småland

the new ikea catalog arrived in the mail the other day. and as i perused the glossy pages for fabulous and reasonably priced swedish designed items, another item caught my eye. "kids eat free at the ikea cafe for a limited time" now the new catalog would almost certainly have been enough for me to find a reason to go down there and part with some of my hard earned cash, but that sealed it.
the trip to our local ikea store only takes a little over half an hour, yet once i pull into that parking lot, around the traffic circle and the island of international flags i feel as if i am in småland. it's as if we've left u.s. soil and all the rules have changed. a kind of diplomatic immunity surrounds the place. (i mean where else do shops have letters that big?) we pull into our parking queue and make our way up the people mover. in the cafe itself we grab a rolling trolley for our dinner trays and make our way through the little maze of automat efficiency. having secured 4 complimentary kids meals and two full price adults we find a spot in the dining area where we can test out some of the furniture. and even though we gaze out over hwy 80 from our venue, we may imagine we are in stockholm watching saabs and volvos zip across the centralbron. and of course once our tummies are filled with swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce it is time to explore.
certainly we could have been like so many other parents and settled for the kids deal at the denny's or carrows or the like, which, while certainly fine establishments wouldn't have satisfied that internationalist longing inside each of us. and maybe that's precisely why i miss the international house of pancakes so much these days.