Mattress matters

We have been complaining about our mattress since our first night in this apartment. It is hard. Not as hard as some Chinese beds, as we discovered at the Tree House Hotel. And not as hard as the mattresses that were provided to teachers last year. We have been assured that ours is on the softer side.

But both Tim and I have been uncomfortable, and keep reminding each other about the pact that we made to do whatever to takes, at whatever cost, to have a comfortable place to sleep after we tortured ourselves on the most lumpy, concave, thin excuse for a mattress in Cairo for 5 months. We have tested out all the mattresses in the nearby furniture stores and were not impressed. We dreamed of IKEA mattresses, a mere 3 hours away in Shanghai, but the cost of shipping one here doubles the price. I was almost ready to give up and just accept that fact that I won't sleep well for a long long while. I got custom-made black-out curtains for our bedroom, which has helped my sleeping immensely.

But Tim was determined not to give up, and turned to our new-found Chinese shopping dream, TaoBao. Just last week he ordered a new unicycle at a great price which came in only 3 days! On Monday evening we asked our Chinese conversation tutor to help us look for mattress pads on TaoBao, and by Wednesday it was here, on our bed, free shipping, with two free chair cushion covers! See Figure 1. below for our new sleep surface:

Figure 1. A: new 10 cm memory foam mattress pad from TaoBao, B: original hard mattress provided with our apartment

I won't lie to you, I am not totally won over by the memory foam. I think maybe I was getting used to the hard mattress and now I have to get used to the foam. But that's not the point. Focus on the cool internet shopping that we have discovered.