Wednesday, January 31, 2007

A great ending...

This morning I made a long list of things that I was to finish today. By 5 pm I hadn't even started with any of them...

So I decided to go to IKEA with a Swedish friend instead.

A much better way to end a day that didn't turn out the way you had planned (and I can just recycle the list to be tomorrow's list and we all like recycling...).

Anyway - my IKEA finally had Marabou!! Only the small rolls - but still!

The woman in the food store, looked curiously at me, unpacking all this weird Swedish food combinations (a frozen limpa, skorpor, nyponsoppa, pärlsocker etc) but it wasn't until she saw my name on the credit card that she asked shyly if I spoke Swedish (still in English). My name is a name that is pretty Swedish, but still could not be (especially if I were an American from say Minnesota).

But I guess the combination of the name and the shopping basked with weird Swedish food gave me away... She was Swedish too - so we talked a while about the importance of the IKEA food store (imagine to WORK there as a Swedish alien!?!).

Why are we so shy about this I wonder? Same thing always happens to me the SAS check in counter in Chicago every time I fly to Sweden. The service representative has a name tag with a name that could be Swedish, I look very Swedish (tall and blonde and blue eyes, a living Swedish stereotype... ) (if only I was thinner too...) but until the point where you show your passport the conversation continues in English... Hm... maybe next time I'll just start speak Swedish and see what happens.

Anyway, me and my Swedish friend talked about how we feel at home at IKEA and when we parted we were happy as we had been out on a big, fun night down town... when we had just got a few bags of tea lights (just kidding) and chocolate (oh, and the rest of the 5 bags of stuff you didn't knew you needed...).

It's probably cheaper to have a girl's night out down town than at IKEA....

2 comments:

Annika said...

This is so funny! What would we do without our IKEA? Life would be so, so...so..dull.
IKEA therapy always works!

Yeah, try Swedish with the SAS lady next time :-)

Toini said...

Brukar åka till IKEA då och då, för det känns lite som att komma till Sverige.