In my tiny house there is a lejancha. A lejancha is a raised platform that is formed from the soba, which, you recall, is a wood stove. The heat from the fire is pumped through the walls and the base of the lejancha, forming basically a little headed corner where you are surrounded by warmth. These are indispensible in the winter in Moldova. They are also cute little nooks and who can resist sleeping in a nook? Not me.
First I was in love with the Lejancha. When I moved in I piled a bunch of blankets onto it and snuggled down. It was perfect. Except for the fact that I was lying basically on bare concrete. Ouch. I tried to deal with it for a few weeks but finally had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t stand up properly in the mornings because my back was so out of whack.
My next solution was to get a mattress for it instead of a pile of blankets. My host family had two extra mattresses, which are not American-style mattresses but more like thin pillows the size of a person. I put those down, layering them on top of the pile of blankets and gave that a try. This is where I learned a sad life lesson – normal mattresses have springs for a reason. If you pile pillows on top of each other, especially old ones that are made with cotton, not down, all you’re going to get is a tiny later of give, covering the incredibly hard cement below it. Still a slipped disk waiting to happen.
At this point I was getting frustrated and lamenting that Korean people sleep on the floor all the time (I’ve SEEN them do this, it’s not a stereotype) and they seem perfectly fine, but if I want to do it all the muscles in my body rebel. I was considering moving to the couch as a permanent bed (LAME – especially considering that then literally half the space in my house would be taken up by this lejancha that I don’t use for anything) when I came across the most valuable invention ever devised by man in Chisinau – The air mattress.
So now I sleep on 6 blankets, two flat, crappy mattresses, and about 5 inches of air. Perfect. Apart from having to pump it back up each morning (it goes kind of flat during the night) it’s perfect. It also makes it harder for bugs to get into the sheets since they can’t really climb up the sides. Also a perk. Turns out, being able to get a good night’s sleep really helps you feel more at home. Noapte buna!
