IKEA? I seeya.

Last week was a week where I didn’t have much to say. So instead of putting out any old blog post, I simply decided to say nothing. This week, however, was more interesting. We took a break away from home, and visited friends of ours in Edmonton for an extra long weekend.

Truthfully, we both needed the break. CF has been working far too hard without some time away from work, and I’ve been getting very tired of the house scenery. So we went to Edmonton for some time with good friends, and a bit of retail therapy.

The drive from Grande Prairie to Edmonton is much like the drive from Joburg to Durban (or maybe Pietermaritzburg). If that drive had zero taxis, one tenth the number of trucks, no tolls, and no insanity on Van Reenen’s Pass. As a result, unlike the drive to Durban, we weren’t balls of stress and anxiety by the time we reached Edmonton.

Our friends very kindly put us up in an Airbnb a few minutes from their apartment in downtown. The downtown core in Edmonton is a real adjustment from any of the downtown cores in SA. For a start, everything is walkable, and if it isn’t there is a bus service to get you where you need to be. Then there’s the safety – even walking home at 11pm we didn’t feel unsafe. Lastly is the variety of shops and amenities in easy walking distance of most of the core – and much like Joburg and Ellis Park, Rogers Place arena is right in the center of downtown.

The first few days

And we visited Rogers on Friday evening for what’s called a ‘watch party’ for an Oilers away game. The Edmonton Oilers made the Stanley Cup play-offs, and are playing the Los Angeles Kings in the first round. For game 3 last Friday, the Oilers were playing the Kings in LA. Instead of leaving the stadium unused for the game, they put it live on the Jumbotron in the middle of the arena and charge a nominal fee for entry (and the net proceeds go to charity). They also project the puck’s and players’ positions live onto the ice so you can more easily see where they players are.

It was a great experience. The stadium is much more intimate than a rugby stadium thanks to the smaller size of the ice rink, so even if you’re in the nosebleeds you’re still very close to the action. It’s also true that Canadians love their ice hockey in the same way we love our rugby. Nearly everyone was wearing their Oilers merch, carrying flags, and getting their faces painted. It was definitely a great vibe. Helped, of course, by the 6-1 demolition of the LA Kings – go Oilers!

Come Saturday I got to play my first full round of golf for the season. We played at a municipal course called Victoria Golf Course. It’s a short-ish par 71, just 5900 yards off the tips, with nice forgiving fairways and greens. Perfect for the first round of the year. I shot an 89, which is not bad for not having picked up a club for three months. My short game – excluding putting – needs a significant amount of work in the sim, although all the long game practice seemed to be paying off.

IKEA

Sunday was all about IKEA. In spite of spending a week in Jönköping in 2009, and nearly two weeks in Stockholm in 2018, I’ve never visited an IKEA. CF and I needed to get some more furniture for the home, so IKEA was the logical place to visit. The layout of the store is very interesting (and I believe all IKEAs are structured the same). You enter the store, and have the option of heading to the showrooms, the marketplace or the furniture self-service warehouse.

The logical place to start is the showrooms, where IKEA has staged various rooms and their related products. If you see an item or a piece of furniture you like, you just write down the product number to find in the marketplace or self-service warehouse later. Or use their app, if you’re a sadist – it’s extremely difficult to scan items since most tags don’t have barcodes, so you end up manually searching the item and finding the item number. Or you could just write the numbers down…

I digress. There were something like 28 different showroom sections – ranging from bathrooms, to offices, to living rooms and bedrooms, and so on. It’s all structured in a large loop so you can just walk from one section to the next. There are also regular shortcuts that allow you to cut across the loop, to get to specific sections more quickly. A lot of people say the layout is confusing. To that I reply: “just read and follow the signs”.

We spent a good amount of time walking through the showrooms looking at items we’d already picked out online, to get a sense of the actual colours, material and size. Two hours later and we’d only managed half the showrooms and gotten to lunch time. IKEA knows you’ll probably be hungry at this point, so they’ve put the restaurant at the halfway point to encourage you to take a break and sample their famed meatballs.

Which we did. Well, I did. CF tried their veggie balls. The value for money is pretty good, and the food was definitely not terrible. Not something I’d go out of my way to eat, but definitely something I’d be happy to pay for again if I was at IKEA.

After lunch it was time to head to the marketplace and the self-service furniture warehouse. The marketplace is effectively where you find all the non-furniture items to buy. Using the item numbers of the items you found in the showrooms, you can use self-service terminals to look up the location of each item, and head on over to pick them out. We didn’t have much we needed from the marketplace, so we relatively quickly moved onto the furniture warehouse.

It’s pretty straightforward. Each piece of furniture is located in a specific row, in a specific bin, and you pick them out and put them on your flat-load cart. I’d suggest this is mostly a two-person job, since even the smallest items can be extremely heavy and/or unwieldy. Also, past a certain point, there’s so much weight on your cart you can no longer maneuver it. My cart ended up having around 400kg worth of bookshelves, wardrobe and desk on it, and it was nearly impossible to get around. Please, IKEA, invent some carts where you can lock the front wheels in a forward direction to make steering easier.

Two of the items we wanted weren’t available on the floor. For those items, you need to speak to an IKEA associate in the warehouse and have them create an invoice for you to pay. Once you’ve got that, you take the invoice along with your furniture to the checkout counter and pay for everything. You can then pick up your invoiced items at a pickup counter near to the tills.

Getting everything back was… a challenge. As spacious as our CX-5 is, many of IKEA’s pieces of furniture are 7 foot long. Even with a big truck, you won’t fit them flat in a standard loadbed. Our solution was to rent a Uhaul trailer to get everything back to Grande Prairie – at $90 with insurance, it’s less than half the cost of shipping everything to us. Whilst IKEA has parking bays for loading right by the exits, there isn’t a specific place to park vehicles with trailers, so we got to push our carts all the way to the car. Cannot recommend, very heavy sweating intensifies.

This week is going to be all about assembling the furniture. I’m looking forward to having a place to store our books, and CF is looking forward to having a space to scrapbook. Judging by the weather forecast, this will be a good week to stay indoors, so it works out very nicely. Hopefully next week we have some pictures of everything setup in place!