Our day starts off in the IKEA museum. Humble beginnings with a commitment to quality, Ingvar Kamprad began his company at the age of 17 in 1943. He revolutionized the way furniture could be made, sold, packaged and shipped, all while saving the consumer as much money as possible. In fact, in the early days, he received a lot of push back and boycotts from ‘real’ furniture designers and manufacturers. He kept going though and won over the public. IKEA became impossible to ignore.

After touring around, seeing the company and its products change and evolve, or sometimes stay exactly the same – because why mess with perfection? – Jason and I have decided that we will probably start buying our lightbulbs only from IKEA. The amount of thought, engineering, research and quality control that went into the design of them was astonishing.

For lunch, we finally got to eat the IKEA Swedish meatballs. We made the cashier’s eyes go wide when we just kept on ordering; Swedish meatballs (the OG), chicken meatballs, falafel meatballs, herring, a Swedish cinnamon bun and an IKEA chocolate bar. Yeah, it was an embarrassing amount of food, but how could we resist trying as many things as possible?? Were they different? Were they better? Were they life changing? No, no and no. Were they tasty? Were they delicious? Were they sooooo good? Yes, yes and absolutely yes. I guess the test kitchen right across the parking lot knows what they are doing, eh?

A three hour drive later and we are back in Gothenburg. I am almost ashamed to say it because there are so many awesome food choices here but – we had dinner at McDonald’s. Our goal is to eat at one in every country we visit – we missed Denmark and only had a couple of days to make it happen here in Sweden so we had to do it. I got the World Cup meal. It came with a plastic cup with Grimace kicking a soccer ball.