Swedish Meatballs and the Great Shopping Expedition

Let There Be Light

Really wanting a bedside lamp as well as a desk lamp for my kitchen table home office, I ventured far out to Xuzhou's IKEA.  The taxi ride took a good 30 minutes, and at one point, the driver made a grunt to signal my attention, and then proceeded to take a selfie with me.  I'm unsure if he was put out when I wrote in Chinese I didn't want my face appearing on buses tomorrow!  He dropped me off by the side of the road upon arrival.  A stand-alone store situated on one of the major thouroughfares here, Heping Boulevard, it wasn't as crowded as I expected it to be, nor were there that many people sleeping in the chairs and beds.  It had the same generic layout that most IKEAS have - winding around through different designs for different sections of houses.  I made it eventually to the lighting section, and after some translation confusion, settled on a basic bedside lamp and some multi-touch flexi desk lamp.  Happy with my selection, and needing lunch, I found the restaurant and ordered the ubiquitous swedish meatballs.  It tasted alright, nothing special.  Served next to some mashed potato gloop that was swimming in what I gather was meant to be meatball sauce but was like a broth, and a smidgeon of cranberry sauce, complete with two blue and yello toothpick Swedish flags, my lunch was at least filling.  Not so nice were the local children running havoc all around, screaming and screeching at the top of their voices while their parents sat like drones scrolling on their phones.

Show Me The Fika!

Realising I also needed a cutlery organiser, while at the cutlery section, I eventually found a staff memeber and discovered that such items are actually located back upstairs in the kitchen decoration section.  Silly me strolled the gauntlet all over again to find only a few items and discovering I didn't know the exact measurements.  I then went all the way back past the restaurant to the Swedish food products section whereby I grabbed a bottle of Felix branded Caesar Dressing.  Seeing giant posters on the wall extolling the Swedish tradition of 'fika', I searched high and low for Swedsih coffee beans but couldn't find any.  They did stock cinammon buns BUT alas, no coffee.  I felt quite cheated by this.  I mean, how can they have posters showing steaming cups of coffee and cinnamon buns with the word Fika underneath, and then not stock coffee?  And Swedish coffee is good, especially in cold weather, as I recall, some ten years ago.

RT Mart

From IKEA, I spen 30 minutex trying to work out where and how to get a taxi and once achieved, headed to Suning Plaza.  A sprawling mall, and Xuzhou's largest, it also sits at the bottom of Xuzhou's tallest building.  I found the Uniqlo, not without first taking a quick look at he adjacent food court, featuring eateries such as Putoto Sauce Fries.  I found the Uniqqlo's prices the same as in Australia but purchased a thermal long sleeved tshirt anyway.  From there I went on a bit of a walk retracing my steps from a few days prior, then remembered there was an RT Mart somehwre in the area.  The map was putting it somehwhere inside some Golden something Mall, about 500 metres away.  I got lost in the mall, then discovered RT Mart was by the side back on the main road.  Formerly Carrefour, a place I loved shopping at in the past in China, due to their excellent quality, cheap prices and foreign products, I hoped RT Mart (the new Chinese owners) would be similar.  Indeed it was, and I was pleased to not only see the cooked chicken section but also a little imported food area where I managed to pick up a jar of proper coffee, pasta and pasta sauce.  I got a local spice mix that I thought was going to be some kind of 5 spice powder, (translating almost all the items on the shelf using Google), a bag of chicken wings, a packet of spicy Doritos some good chocolate.

A bit of a walk straight down the main road and I eventually arrived back at Nice Cafe for a nice cup of Australian flat white, and began reading the 2nd book in the spectacular Anno Dracula series by Kim Newman.  A good day of shopping, even if the bedside lamp required the patience of a thousand bus stops to assemble.