Unfurnished Apartment = Very Empty Apartment!

Ikea (Purley Way) Nightmare Deja vu!
If you mention the words Ikea and Purley Way to Adam, he will break out in cold sweat! Why, you may well ask…well until you have experienced it you can not comprehend the full horror. I, myself love shopping, whether it’s for clothes, shoes, bags or home stuff, however I also quiver at the thought of Ikea on the Purley Way in Croydon. This is why…

• The traffic is horrendous. A journey which should only take about 15 mins can take up to an hour when it’s really busy (it’s almost always busy!)
  
• Ikea is always packed full of people who think nothing of ramming their trolley into the back of your leg!
  
• The sneaky company have set out the shop so that you have to walk all the way round the whole store to get to the part you need and to be able to pay for your items (clever on their part but bloody annoying if you only need something from the end!)
  
• It’s a nightmare to find the furniture you’ve chosen once you get to the warehouse and end up walking up and down endless aisles looking at bizarre furniture names and codes.
  
• Finally, the queues to pay always seem to snake all the way through the warehouse (at least a 20 min wait)
  

Why on earth did we go back more than once I hear you say?! Well, Ikea’s stuff is pretty good for when you need to set up home. Most stuff you need is under one roof, it’s pretty good value and if you can fit it in your car it’s ready to go to your house immediately, without having to wait for weeks for an item to be ordered and delivered to you.

Why am I talking about Ikea in Croydon then? On our arrival on Sunday morning at about 6:00am we decided that we needed to get some essentials for the house to enable us to eat decent meals and clean! Funnily enough it was Adam who mentioned the ‘I” word. We decided that after a few hours sleep in our apartment we would be ready to tackle Ikea. Surely it couldn’t be anything like Purley Way, surely that was just a one off! Yeah, right!

Our first task was to navigate our way their. Armed with a map and Adam’s blackberry (we had Google map directions on it) we set out. How hard can it be to follow some directions and a map?! Erm, it turns out it was actually quite challenging. I like to blame the jet lag and the fact that the sign posting wasn’t overly clear at certain points. We made it there eventually though.

Now we had to navigate the car park. It seemed that every body in Sydney was at Ikea and we had to go right up to the top level of the car park (level 9). The next issue was the lift! Who would have thought that a lift could be such a problem?! We even experienced lift rage later on in the day when trying to return to our car. Not only was every lift full all of the time, it made no sense as to the floors the lift was going to. It would go down when you pressed up and the doors would randomly open and close!

Finally we made it into Ikea. We decided that it would be the perfect place to buy most stuff for the kitchen like plates, bowls, glasses ironing board etc. Just like in Croydon we had to tramp all the way round the store before we got to the place we needed. We piled our trolley up high with everything we needed and proceeded to the check outs. Thankfully the queues were relatively small for Ikea and so the wait didn’t get to the Purley Way extremes.

By this stage we were flagging a little but needed to forge on for the rest of our shopping. Luckily the Ikea was part of a shopping mall, so everything we needed was under one roof. We returned the trolley load to our car and continued our shop. ‘Bing Lee’ (a name for an electrical shop which Adam finds very amusing due to the adverts on telly) was our next stop for a Dyson, kettle and toaster. Finally we needed to get our food supplies. It almost felt as if we were in the game show ‘Supermarket Sweep’ only without Dale Winton (thank God!) I’ve never done a food shop in quite such a quick and urgent way. By this stage Adam and I were flagging and desperately needed to get home. Thankfully we were able to successfully navigate our way home without any detours! Job done!

Ikea Sydney

(The Biggest Ikea in the southern Hemisphere, but not quite as big as Croydon's!)