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| - You can eat in a furniture store? Yup.
Okay, we all know about IKEA--it's this labyrinthine store with tons of inexpensive, hip, and space-saving furniture in meandering aisles that trap unsuspecting buyers for hours. Go there at your peril! or you will emerge with something called Blörken-Mork or Glürben Glärby that you didn't know you needed but just can't live without. The Swedes are ingenious at making furniture fit small spaces comfortably, and they've got a real knack for organization and storage. I've got a couple pieces of furniture that I assembled with a little s-wrench that are holding up well after several years that I'm very satisfied with. Sweden,the land that gave us ABBA, Björn Borg and stinky lutefisk (does anybody really eat that stuff?), has finally found a way to organize my junk drawer--and I like it.
And now a word about their food . . . .
They have a cafeteria that serves very inexpensive breakfast and lunch, all decorated with--who'd have guessed--IKEA furniture. (The wall-size murals are interesting. Not sure where Gottland is--don't wanna know.) A breakfast plate is scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, bacon, French toast sticks for $1.99. Don't forget the coffee, Swedish pancakes with lingonberry sauce, and one of those gooey cinnamon bun things. Lunch fare is meatballs, salad, buffalo chicken wraps with bleu cheese dressing, Swedish meatballs, Swedish sodas, and their cake slices--small, delicate, not overly sweet, and delicious. Everything available in the cafeteria upstairs is available for sale in bulk downstairs--the frozen cakes, jars of pickled herring and tubes of ABBA fish pastes (not joking), cookies, crackers, frozen meatballs, on and on. It's not gourmet food, but who goes to a cafeteria expecting that? It's actually pretty tasty. You can pretend you're Swedish for a couple hours, enjoy the food, and imagine you're staring deeply into the sky-blue eyes of Agnetha while you eat your meatballs with lingonberry sauce. Oh, and don't forget to purchase a Plürgy--they're quite handy.
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