Une première visite à Ikea

(A first visit to Ikea)

Yesterday was a glorious Saturday and my wife and I had already planned a trip to Ikea. Now, while we're in France, we don't have a car (ours is being lovingly looked after by my grandparents back in England), so we had to make our way on public transport, which, thankfully, is pretty awesome here.

We decided to walk some of the journey since we do like a good walk-and-talk and meandered our way through the city, stopping to look in shop windows and enjoying the 20 degree heat. After a while, we could no longer walk as the French do not always go in for useful pavement, so we hopped onto one tram, then a second one until we reached as far as we could in the right direction. The next stage was slightly trickier, getting the bus ... We spent ten minutes or so looking for the bus stop which we knew should be somewhere very close to the tram stop. We even asked a nearby bus driver. Finally we realised that the bus simply went from the tram stop opposite, doh!

Ten minutes later and we were at Ikea :)

Not really knowing what to expect, the building looked huge, we entered the shop. We pretty much already knew what we wanted to buy having looked things up online before going - we like to be organised - but I wanted the whole experience as it was my first time. 

We strolled round the shop, looking at various items of furniture and making mental notes of the kind of stuff we liked/would like for when we eventually have our own place that we need to buy for ... like this sink.

After an hour or so of wandering, we were both beginning to get hungry so we made our way downstairs to find the items to buy: this proved more tricky than I imagined, but we did eventually manage to find the three products we wanted to buy ... and buy them we did.

Our haul

A well-deserved stop at KFC on the way back for dinner, before we foolishly decided to walk back to the city centre, as we thought we didn't actually look that far out(!)

An hour later, with the sun setting we returned to our apartment, definitely tired out after the 3 mile walk. 

Virserum frame for my mountains

Grundtal pots for stock cubes and other kitcheny items

And the Ribba frame will be for the cross-stitch that I've nearly finished.