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We went to Ikea today. I've now been to Ikea's in 3 different countries, and they're all remarkably similar. The machine pushing away at a chair to prove how robust it was gave me a spooky feeling, it was so like Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham and Bielefeld.

One difference was the restaurant. There was the bistro at the end, which sold hot dogs (but no vegetarian ones) and meatballs and lingonberry juice (or whatever it's called) but the restaurant in the shop was very small - there were about 8 tables, and I bought a very unpleasant sandwich, because the menu consisted of three kinds of sandwich ' vegetarian', and two others that I didn't bother to take in. Drinks were cheap though, cans of Pepsi were 75c.

One similarity was the fact that when you got to the end you couldn't find anything, and there was no one around to ask. So that felt like home too.

There was a car hire place next door, where you could hire a van by the hour, which I though rather cunning. And it was on three floors, you started at the top, and worked down (I think that I've seen that before, being an international ikea veteran). There were lifts and escalators between floors, and a special excalator for trolleys, which was supposed to hold the trolley, but occasionally didn't quite manage, causing the trolley to skeeter down, scattering crockery and light furnishings until it crashed into the trolley in front. The boys thought that was very exciting.

[Update: I found a picture of it on flickr.]

We bought a thing I've forgotten the name of, but it wouldn't mean anything to you anyway (Trafort, or Rotfart, or something like that) and tried to buy another thing but the shelves were out of stock. (As in the shelves that go in the thing, you could buy the outside, just not the inside. Is this making any sense?)

We bought a clock (for $2.99), a big kitchen style one, to go in the boys room, so they don't have to ask if it's time to get up, they can just stay in bed. And a non-stick frying pan.

And I took another one of those panoramic photo things, because I could. One day I'll find something to take a panoramic photo that's worth taking a panoramic photo of. To make things worse, it's the side, not the front - when we'd finished I was going to drive around to the front to try again, but when you've been to Ikea you barely have enough energy to get home, so I didn't bother. To attempt to make it more interesting, I've done a perspective correction thing. You can see the escalator on the right that you use to get to the top. The people look a bit chopped in half, because they weren't considerate enough to stay still while I took multiple shots.

(Click on the picture for a larger view, click it again for even larger.)



While we were in Ikea it started raining. It doesn't rain often (as I mention whenever I can), and it seems that drivers don't remember that wehen water falls from the sky, the roads get more slippery - it must have been too long ago that it last happened. We passed three minor accidents within about 10 miles. (Reminds me of that joke about what accident and emergency, errrmmm, I mean ER, doctors call motorcyclists when it starts to rain: "organ donors".)

On the way home, we went to Trader Joe's on the way, and bought some 'Avocado's Number' Guacamole. Which I imagine is a joke about Avogadro's number. I'm impressed that a supermarket make a joke about something that obscure that very few people are actually going to get it.

(I just typed 'Avogadro's number into Google, and found that (a) it knows it, and (b) it can do calculations on it. Don't you just love Google? I mean, if you ever wanted to know the square root of Avogadro's number to the power of pi ...)