Field research

In our never-ending quest to be 100% integrated into Swedish culture before actually setting foot there, we conducted a little field research today by visiting our local Swedish embassy, IKEA. Mostly we were there just to eat some pseudo-Swedish food, to start getting ourselves used to it. We also took the opportunity to look for some sort of dining room cabinet / kitchen appliance storage solution.

I got the chance to try some cloudberries, in the form of some preserves that IKEA sells in their "Swede Shop" thing. Apparently it's an acquired taste; it's a bit funky-smelling, and there are these gargantuan seeds that threaten to stick between your teeth. Oh well. I'm guessing that all the sugar and stuff in the preserves threw things off a bit, too.

For "fluff books" with which to fill the shelves of their bookshelf floor models, IKEA uses gobs of old Swedish-language books (children's books, atlases, novels, and textbooks) that they must have purchased on discount, by the thousands (around twenty identical copies of any one title were sitting together on any one shelf). We weren't there long enough for me to actually plop in a sofa and try to fumble through one of them (and I don't really read Swedish that well yet anyway), but it was an interesting idea.