Day Six: Stockholm Design Tour continues

Plan to go to Ikea. According to Time Out City Guide, there is a free shuttle bus to Ikea store from Regeringsgatan 13 every one hour from 11am to 5pm daily. Arrive at the bus stop a couple of minutes before 11am. No bus comes. I may have missed one. So I wait for the midday bus by visiting an Åhlens store in front of the bus stop. It does sell some tempting products like napkins with nice patterns. It also tells me about the best colour combination for my bathroom. Muji is also here, and I find colourful and transparent bath soap bars (in yellow, blue, organge, and green) and tissue boxes which are surprisingly rare in Sweden. It's a good idea to open a store like this in front of the bus stop for Ikea.

Midday approaches. A girl speaking American English asks me if the bus to Ikea is operating on Sunday. The bus stop has a sign: "går alla vardagar." The electronic dictionary I bought yesterday doesn't help me at all. It does not have an entry for any of these words. Actually the dictionary has only 20,000 words in total. Since it translates into 29 different languages, it boasts 580,000 words on the package. A pocket Swedish-English dictionary on sale in a bookstore contains 32,000 words! What's the point of an electronic dictionary then? I'll definitely return this dictionary. It's called 29L Global Translator. Never ever buy this.

Several minutes later, the girl, coming out of the Åhlens store, speaks to me: There is no Ikea bus on weekends.

Changing today's plan, visit NK department store, probably the Swedish counterpart of UK Harrods. Its lower ground floor is another temptation for design addicts. In addition to Design House Stockholm, Bookbinders, Ording & Reda, and Kosta Boda (see yesterday), it also has Granit, which is a bit like Muji but offers products either in white, black, or the mixture of both. Find a tempting shower curtain (last night I found that the shower curtain already furnished in my flat allows water to spill out) and a black laundry bag. At Ording & Reda, I buy paper clips of black and white stripes.

Time Out recommends NK's bookstore as it offers books in English. But to me it's not very useful. Where can I buy Monocle magazine here in Stockholm?

After having lunch at the NK canteen, I stop by at Clas Ohlson in Gallerian (see yesterday) and buy a measure tape. I need this to know what size of furniture I need to buy before going to Ikea etc.

Then I head for R.O.O.M., yet another furniture store in Kungsholmen of western Stockholm. It displays quite a few living room furniture suggestions, which is enlightening to learn what colour and texture combination looks great. The store is very large, and also has a small item section. Find a tempting soap dish here.

On the way home, stop by at my office in the Institute. Log on to Tyda, an excellent online Swedish-English dictionary. It's better than Lexin, which everyone seems to recommend, in terms of the speed of translation. I check what "går alla vardagar" at the Ikea shuttle bus stop means; "går" means run, "alla" every, and "vardagar" weekdays. I'll definitely return the stupid 29L Global Translator.

I also track my UPS boxes online. It's not updated over this weekend; so I don't know whether they will deliver tomorrow. I need to call them up tomorrow's morning.