IKEA

What do you do when the three suitcases that you shipped from Kyrgyzstan to Indonesia last August, containing most of your housewares, are still not in your possession? 

You can curse and swear or you can give up and call Ikea. 

Ikea is the Swedish home store where you can get home goods at a reasonable price. Luckily for me there's one in Jakarta, which seems to have at least one of most things on the planet.

Each of the 6,000 goods Ikea sells, from pillows to frying pans to shower storage units has a quaint little Swedish name. HOGSMA. Why that's the name of my wood cutting board, of course. FARGRIK is the Nordic name of my serving bowl. Fargrik and Erik...sounds like we could be cousins. And my retro, 1960s-looking carpet? TORRILD is its name. I now have an apartment furnished with items that sound as though they are parishoners in one of Stockholm's Lutheran churches.

But as is with all good things: there is a catch. Ikea became successful because their items' low prices were a result of the fact that they were extremely efficiently packaged. Ikea stocked their stores' warehouse with much more product, because of this efficiency. And because of this efficiency, in exchange for the lower price, we got the fun of taking the largest items home and assembling them ourselves.

In a previous life, I was sometimes tasked with this frustrating job of assembling Ikea furniture armed with Ikea's vague and sometimes incomprehensible instructions. Attempting to assemble Ikea furniture ìs a great way to stress test a relationship with someone you love.  It was more than once that we assembled a bookcase or a table and found we had two or more extra pieces remaining after we thought we were finished. It would be have been amusing. If you were a spectator.

Fortunately, I didn't have to assemble HEMNES, my new bookcase. In this COVID era, IKEA delivers some furniture to you pre-assembled. For a fee, of course, but I would have paid three times the amount I did to avoid the horrors of attempting the job myself. I'd still be struggling with HEMNES without the help. Now all I need are my three suitcases being held hostage in Indonesian customs, so that I can actually fill up HEMNES with something more with the few meager items I carried with me here. Somehow I have this feeling they were mistakenly sent to Madagascar, never to be seen again, but one must hold out some small hope.