The Great Indian Life

I was initially planning to write my goof ups in a sequence. Now i am breaking the sequence after this weekend.

This weekend has been damn adventurous. I had rented a nice house alright but it was totally empty without even a chair to sit. So, i decided to pick up a small sofa cum bed for the living room and a bed for me to sleep in.

So, the great idea was to go to IKEA to pick up these furniture. For those who do not know IKEA, its a wonderful shop for buying anything you want to setup a house or an office. Its cheap, they have everything you want and it is an adventure. If you are ever in the US, you should visit an IKEA store for sure. The added advantage of visiting IKEA is you can skip your gym for a day or if you don’t go to the gym, you get a good day’s exercise totally against your will and you have nobody to sue.

So, IKEA basically lets you go and get all the furniture (apart from other things) you want. You identify all the furniture you want and note down the Aisle and the Bin where you would find the furniture. When you go to the Aisle and Bin, you see boxes of furniture components. You can pick all the components, get it home, assemble it with the tools and instructions that you find in the box. Thankfully a very nice friend offered to help me and so i manage to sleep on a bed now.

Before i came to the US, i had no clue what components you need to set up a bed. I found that i need the Bed Base (which consists of a headboard, footboard and the side bars), the bed slate or the box spring and the mattress. I identified these items and a sofa cum bed, brought them home.

We initially assembled the sofa as per instructions and when we were about to finish we figured that we assembled it wrong and the way we had done it, the sofa would not open up into a bed. Great! we thought and we reassembled it and it was all set.

The next adventure was the bed itself. We assembled the bed frame only to figure out the bed slates and the mattress were of a smaller size while the base was larger. It looked like we had brought the larger bed frames than i wanted. Feeling lazy to disassemble the frame, we decided to go and get the bed slates and the mattress of a larger size. Once back in IKEA, we found that it was indeed the bed frame that was wrong. The head board and foot board were of the “Queen” size while the side frames were of “Full” size. Essentially, this meant that if we changed the slates and the mattress, they weren’t going fit ie. they would be longer than the frame.

Now, this was no fault of ours since the bed frames were packed together. IKEA had goofed up in their packaging. So the bed slates, the mattress and the new bed frames were taken back home. Then we re-assembled the entire bed and heaved a sigh of relief.

It was not over yet, we had ripped off the packaging of the bed frames we brought earlier, so, we were worried if they would take the frames back. But thankfully they accepted the package back. Basically, the IKEA adventure took almost the entire day

All of Sunday, i was pressing all my clothes. I have never pressed my clothes in my life. Twice a week the laundry guy would come home pick up the clothes , press them and bring them back. So forget pressing, i have not even taken the clothes to the laundry ever.  Wow, pressing those machine washed crumpled clothes is not funny at all.

The weekend reminded me of the royal life in India. It was so easy. I want a bed and sofa in my house, i go, choose and they are brought home and kept where i want them. I never go out but the clothes went out and came back pressed. Wow!!! what on freakin’ earth am i doing in the US?