Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Don't read unless you like hearing me complain

Today we went back to Ikea, fine-tuned our kitchen plan, and ordered all of it, plus a few rugs and other odds and ends too bulky for us to haul home on our own.

It was a very unsatisfying trip, though, one of those days when one thing after another didn't go the way we'd planned.

We had an appointment for noon, so we took the 10:15 train, had a caffe and waited around the Parma train station for half an hour, and caught the bus to Ikea--which only runs every two hours. But when we presented ourselves at the Ikea kitchen department, we discovered that the very nice man who was on deck to work with us spoke no English, even though we'd specifically asked for an English-speaker. I was willing to plunge ahead, but trying to make dozens of decisions about the nuts and bolts of a kitchen in an atmosphere of linguistic confusion was just too nerve-wracking. We had to wait till two o'clock to get an appointment with an Ikea kitchen expert with some English proficiency.

So we shopped for a while and had an Ikea lunch (and yes, they do serve Swedish meatballs, in regular, vegetarian, and chicken versions).

Yesterday we'd had lox, which was a bit of a treat after two weeks of cured pork products. Today's lunch was less satisfying (mains: lasagne for Danny, a salad with shrimp for me), in particular the vegetable side of fennel, which we were sort of excited about until we realized that the fennel was (a) boiled, (b) tough, and (c) ice cold.

Italian food is great, but a lot of their vegetable dishes seem more a cliche version of British cooking: boiled, soggy, and flavorless. Why do Italians put up with such icky vegetables? Do they eat things like this at home?

At two we had our appointment with Alessandro, who spoke pretty good English and was delightful and also quite beautiful, in the way that so many Italian men are. But the appointment stretched on and on, because things had to be checked and printed and so on, and we watched anxiously as the time for the 3:47 bus back to the Parma station drew closer and closer. We also had to absorb the frustrating news that the soonest the new kitchen can be delivered is...April 9. So a few more weeks of living with one burner and no place to put anything.

Finally we were done. Danny and I sprinted down to the check-out, hoping we could somehow make the bus. Of course sprinting in an Ikea is no joke--there were miles (literally, I think) between the kitchen department and the purchasing endpoint. Once we got there, all we had to do was pay. And yesterday we had finally--finally, after two weeks!--gotten the new PIN for our Italian bank account debit card, so we were all set to pay for our new kitchen with euros we'd deposited back when the exchange rate was much more favorable to us than it is now.

But our bank, in its wisdom, wouldn't permit us to charge more than 1,500 euros on our bank card, and the bill for an entire kitchen was considerably more than that. A lovely Ikea staffer helped us figure out how to pay that much with our bank card and the rest on a U.S. credit card, and another gave us the gift card that we're entitled to because of Ikea's current kitchen promotion, and a third fetched the kitchen stool that we were carrying home with us. By then, though, the bus was long gone. And the next one wouldn't be until close to six o'clock.

By now it was almost four, and we'd left home a little after ten this morning, and much as we love Ikea we were pretty sick of being there. Plus I had gotten into that home renovation frame of mind where an extra hundred, or thousand, dollars here or there starts to seem inconsequential. So one of the nice Ikea folks called us a taxi, which we took to the Parma train station.

Instead of having an old-fashioned meter box, the taxi showed the fare on the rear-view mirror. So our driver could watch the growing dismay on our faces when we came to a stop at a railway crossing and spent two euros waiting for an empty, four-car train to finally go by. The whole trip lasted about 15 minutes but the fare ticked up awfully quickly and the total came to 14.50 euros, or almost 18 dollars. Even to someone in home-renovation mode that seemed a little steep.

Then we had to wait a half-hour for a train in the Parma station, which discourages loitering by having almost no places to sit and no area where you're not standing in a brutal draft. By the time we staggered back to our apartment, we weren't feeling at all celebratory, just glad that we don't have to go back to Ikea again tomorrow.

Instead, first thing in the morning the electrician is coming. We hope he will rearrange the gas line for our new stove, put new plugs where the new kitchen is going so that we can plug everything in, and put up all our light fixtures. But after today I am braced for things to go less than smoothly.

2 comments:

barbara said...

Saint Pasqual is the patron saint of kitchens. I am now praying to him on your behalf.

ColleenD said...

I wish I could bring you some warm dinner and a few bottles of wine and some flowers!!!!

Arriverderci!

Quanto? Tanto!  has moved over to Substack, where the nuts and bolts of this sort of operation are more up to date. Please join me over ther...