Cliff and I headed over to Ikea to pick up some storage units and some mirrors and other assorted knickknacks that would bore you to death. However, the first, most important thing we wanted to do is eat. The Ikea cafeteria is a site to behold. First, it's ginormous. Second, the food is cheap and kinda western. Their menu is pretty large...you can get the standard meatballs, mashers and lingonberry sauce (which is crap, compared to what is available in US Ikeas), spaghetti (weird sweet taste and they use some sort of fake margarine on it, which I know is a misnomer, since margarine is fake butter, so maybe its fake-fake-butter flavor...whatever), some assorted Chinese dishes, smoked salmon platters, salads, etc. I don't know if you got this from my opening dialogue, but unsuprisingly, Ikea offers these items all at a reasonable price. The great thing is that the menu is also printed in color photos, so you can order via the pointy-talky method, which Cliff is fluent in by now.
Cliff decided on the baked salmon with a veggie medley called "vegetable max". It was not bad at all and it only cost 25 RMB (3.75 USD).
I opted for the Chinese option for several reasons...the food didn't look too oily (been a problem here for us), the meat looked reasonably lean (also a problem) and they gave you alot of rice (which cliff wanted). It was reasonably good and at 19 RMB (2.5 USD), it fit the bill.
After gouging our wallet of 2900ish RMB, we decided that we needed to have some of our items home delivered. Also, if any of you have ever put together wooden storage shelves, you know what a pain in the @ss it can be and you can actually pay Ikea to do it here. So we brought our stuff to the delivery section and the first think they said is that they couldn't deliver the 4 foot plant we just bought. As they were telling us this, an older man came up and asked us where we were going and what floor we lived on. He then quoted us 80 RMB to take our stuff home. Ikea quoted us 80, plus would charge us 4% of the price of whatever we wanted them to assemble and we'd have to wait for delivery. Given the fact that we didn't know how we were going to get the plant home, we caved in to the freelance-ikea-business-stealin-delivery man. He led Cliff and me out of Ikea and down the front walk where he had his van parked.
Here is a close up of the man loading our stuff.
Cliff is happy he finally has someone that can help him take the heavy stuff...
And...all of our stuff crammed in the back of his van.
After putting some stuff together, we headed out for a meal of Beijing duck at a place that we've never tried before. The duck was marginal (lots of fat, but the meat was tasty), but the price was right...38 RMB (5.5 USD) for half a duck and 58 RMB (8.5 USD) for a whole duck and they give you the options to take home the bones (which alot of Chinese do...mainly to make soup). This compares to the 198 RMB plus extra for the fixins at the nicest Duck places in Beijing. Cliff put it to me this way, I could could eat more than three ducks at the place we went last night for the price of the best place in Beijing. Obviously, there are some culinary nuances that make the expensive duck deservingly expensive (roasted over fruit tree wood, served on gold plate by waiters in period costume), but maybe that is lost on me...and I love duck, so price and quantity also weigh heavily on my decision making process. After dinner we stopped back at 7-11, because Cliff wanted ice cream and I wanted beer. Any one who knows us, won't be surprised by the previous statement. We walked out of 7-11 with 63 RMB (9 USD) of goodness...four King cans of Yanjing beer, cheese cake, a chocolate almond coated ice cream bar, a small container of vanilla ice cream and a dozen small ice cream drumsticks....all of which were pretty d@mn good.
As you can see, Cliff was exceptionally pleased with the ice cream bar...
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