When you walk into IKEA, do you ever think to yourself, "I never want to leave this place"? Of course you do. With all of the nicely-decorated room displays, seemingly miles and miles of beds on which to take a cat nap and a whole food court with an unlimited suppliy of Swedish meatballs, who would ever want to go home again? All I need is my Jomna, Braviken and Framtid, and I'm good.
Well, one 12-year-old boy may have made all of our dreams come true. Peng Yijian was found by police in an IKEA in Shanghai after he had been missing for six days. He reportedly survived by eating free samples from supermarkets, according to Shanghai Daily. Now that's really living.
Yijian ran away from home on Nov. 3 after being reprimanded by his mother for not completing his math homework. Ah, to be in seventh grade again.
The boy apparently has a history of running away, but never for this long."We thought there might be other places he likes to visit, so we asked his mother," Sun Miao, a police officer in the Xuhui District of Shanghai told Shanghai Daily. "She gave us eight or nine names, including Caoxi Park, Nanfang Shopping Mall, In Center and IKEA."
The boy showed up on surveillance footage at IKEA on Nov. 9. Police blocked the exits, and after 40 minutes, they found him near an escalator on the ground floor. And if you're wondering why it took the authorities so long to track down the little dude in the store, you've clearly never been to the labyrinth that is IKEA.
After he was found, Yijian was taken to taken to the hospital and treated with an intravenous drip. We're obviously glad that he's OK and that he may have gotten to experience the rush of sleeping in an IKEA store. Way to go, Yijian.
However, many have taken advantage of IKEA's nearly ideal living situation before. Comedian Mark Malkoff lived in the IKEA in Paramus, N.J. for a week in 2008 and documented his experience. Others have imagined what it would be like to live in an IKEA, as we all have. An English IKEA let cats roam around the store overnight, for whatever reason. And then of course, there was the dapper IKEA monkey who also wandered around the store lost just like Yijian. I miss that guy.
One day, you could even live in an IKEA the size of a town. The Swedish furniture company's real estate division announced plans for a self-contained neighborhood in East London called Strand East in 2012. Surprisingly, your house comes already built.
Image: Kevin Frayer / Getty Images
