A Good Night's Sleep

One of the amazing benefits of this experience in Nanjing is our apartment in foreign faculty housing, right on the Nanjing University campus.  It's an amazing location.  We're surrounded by the old campus buildings, but the bustling city of eight million people is less than a 5-minute walk away.  A couple of the pictures below show the constant mixture of old and new.  Having a western bathroom more than makes up for any other shortcomings.

The only things we decided to change was our bed.  It's a queen, but we think someone else in our building must have the mattress, because we only have the box springs.  We thought our sleep problems could be attributed to jet lag, but after a week, Brad decided it had to be the bed.  Another adventure began.

We discovered there is an Ikea in Nanjing!  With Google maps on our phone, we found it, along with directions on how to get there.  The first leg of the journey, a simple ride on the subway, about five stops.  The next leg, a bus ride--the only problem was Google's suggested bus number and direction were in Chinese characters.  We found the bus station, but we had no idea which bus to take, and it wasn't in a neighborhood where it looked like many people spoke English.  Right next to the bus station, there was a guy frying things, and he seemed sympathetic to our situation, so we showed him the characters on the phone.  He pulled out a huge bus map with thousands of characters on it.  He patiently read through all the schedules until he actually found the bus we were looking for and showed it to Brad -- the 101 (if it had had any number over 5, we would have been in trouble, since Brad has only learned 0-4).  The man gestured for us to wait near him and gave us the go-ahead when the bus arrived.

Within 10 minutes our bus arrived near Ikea.  It was just like the Ikea in Canton, Michigan -- yes, they make you wind through the entire store to find what you're looking for.  We found a reasonable mattress pad and a couple of pillows -- success!  Then the adventure began again.  I refused to carry this huge mattress on the bus/subway back to our apartment, and wouldn't you know that Ikea would have a taxi stand right in front of the store.  We had no idea what a taxi would cost, but we climbed in and said, "Nada Guangzhou-lu" (the phrase we'd been taught to get home). The ride was like going from Wall St. to the upper East Side of New York City, and you can imagine how much we thought this was going to cost.  We arrived right at our gate, and the driver said, "23 RMB" -- less that $4!

One last note.  The directions in the mattress said to give it 72 hours before using.  Did we follow that direction?  No! And we even cut the tags off the pillow.  Ah, sleep.

The view out our bathroom window -- the Zifeng Tower again.

The view out our living room window - old and new.

Need I say more!