March 8 - Ikea All The Way

We started our day with a visit to Ureblock, a mattress cover producer who sources

their yarns from American & Effird. Felipe, from A&E, joined us on the trip as well as Luis.

Ureblock makes about 2,000 mattress covers and about 20,000 pillow covers per day. Ureblock

only makes mattress covers for Ikea: both foam and spring mattresses. The thread they use

is A&E textured polyester and filament polyester. Their fabric is from Turkey or Europe and

some of their chemicals are from China. They also source wool from New Zealand. If

polyester fibers are used, Ureblock makes it from recycled coke bottles. They also use fiber pads from North Carolina from Innofa, with wires (for their spring mattresses) coming from Germany and latex coming from France. There was a huge emphasis on flame retardant mattress covers and mattresses since most of the mattress covers made in Mexico are sent to the United States.

Ureblock also makes their own foam and any left over foam is compacted together to be used

in upholstery. The foam has to be laid for 24 hours to reach a cooled temperature before they can start using it in the mattress production process.

Due to the fire hazard, there are no fans, no sprinklers, but they have hoses to control

anything that may occur within the factory. They do not allow smoking and the water

fountains are unplugged when the workers go home for the day. They ship out two containers

a day via trucks. The trucks go to the border where the products are switched to another truck

that stays in the United States for distribution to Ikea stores. They are operating from 7am to

2am, with weekend work as an option if they are behind. They also put the packs of mattress

covers in a roll, it is then vacuum shrink wrapped to save space in the trucks.

Then we drove on over to Uxmal, more pyramids from the Mayans. This is the one

place of the Mayans where their only source of water was rain water. As a result, they became

obsessed with the rainy season and truly predicting exactly when it came. The main temple is

called the Magicians Temple, the legend says that it was build by a dwarf throughout one

night. The terrain was a little rough for the crippled: I have an AirCast boot on due to a little

accidente in January. So after about 30 minutes of me attempting to walk around these ruins, I

had to call it quits and had 4 lovely escorts to take me back to the entrance where we sat

in the restaurant and I was able to ice my swollen feet. After everyone came back we took the

bus to a restaurant in Ticul where we were also able to see the last celebration of Carnaval in

the town square. After dinner, we hitched it on back to the hotel in Merida, where we were

able to enjoy the very end of Carnaval celebrations and just have a nice relaxing day before our

trip to Campeche in the morning.