IKEA is Fresher Here

Spoiler Alert: Denmark is different than Italy.

It's hard to believe we've been here for almost two weeks already, but it makes sense. We've shifted into living-mode, which is decidedly easier than traveling-mode, but you blow through days a whole lot quicker.

This post finds me in our small Nørrebro apartment listening to Danish radio on the internet which oscillates between a vowelly word-soup and the very pop songs I was hoping on escaping. Katy Perry follows me everywhere.

Two weeks is a little late to do a first impressions blog, but I'll do my best to remember those first few days.

We arrived in Copenhagen a little frazzled since this time Sarah's bag had some things stolen from it. One could blame Italian baggage handlers, but we preferred to think it was a Robin Hood type of forced donation, and the money he/she got from selling the stolen goods will shortly go to getting orphans their gout vaccines.

Still, we lugged our (slightly lighter) bags from very clean train to very crowded bus and found ourselves at the corner of Frederikssundvej and Glasvej. Now might be the time to point out that this language isn't the easiest to pronounce.

We were trying to get to Musvågevej, which, although it was only a block away, took us false starts in each of the possible three wrong directions in order to find the place. The bags and us trudged up 5 flights of stairs where we woke up our eminently friendly temporary landlady, Sabine. She's a pixie-ish universitet student who rents her apartment out a few days at a time for extra cash and crashes at her boyfriend's place. We had the place for 4 days, and it was to be a base of operations during our extensive apartment search.

The first place we looked at was great, so we took it. Extensive search over. It's got a kitchen with a fridge slightly above "mini" status, but the electric stove gets hot in a hurry, so I'm good.

Also, like in Malaysia, we have a wet bathroom, meaning the shower floor and the bathroom floor are one and the same. I'm okay with it, since in the event the apartment starts flooding, it's nice to know we have an effective drainage system.

In addition to a very adequate hallway (straight and connecting rooms together) we also have a dining-living-bed-room. We keep clothes on a rack there so it's also a closet. But it's enough. The internet is already paid for, the beige couch is comfortable as long as you don't sit in the middle, and we have a $1 IKEA fleece blanket serving as a throw rug.

Speaking of IKEA... it's the booty call of interior decorating. It'll get the job done but it's cheap and you'll feel a little dirty afterwards. In order to secure a mattress for our nearly-furnished apartment I had to go to IKEA alone and I had to get there and come back on the bus all within 1 hour and 20 minutes. The bus ride was 25 minutes on its own so I was pretty much screwed.

Assuming they haven't already been hired, the CIA should really let the IKEA guys design their next torture device for interrogations. You lose all ability to reason in IKEA because:

1. Everything is in Swedish.

2. Everything is cheap, but prices are different.

3. There are dozens of different options and they're all the same but slightly different.

4. It's a place you want to leave.

5. You have to write down archaic coordinates for your furniture (still in Swedish) and hope that you'll be able to find it/it's still in stock.

With the opposing forces of "is this one cheaper?", "Gosa Klätt vs Gosa Aster", "what thread count do I really need?", and "ooh, meatballs", the subject is completely boned.

The possible results are to turn into IKEA zombies or headless IKEA chickens. I was a useless combination of the two, frantically looking for brains, but without a way to consume them, or know when I had found them.

I have no idea how, but I made it out of there alive, with a mattress and a full set of bedding for less than $200, and I only had to deal with what should have been a fairly obvious problem: after you buy things, you have to move them.

Counting the tightly rolled mattress, I was lugging 60 lbs (27.2 kgs!) of lumpy bedding, and I had 15 minutes to get back home to get the key from the landlady. I hobbled to the bus stop, only to find that the first bus that came had only enough room for an undersized floating infant, definitely not a sweating American who with enough bedding to start his own shantytown.

The next bus was nearly as packed, but at this point I was down to 7 minutes and I figured some people would pay good money to cuddle up to fluffy pillows in the middle of the day. I got on, kept my head down for the length of the bus ride of shame, and after one transfer, and some brisk, jerky walking, I was back at the apartment only 15 minutes late. That's a win in my book.