Let's Make Some Money
Posted by Aaron Lopin on Wed, Aug 05, 2009 @ 02:43 AM
As you may have guessed, this is the first in a series of attempts to commercialize chineselanguageblog. I would therefore like to introduce the chiense "summer sleeping mat" which i took the
liberty of translating myself. Why? Because we don't have any in the US. But we should. It's called a 凉(liang2)席(xi2) and pretty much every household in southern china (more people than in all the USA) use them. Literally, 凉 means "cool" or “chilly" as seen in 凉快 （liang2kuai4) and 席 means "mat" as in 席子 （xi2zi). What it looks like is a greenish or brown/beige bamboo mat, flat and pretty thin, usually big enough to cover an entire bed. It's not hard to use, you just put it on there and lie down. It makes you considerably cooler in the summer, i'd say at least by 7 or 8 degrees, and gets rid of that summer heat sticky feeling. I know what you're thinking, "but they just use it because they can't afford air conditioning" Yes, that's true, but can you really afford 
air conditioning either? It's expensive. And the sleeping mat runs from a basic one for about 5 bucks (us dollars) to a top of the line model for like 20 or 25 bucks. Ok who wants one?? I'll ship it for you and only take 1 dollar commission, since i can live on that one dollar for like ten days.