Ikea hell

The interesting thing about Germans is that they usually take their kitchens with them when they move. Unfortunately the previous tenant took his. And so with that we found ourselves joining the crowds at Ikea, with the mission of getting hold of a kitchen ASAP. Now, shops in Germany tend to close on Sundays and Ikea is no exception. So everyone has to do their home improvement shopping on a Saturday, heightening the pressure. We spent a full 5 hours in the store, which we spent like this:

• Viewed the kitchens on display – despairing at the price (we only bought a kitchen for our UK home 10 months ago so this outlay was upsetting) and trying to decipher the meanings of the display captions
• Retired for lunch with catalogues, pen and paper to draw up our design
• Queued up for a very long time to discuss our requirements with the kitchen advisor
• Pit stop for kaffee und kuchen (German for coffee and cake, which is their version of doing ‘afternoon tea’)
• Queued to pay
• Queued to speak to the department responsible for transportation of said kitchen
  
  

So, that was fun. To top it all, the kitchen cannot be fitted for at least two weeks. This means we have to live with no oven, fridge/freezer, or washing machine. V. inconvenient. (Did I add that we also do not have: TV, internet and telephone?)
We had wanted to buy other items from Ikea, including light fittings and a desk, but were too beaten down to bother. So guess what we’re doing next weekend?!