Hanne

16th April 2009

OK Kiddies, hands up who has heard of IKEA? It is like a giant Swedish Briscoes, and it is BRILLIANT! So brilliant that I actually went there on both Tuesday AND Wednesday. The Tuesday was to be a tourist. The Wednesday was an attempt to make my room look less like a prison cell and more like a livable space. I came home with:
1x table cloth
1x cushion
2x cushion covers
1x vanilla candle
1x Cyprus tree
The candle is to try to rid my room of the odour of sour cabbages. The Cyprus tree to reduce the carbon footprint created by said candle. It will be interesting to see how long I manage to keep the tree alive, actually… My venus fly trap plant was the last piece of greenery I was charged with keeping alive and that went dismally. Ah well, there were also plenty of cacti at IKEA. Plan B is sorted.

OK, so maybe that rant about IKEA was a bit desperate, but I have been here two weeks now and just about exhausted the tourist possibilities. Although yesterday I did try Schwarzwaldtorte for the first time. Genuine Black Forest Cake. It had a lot of cream on top but was not as sweet as I expected. Pleasing on the palate. Next time I will make sure to take a camera along for company!

We did take our cameras to IKEA, though. I went with Holly, a girl from Paihiatua, and her friend Selwyn, from Christchurch. Chances are he is probably reading this as he is also on KB (I know this because I was wearing my KB T-Shirt and we had several in-depth discussions about bikes and our old ZZRs and generally things that go ‘broom broom’). We had heard all about the legendary IKEA hotdogs so decided we really MUST try one, but in order to get to the café we had to walk through the entire store. It was worth it though. One euro and you get a hotdog in bread, and a cup. You then put mustard and tomato sauce on the hotdog, top it off with pickle and dried onions, fill your cup with coke/fanta/coffee/hot chocolate (BK style endless refills) and enjoy. Yum.

As I mentioned earlier, I have met several skandinavians since arriving here, including three swedes. They find IKEA very odd. Alongside the hotdogs and icecreams you can also buy ‘traditional swedish’ food, such as ‘Swedish Breakfast’. This consists of a roll, marmelade, salami and a cup of coffee. Oh, and a Swedish flag in the roll. That is pretty much all that makes it Swedish. Or the ‘friske Pfannekuchen’. This is the one they were really ranting about, because in German ‘frisch’ means fresh. The sweish word ‘frisk’, however, means ‘healthy’. The two Swedish girls actually wrote a letter to the store explaining how stupid it sounds to call your pancakes ‘healthy pancakes’, and got a letter back all about how they ‘value customer feedback’. The name of the dish has not changed.

Ok, now I think I am finally done with IKEA. Last mention of it! Moving onto something more German, on Tuesday we also went to see a movie made up of 21 short films. Called ‘Deutschalnd 09’, the idea was to reflect on the place Germany has become 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some of the films were quite funny, some of them very artsy and full of stills that none of us really understood… And one was actually quite disturbing. It was an interview with an Iranian sex bar owner, going into great details about why he employs foreign ladies and what his customers enjoy. Sucking tampons, anyone? Anyway, that one was rather odd but all in all it was really neat to see all these different views of how the country has developed. And I have lots of postcards to put on my wall of stills from the films. The ywill sit proudly alongside my XL Red Ducati 999 poster. Score!

Today has been a sleepy day, it’s back down to 9 degrees again, coldest it’s been since I arrived. Windy, rainy. Much like Auckland, really. Come back, sun!
I’ve bought a few uni books but suspect I might be in for a bit of a shock come Monday when uni starts and I am actually expected to LEARN things again. 6 months of holidays (especially from a language) can turn one’s brain a bit to mush…

Think that’s about all. Infocomercial for certain-unnamed-Swedish-store over!

Bis nächstes Mal,

Hanne