I only really wanted to buy sill and maybe bread while there, but we both wanted to look at furniture, since IKEA is in Sweden too (considering it’s Swedish, that’s not surprising) and the furniture is the same regardless of the country you’re in.

I don’t go to IKEA very often, personally, but when I do go I like it a lot. I love the way they market their stuff, setting up little pretend-rooms throughout the store, and letting people sit down and check things out at their own pace. It definitely gives you a good idea just how well this and that would fit together, and testing beds is *always* fun. Bouncebounce.

The store was pretty damn big on the outside, but on the inside it was smaller than I expected. It was two floors big, and it took us just under an hour to go through the whole thing. We had sort of expected to be there for quite some time, but in the end, at 2.30 pm, we had seen everything we wanted to see, and I’d bought my food that I wanted.

Speaking of food, the “market” they have there is quite nice, but small. I found lots of Swedish food that I really wanted, among them Swedish bread (tears of joy… Japanese bread sucks…) , sill (fish in glas jars, sort of like marinated, I guess?), Swedish beer, glögg, smoked salmon, etc. And the prices were actually comparable to the Japanese stores, amazingly enough.

Anyway, since it was so early we decided to not eat dinner there, but instead decided that we should make a Swedish dinner at my girlfriend’s parents’ place to let them taste “Sweden” once and for all. So we bought more sill, more salmon, and meatballs, lingon jam, and Swedish beer. No glögg though.

It turned into sort of a christmas dinner thing, in the end. The salmon and potatoes are kind of one dish by their own, as are the meatballs and potatoes, so people sort of just picked and tried stuff from the table. Surprisingly everyone liked it a lot — even my girlfriend’s mother, who usually hates potatoes (I made mashed potatoes, which might have done the trick — the cream sauce might have done the trick too).

In any case, that was my IKEA day. It’s always great fun to cook dinner for lots of people, even though it’s not usual for guys to make food in this country. The girl’s dad always seems a little unsure how to take this all — his daughter’s boyfriend swings by and whips up food for one and all. Must not be a very common sight in Japanese households, but noone is discouraging in the slightest, so I’m gonna continue making weird dishes from my northern origin in the future. (Next up is this chicken + curry + rice thing that I love. I already have the recipe, but I’ve never actually prepared the dish myself. We’ll see how that goes…)

There’s lots to be said about Japanese, but one thing is certain… they sure know how to eat. Or rather, they love to eat. It’s like eating is one of life’s pleasures. I can’t argue with that sentiment, really, but I wonder how they all stay so thin when their food is so damn unforgivingly good.

Most of you guys know about sushi, which is a rather odd way to eat, but there’re lots of other ways to make dinner. Today’s dinner was something called “Onabe”, which is basically a big pot which you put on a stove in the middle of the dining table, into which you drop various vegetables and meats and eat as they are cooked. As you eat, you drop more veggies and meats into it ad infinitum. Until you feel pregnantly full.

Yeah. It’s borderline wasteful but it’s so fucking orgasmically good that you simply can’t help but admire whoever came up with the idea. In any case, I now feel pregnantly full. And there’s lots of meat left in my fridge. Tomorrow will be “round 2″. I have to starve myself so I’ll survive…