China - Day 18, Saturday

As I have mentioned before, the mattresses here in China are not much better than sleeping on the hard floor. And our living room furniture looks nice, but it is not designed to curl up and watch TV, more like "being strapped to an electric chair" as Randy puts it! So today, we took a trip to Red Star Macalline Furniture. It happens to be right next door to IKEA. To say this furniture Mall is huge is to understate it! There are 7 floors of furniture. Typical Chinese style, there are hundreds of individual stores within this "Mall".

This is the longest escalator I have ever seen. It travels from the 6th floor to the first floor.
The light are pretty cool. Daniel got a kick out of it!

This is looking from the first floor back up. Mind you this is only half of the Mall. You go to the
right and there is another area just like this!
Doesn't Daniel look like he's having fun!!! He hates shopping!

I liked the name of this store "Order Your Life".
 I'll have one order of good health, happiness and love please!

This is a store that is devoted to just Hello Kitty designed furniture.
Next door was one for Mickey Mouse.

We thought this foot stool was neat!

We started off on the living room furniture floor looking at couches and chairs. We walked in and out of dozens of stores. Sat on quite a few - all as hard as rocks. Apparently the Chinese are more interested in looks than comfort - unless they find brick like furniture comfortable. On a bright note, Randy did find a recliner that he liked. Amy and I will go back when Daniel is in school and look for a couch again and order Randy's chair.


Next we went to the mattress floor and tried at least 50 mattresses. We found some that were a little softer than bricks. This includes a Serta and Themprapedic store. When we asked about twin mattresses, they would ask what size? How am I supposed to know, at home a twin is a twin is a twin! Here a twin can be 100cm, 110cm, 120cm. So we got some prices and wrote down some mattress names so we could come home and measure Daniel's mattress. While I am at it I am going to make the mattress a little smaller than the current one, in hopes that the fitted sheet I bought might fit!

You would think that a Furniture Mall this big we could find something, anything! We ended up leaving exhausted, frustrated and without any furniture!

While we were furniture shopping, Amy was out with Iris and a few others from Randy's office . They went to Karaoke (KTV as they call it). It is really big here in China. They have small rooms that you reserve for your group and you just sit in there and sing Karaoke. Tomorrow they are going to a James Blunt Concert.

Today's Cultural Differences/Frustrations 101: The Chinese are very superstitious people. The color Red means good luck and Gold means money/wealth (you will notice my blog colors are red and gold!). Never give a Chinese person a watch for a gift - it means death.