ChIKEA

Since I moved to Beijing nearly 10 months ago, the BBC World Service has done at least two stories on the Beijing IKEA.  So in an effort to legitimize my hobby as investigative journalism, I present my own adventures at Beijing's unofficial Swedish embassy:  Please note that much like the furniture sold in IKEA....some assembly is required.

Swedish Meatballs

We started our IKEA adventure by eating Easter lunch in the restaurant on the top floor.  Not exactly the most conventional post-church Easter lunch, but Swedes gotta eat too.  The restaurant was so packed that we spent about 10 minutes looking for somewhere to sit down.  The whole event felt like eating in a high school cafeteria.  Though the food was quite good and inexpensive, I recommend skipping the IKEA brand soda fountain.  $1 for unlimited IKEA brand sodas was the biggest disappointment of the day if that helps put it in perspective.

The Beijing IKEA is famous for the people sleeping on the furniture and foreign tourist have started to go to the store simply to observe the stay-cationing locals.  People literally just take naps on the couches and beds.  We're talking entire families napping in public here.  At least once this trip, we witnessed a father reading a bedtime story to his child while they were tucked into a bed in one of the fake bedrooms....at 1 in the afternoon.  It's all a little too creepy sometimes.  I spent the first half an hour of my shopping trip trying to find passed out customers to take funny photos for this piece.  Odds are, at least one of the people in the photos featured below is a crafty homeless person who found a comfortable place to spend the afternoon.

We were too late to save this woman who was tragically crushed in this pillow avalanche.  The memorial service is next week, and we’d appreciate it if you’d keep her family in your prayers. 

This man (or possibly a woman) is down for the count

A trip to “ChIKEA” makes for a great non-traditional tourist spot.  Yeah you can go to the Cincinnati IKEA and see the same bland furniture displays, but for many western tourists, a trip to IKEA is a peek into how the average Chinese person lives at home....or would live at home provided they had the right clapboard couch and desk set.