The princess and the pad

Packing, sorting, organizing; what to keep, what to throw away? In an attempt to excite the kids about China we look at everything around us to see where it is made. Most of the time the things we are looking at are of course Made in China. Just like Marcus, I might add, something he doesn't find too strange at all. Perhaps because he still doesn't know what it means exactly....let's see how long we can keep it that way...
At the moment the kids are more excited about going to New York City for a few days ("Mamma, there's a huge toy store there!") and to go to Sweden to see family and friends.

I started thinking that maybe it is time to buy a new mattress for our bed; it has travelled far and been used in many countries after all. In China, back in the day, we rented our apartment furnished - in theory. The reality was that the apartment was brand new and had not yet been furnished and I, lucky me, was given an allowance to furnish it. The budget was as limited as the selection of furniture stores. "Real" stores didn't really exist, instead I was given, by our nice realtor Joanna (now a mogul in the world of real estate in China), a list of warehouses where I would find furniture. I gave the list to a taxi driver that I hired for the day (the list was all in Chinese characters of course) and he took me to one place after another. In these gigantic buildings in the middle of nowhere in this humongous city, there were stalls, stalls where people sold their goods. A chair here, a table here, a chest of drawers over there and beds - too short for a normal sized Swede and thus had to be custom made, here and there. With the help of a friend I managed to make my selection and we could finally move in - only to find that the mattress on our custom made, extra long, bed was made out of cement. It was so hard it was impossible to sleep comfortably. Go figure, since in the old days, the Chinese used porcelain pillows!
I set out to find a mattress pad of some sort to make it softer, more sleep able. At a small store on Dongzhimenwai I found a small mom and pop store where they sold everything under the sun and sure, they could make me a mattress, even as big as our bed! After a sleepless week or so, I went to pick it up. It was thick, it was soft and I was sure we would sleep like a prince and princess!
One month later, our mattress was as thick as a bedspread and no fluffing it helped. I think we went through four or five of those mattress pads during our stay. Luckily we were young and didn't sleep much those days anyway and hopefully, we helped the store make a  few RMB...enough to send their children to school for life or so...