19 November, 2010

Surviving a trip to Ikea

Last Friday I was madly rushing around with 6th graders at an amusement park. What I didn't mention in this post about it was that almost as soon as we got home we left for an 1 1/2 drive across Tokyo. We went to our mission's Japan headquarters for a social get-together. We planned well, we weren't about to repeat a drive like that twice in a day, so we booked at room at the OMF guest home, so conveniently placed on the same site. 


The next day (last Saturday), instead of coming straight home, we drove the opposite direction to visit Ikea for the first time. The main reason was to find a chair for our lounge room. Lots of people use it, but it is primarily known as Wendy's cross-stitching chair! The previous one wasn't all that old, but the foam inside the cushion gave up and it was a painful chair to sit on and needed replacing. 

We went to Ikea in a desperate attempt to find something tall, all the Japanese chairs out at the moment seem to end somewhere near your shoulder blades, which isn't so great for relaxing in.

The trip to Ikea was not without its painful moments, mostly related to boys who don't do shopping well and Tokyo traffic on the way home with boys (actually it was mainly just one of them) who don't do long travel in city traffic really well (it took over two hours to drive home, much of which was creeping between traffic lights). 

Ikea itself is not the easiest place to navigate around, as I'm sure many of you know. It seems to be designed to turn you around so that you are totally disorientated and ?more likely to buy their stuff. It is also an easy place to lose members of a group - i.e. children!

Nevertheless we made it out alive and without too much damage to our wallets. 

While we were there we did find something else for our house. Now the weather is cooling down we're finding lots of clothes lying all over the place. Also laundry has increased exponentially. Our family policy in winter is that pants and jumpers (sweaters) get recycled for a second use, unless very dirty. But where to put those clothes? Previously we've used a small clothes tree, but as the boys have gotten bigger, so have the clothes and the clothes swamped it. So, here we have it. The blue column or cylinder. We're still struggling to know what to call it. Any ideas?

2 comments:

  1. Yes, the height thing is a problem. My 6 ft 4 in brother-in-law has just had to buy a different make of 8 seater as he can't fit comfortably in the driver's seat of a Tarago. The only name I can think of for the blue column is tapeworm - the segments just reminded me of one - sorry!

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  2. My 5 y.o. informed me last night that is it called, "The Tube". I can see the tapeworm likeness, though.

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