Gray, cloudy, rainy and not at all warm outside to…
Gray, cloudy, rainy and not at all warm outside today. Luckily I work indoors; I’d hate to be stuck doing an outside job in weather like this.
I was at Ikea today looking at beds. I am doing this because I don’t have a bed, and I will need one shortly. The Lofty Sky Palace, being very Lofty, means I sleep on a mattress in the top level of the apartment. My neighbor David has an Ikea bed-on-stilts thing he says I can use if I like to save much-needed space, so I went to Ikea to check it out in action, and also to look over the other beds and setups there. In a nutshell: expensive, but not ugly. I couldn’t find any beds-on-stilts that I didn’t have to bend over to fit underneath, so I think that option’s out. I still need a bed, though.
Ikea has interesting setups that list what you can do with, say, three pings of space, but I couldn’t find any that fit my circumstances, and even if I did, I don’t like most of them, as they all seem designed for teenage girls.
One thing Ikea does have, however, is a cafeteria. I wasn’t originally planning on having lunch there, but after walking through the cold rain, the idea of a hot, cheap, steaming lunch served on real ceramic plates with real utensils really appealed to me. No lines, either, so I grabbed a tray and went over to pick out some steamed fish and veggies with mashed potatoes for NT$99.
It wasn’t bad. I usually grab some sashimi or curry pork for lunch, as they’re conveniently located in the underground subway station where I get off to go to work. Dinner is usually rhoti from Athula by the bridge, or else spaghetti or omelettes, the only two things I really know how to make at home. Having lunch at a cafeteria reminded me of going out to such places, only on a much larger scale, after church on Sundays when I was a kid. I never gave them much thought at the time, but now the idea seems pretty appetizing, though as I recall the lines were pretty long.
But no matter how much I write about the subject, the cold smell of rain remains outside my office window.
