Bed of Bricks

When you rent an apartment in Shanghai, it will most likely come furnished, which is great for people like me - a traveler temporarily settling in a foreign city. Most of the time the furniture that comes with the apartment is decent, but sometimes you wind up with a really hard mattress.

The other day I was telling one of my co-workers that the mattress in my new apartment has to be the hardest mattress in the world. It's like sleeping on bricks, I said. She told me that when she was growing up in the northeast part of China, she really did sleep on bricks. She said that her bed made of bricks (called a kang) was built next to the cooking fire, which would heat up the bricks so that when she went to bed, covered by a thick quilt, she was nice & warm. Craziness.

Here's a photo of a kang that I grabbed off the internet: