IKEA: Many Living Rooms, None of Them Yours

Over the weekend, Sweetface and I made a pilgrimage to the Tempe IKEA. For those of you who aren’t lucky enough to have had the IKEA experience, it is a showplace for modular Swedish furniture, and has just about everything you could want to outfit an entire house or dorm. And at IKEA you can also get every form of lingonberries known to man.

This particular IKEA consisted of one floor of showrooms, and a second floor, which is their warehouse. Now the showrooms are definitely set up for exploring. Why, Sweetface and I explored them ourselves. We even saw a family of eight fit neatly into one of those sleekly furnished 10x10 rooms and marveled at the wonder that is space-saving Swedish furniture. Rounding the corner from a kitchen complete with a home-fill refrigerator, we never had the barest inkling of the horror that was before us.

There was an entire family seated around a Bjursta table and in a scene more gag-worthy than almost any gross-out close up on CSI, one of them was wiping a baby's bare butt. There was no secretively, no hint that what they were doing might be unsanitary or wrong, or even better done elsewhere. I think the most horrible part was the realization that these people weren’t the first ugly Americans to walk into, what is essentially one of Sweden’s many embassies to the U.S.A., and do such a thing.

Even in Sweden, mysterious land of affordable and stylish lamps, I’m sure that in furniture stores such as IKEA, they have restrooms with changing tables. The Tempe IKEA was no exception. The showplace bathroom next to them was not equipped with diaper genie, soap and running water. It did have a striking cobalt blue soap dish, which I was far too disgusted to enjoy. I gazed into the intense cobalt color in an attempt to burn the image from my brain.

Needless to say, I no longer had the appetite for eating any lingonberries.