to do when I go to a new country is to go to the supermarket and discover all the wonderful delights you can't find anywhere else. And the biggest regret I have in leaving a country is all those things that I can't buy elsewhere.

Therefore, you can imagine how over the moon I was to find all those Swedish products that we had bought in Sweden right here in Ikea Sydney: blueberry soup, giant cracker bread, lingonberry jam, polar bread, caviar in a tube...and the biggest surprise of all was the CLOUDBERRY JAM! For those of you who know my cloudberry jam story, this really was the icing on the cake!