IKEA

Wow! Francesco and I spent almost the whole day yesterday at the IKEA in Naples. It took us two hours to drive there, 7 and a half hours to plan, order and pay for the kitchen for our new house and two hours to drive home. Exhausting! But, at least we have the kitchen taken care of. That IKEA is not a store, it's like its own little universe. The place is immense. It took us about 10 to 15 minutes just to get from the kitchen section to the cashier. And the number of people who were there? It was jam-packed, a constant, never-ending flow of people streamed by the whole time we were there. It took us 30 minutes of standing in line just to get to the casheir - and there were at least 10 cashiers working. I don't know . . .

I geuss I have just become too accustomed to the small, Italian, boutique-type shopping experience - the whole size and dimension of the IKEA experience was overwhelming. I suffered for years here getting used to the "Italian shopping experience." I was mystified by the ability of Italian women to walk into a particular boutique - how did they know which one to walk into? - and ask a clerk to show them a particular item ("a short brown skirt" for example, or "a blue suit") - how did they know exactly what they were looking for anyway? I was used to the American system of walking in to a large store, wandering around on my own, looking at what caught my eye, browsing through the racks, touching the items, carrying what I wanted to try on to the dressing room by myself . . . perhaps I was looking vaguely for "work clothes" or "a bathing suit," but nothing more specific than that. Now that I've gotten used to the boutique experience (although I'm never quite sure exactly what I want), the large warehouse experience seems strange!

Thank God we didn't take the kids with us. They would have 1. been bored out of their minds, and 2. driven us crazy. We would never have got the kitchen taken care of. Unfortunately, we had left the boys at the house of my friend, Sveta, who thought she had them for 7 hours and ended up having them for about 12 hours. I took care of her kids for her the day before when she had some errands to run, but for about 4 hours - not 12! On our way out of the IKEA, I bought her a whole bunch of Swedish food delicacies as a gift pack. She's Russian, so I think she might find some of the items vaguely familiar or interesting, in a general northern European sort of way. In any case, I still owe her big time!