On surviving without IKEA, Internet and Starbucks coffee

Most people love to tell how much they hate IKEA. Or rather, shopping at IKEA.
But I love it. I love it that much that I dare say that my life here in Eleftheres is much better because there´s now an IKEA only a two hours drive away.
Whenever I have to pick up or deliver guests at the airport I pop by IKEA, as it´s next door.
And every time it feels like coming home.
I love hanging around in there, looking at all the beautiful stuff, the exhibitions...It gives me a sense of who I really am: Scandinavian. Which of course equalizes style, good taste and natural looks.  
IKEA feels like it actually belongs to me, at least partly - and it´s only because I am such a tolerant and generous person that I don´t throw out all those Greeks wandering around in the shop, touching stuff and shouting and eating Swedish meatballs in the restaurant like they were keftedakia.
Here in Greece, for tax reasons, we have to collect all our receipts. And if you look in my receipts drawer you´ll find a few from IKEA. Though the main thing at IKEA is not shopping. It´s being there.
The shopping I do on Internet.
Clothes, shoes, books, music. Yoga mats for my workshop. A playground for our hotel. And most recently: A swimming pool.
How could I ever survive without IKEA and Internet?
Rather: How did I survive?
Because I did.
When I moved here in 1993 my gorgeous Greek had just get a telephone installed in his apartment, after having waited for three years. Our long distance relationship was based on letters (you know, those you wrote with pen on a paper and put in an envelope and sent off from the post office) and phone calls when he worked night shift and didn´t have a boss around.
The gorgeous Greek lived in a flat with a camping table, camping chairs and a sofa where the seat fell to the floor if more than one person sat on it, so it was obvious, at least to me, that we needed some new stuff when I moved in.As we were getting married, my in-laws gave us money for furniture, as tradition is in Greece (my parents should have provided the house, but somehow they missed that!)
I was in tears! IKEA hadn´t opened in Greece yet. Here I had loads of money in hand, and everything I looked at in the shops was so ugly, so bad taste and so synthetic-looking that it almost made me move back to my dear tasty, stylish Scandinavia.
But I wiped my tears, clinched my teeth, bought the least ugly pieces in the shop, and stayed.
Surviving without Internet was actually easier, as I didn´t know what it was.
Just as Starbucks coffee (never tasted one).
Or the Oprah show (never seen it).
But I hear some people are addicted to both.