After-school snack

IKEA makes me nostalgic in a different way than most people I know. For one, most people don’t really get nostalgic about IKEA. And two, if they were to get nostalgic, it would be about walking through the showrooms, trying out the couches, pretending to watch tv in the living room, cook in the kitchen, and lounge in the bedrooms. Some might remember when they tried to play in the kids’ showrooms and fit down the slide even when they were well past the age of five. I’m nostalgic for the food.

I lived ten minutes away from an IKEA and one of my best friends during my senior year of high school was obsessed with the Daim torte. While other high schoolers hung out at Starbucks or the mall, we hung out at Ikea, in the cafeteria, eating Swedish meatballs and drinking lingonberry juice while chatting about our love lives, school gossip, and looking forward to college. It was always amusing to me that our after-school hangout was a big box store; I get the feeling that we could have easily have spent a lot of our afternoons in a Target.