IKEA store has been opened in Vilnius city already in 2013. This place is very popular among local and neighboring shopping travelers - Belarus and Latvia.
There is no surprise seeing shoppers from Belarus here, as Minsk is less than 200km from Vilnius. Latvians? Well they just love shopping in Vilnius.
It was my birthday, we were at Vilnius, after spending few hours wandering around Old Town - idea visiting IKEA arrived. Unfortunately we hadn't no idea where this store is actually located as we are not familiar with topography of Vilnius. No TomTom's here. We got a small tourist map (covering just Old Town) at tourism information center. Not a single word about IKEA there. My guess was - I believe it should be located somewhere on the highway connecting with Minsk. So we took the route towards to Minsk.
Yeah... not the best idea. We got lost nowhere in the surrounding forests of Vilnius, when suddenly a small village appeared in the outskirts of Vilnius, we made a stop in front of one house and I asked - hey, do you have any clue where IKEA could be located? The guy looked to me. IKEA? Sure, follow me! He entered his small car and accelerated. Rally Vilnius. After some 20 minutes we were set - IKEA appeared in front of us. We used may shortcuts, all I remember at one point I noticed a sign - Naujamiestis.
Anyway, thanks to the friendly people in the outskirts of Vilnius we finally found IKEA store. It's not that we were here for shopping, just for fun, and maybe to buy something for our rural house. Our Honda CRV features a large trunk, so yes we could buy even some furniture.
Parking lot at Vilnius IKEA
At the end we spent some two hours here. Yes there are some offerings for furniture, but I got the feeling if we want to buy something for our rural house here, it's better to use online shopping catalog and pick our articles in store. We bought some linens, tea pots and some other small but cool things.
P.S. This IKEA store features a dinning area - where some meatballs are served. I haven't visited other IKEA stores, but fact they are serving meatballs here (for a cheap price of course) made me smile. Should I mention, it's hard to get a table there? Yes, very tasty and delicious. Can you imagine a better birthday that eating meatballs at IKEA store? Awesome!
