Last Sunday we decided to go for an excursion and explore something outside central Brisbane. We thought IKEA would be a good target as we also needed to complement our household equipment and after 5 weeks also felt it would be nice with some Swedish food :)
IKEA in Brisbane is located in Logan, a suburb one hour with bus south of the city.
Actually the bus trip in itself was quite interesting as they have built a separate road only for bus traffic. This road has bus stops that look more like train stations, i e the whole concept is like a commuter train solution but with buses instead of trains. No impact from traffic jams on the motorway. Quite smart I think. Never seen that before.
Actually the bus trip in itself was quite interesting as they have built a separate road only for bus traffic. This road has bus stops that look more like train stations, i e the whole concept is like a commuter train solution but with buses instead of trains. No impact from traffic jams on the motorway. Quite smart I think. Never seen that before.
Finally at IKEA we could see that it is as popular here as in Sweden. Crowded! And everything looks exactly the same way. The restaurant served meatballs and salmon, just like home. Well it's a pity if the Aussies think these meatballs are the real thing. In Sweden we all know that mother's meatballs are the best and no mother would be proud of these pale, texture-less things served at IKEA. Anyway we enjoyed the cream gravy and lingonberry jam.
As mentioned the concept is exactly the same as home "Designed in Sweden, built for Australia" is the motto and if it wasn't for hearing english everywhere you could as well have been in Sweden.Even the names of the products are the same.
And here I start thinking... how does these names sound for a non swedish speaker? Do an Aussie have any clue of what hey mean or do they think it´s just something made up to be impossible to pronounce?Take for example "Oumbärlig" How would an english speaker pronounce that? Waambaarlich?
Correct is rather oo-uhm-ber-lig
To be honest it's a rare word in swedish as well that hardly noone below age 40 would use.
For those interested all Ikeas product names simply are swedish words.
Furnitures are usually Swedish towns and villages ex "Stockolm", "Liatorp", "Vitemölla" (The last one might make one or two of my swedish readers happy) and in some cases person names like "Billy", "Erik" or "Ingolf"
Smaller products used to be adjectives but I guess they ran out of them so now it can be any type of word
The best thing for an expat is the food shop outside where you find things like pickled herring, swedish caviar, "knäckebröd" etc to fill your food stocks.
Oumbärlig?? => Something you can't live without
Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment