quality or quantity, you decide?

one thing i don't miss about a 'working' monday morning is the incessant and obligatory "how was your weekend" question. i can't possibly think of anything short of a 2-day bout of swine flu that would illicit anything but a "weekend was awesome, can't wait til friday" response.
as many of you will be picking through the freedom on your respective monday morning, i will assume that the weekend was fab for all.

that being said, given my current situation, i have no problem answering that question with a lot less snark. so here goes -
aside from taking us for a late-night dinner to a restaurant that closed a year ago, without access to a phone or wifi to figure out what other options were around, it was pretty good. the notable activity for the weekend? you guessed it, spending saturday afternoon at IKEA. yes, those damn swedes are everywhere....(hi erica). have to give them credit though, cut from the same cult cloth as mcdonalds, they more or less replicate their corporate template no matter what city/country/village. even down to the hot dogs and $2hkd ice cream...which works out to a cool canadian quarter. the reason we were there was simple: we have no furniture. well, not exactly no furniture...we have remnants of the previous tentant's furnishings...and as much as it doesn't necessarily bother 'me', it bothers 'us' quite a bit.
to note - neither of 'us' are super enthused about having a flat that looks like an IKEA catalog. but it was out of our hands...the bank calls the shots on the apartment and its contents. (given they pay the rent, literally, that's just fine)
what's good about the deal is that they gave us an allowance of $40,000 hkd ($5,000 cad) to spend. for any of you +30's out there, it reminded me of the old Wheel of Fortune format, where the contestants were forced into spending their cash on crappy featured showcases. To the living room we go.....
it's also nice that the stuff will be delivered & pre-assembled for us.

what's bad about the deal, as i mentioned before, it's IKEA.

based on the 40g's though, we were able to get a fair amount of stuff for the living/dining/office/bed rooms. if nothing else, it was fun to spend money that's not your own. we can only hope that what looks half decent on the website will look just as satisfactory at home. i'll be sure to snap a few rounds off when it's all in place....and a few pictures too.
yum.