"Are you equipped?"

When we met some Americans for drinks the other night, one of the first questions that I was asked was, "Are you equipped?" Six months ago I don't think I would have understood the question and would have replied with, "Excuse me??" But I simply answered, "No, not yet."

The topic of conversation was about French kitchens. When you lease an apartment, it doesn't exactly come with a kitchen - you have to "equip" it yourself. And the most popular place to get this equipment is at IKEA. There is an IKEA store back home and we shopped there frequently but I never could understand why anyone would furnish..... er, excuse me.... equip their kitchen using stuff from IKEA when there's Home Depot and Lowes and many other really nice stores for that sort of thing. And besides, IKEA things are "some assembly required".

But until we could get the kitchen equipped, I took a packing box, covered it with a tablecloth and used it for the kitchen counter. An old work table held a few things too and then with the stove, fridge, micromachine, and diswasher that Paul purchased, I could actually prepare a few meals. But the cardboard box was starting to warp so it was time to "remodel" the kitchen. So off to IKEA we went. (pronounced "icky-a" over here).

At IKEA, the kitchen designers didn't speak English so we completely designed our new kitchen in French. Imagine that! The young woman who helped us was very nice, patient, and fun to work with. We left feeling quite confident that we would indeed survive in France.