Day 3 • Friday • 8 August 14 • Today’s High 40ºC
TGIF takes on new meaning here coz it actually is the start of the weekend. So I decided that as payback for the vacuum cleaner, I was gonna torture Poss on his first day off the best way I knew how – with more furniture shopping! To Ikea no less – on a weekend!
It’s funny how you tend to gravitate towards things you know when you’re in a foreign land. Makes you feel closer to home somehow. That and the more affordable prices! I’m also happy to report that Ikea on the weekend in Dubai is the exact same madhouse as Ikea on the weekend in Malaysia. Poss was less than thrilled and to be honest, I was thinking of bolting for the door myself but his best mate had taken the trouble to drive us all the way out there and we still really needed quite a bit of stuff. We hadn’t even gotten beds for the kids yet! So we braved it together arm in arm and descended into the madness!
Now, I go to Ikea with my best mate A LOT when I’m in KL. Usually we go supposedly to get just ONE little thing, only to end up with a trolley full of other little things we don’t need. This time however, I wasn’t looking for little things, I was looking for big ass pieces of furniture that would turn my flat into a home and bloody hell – it was stressful!! They make it look so easy and when you’re buying 1 or 2 big tickets items on a whim, it is. But when you’re buying something from almost every department in the store and you’re trying to find every component for each item, you end up pretty much wanting to punch the next person that gets in your way!
Yes, yes, the whole idea is to keep the prices down which is why you’re there in the first place but now my mind goes back to when we were buying our furniture yesterday at Crate & Barrel and all I had to do was point out what I wanted to the salesperson who was following us around. Perhaps spending that little extra is worth it – for my sanity!
Nevertheless, we persevered and made our way to the marketplace to actually locate and load the multitude of separate components onto our trolley and that’s where we really got stuck. We didn’t have enough hands to push the amount of trolleys we needed you see. By this time, my back was breaking, my legs were about to fall off and I just wanted out of there. So I literally grabbed an Ikea employee, put on my best damsel-in-distress and before you could say Louis Vuitton, he had loaded our trolleys at lightning speed and we were at the checkout! Sometimes, it really does pay to be a girl.
p/s: One great thing about Ikea here is that delivery & assembly of everything you buy is free if you spend above AED2,500. And believe you me, hitting that target is not hard to do!
Diva Does Domestic 