We have been in China a week now and I figured it would be a good time to post an update on how life has been so far. Sorry for the lack of photos on this post – the Internet is slow and I'm inpatient. I've uploaded a few at the bottom of this post and will try for more soon. Also, I will apologize for any formatting issues in this post. The Internet crashed a few times while drafting this and I kept losing my drafts. I ended up copying and pasting from Word and it made my formatting all funky. Sorry! I tried fixing it, but its Saturday night, Ang is asleep and Rich and I are enjoying a movie and a glass of wine. So I'm giving up on the formatting and posting as is!
Our new neighborhood is great. Within 5 to 10 minutes walking there is a giant shopping mall, a nice park along the river (actually 2 parks, we just visited another one Friday night), a city foods grocery store (with all imported brands) and plenty of coffee shops. Rich's office is very close by as well. This works out great because he is able to spend quite a bit of time with us in the morning before heading off to work for the day. The shopping mall nearby really is huge and has almost everything you could need (Best Buy, Toys r Us, grocery store, etc). It is probably dangerously close - especially considering everybody here delivers for a very small fee. Unfortunately all of the entrances have stairways so it is not very stroller friendly. Luckily Ang has taken well to the Baby Bjorn!!
Wednesday morning we witnessed a pretty cool event - there was a total solar eclipse that left Shanghai completely dark for about 5 minutes. Unfortunately the sky was very cloudy that morning so you couldn't actually see the eclipse (and I didn't have a pair of special glasses to view it with anyways). However, around 9:15am the sky started turning very gray. By 9:30 it was completely dark out, it looked like it was the middle of the night. Within ten minutes it was light out again. They say that this was the longest solar eclipse of our lifetime!
I am really enjoying our new home. It is so big!! It has been over two months since they packed up our apartment in New York and I'm having fun sorting through the boxes finding things that I had forgotten about. It is great that we have so much space for everything (I was feeling a bit claustrophobic in our New Rochelle apartment). A few fun facts about our home:
· No keys required! The entrance is password/handprint driven. There is a special code for the elevator that will get you to our floor and the elevator opens directly to our entryway. There is then another code/handprint for the door.
· Our washer and drier have Chinese on the dials. I had to pull out the guide book for the English translations. I still have no idea if I'm using them right. So far I haven't ruined any of our laundry.
· We have an awesome spa tub in our bathroom. I haven't tried it out yet because I haven't found the time to read the 360 page manual that describes how to use it. Yes, 360 pages of instruction on how to use a bathtub.
Angela is still working on adjusting to the new time zone and new bed. We have had a few rough nights with her but it hasn't been nearly as rough as I expected. Last night and tonight were significantly better so I'm pretty optimistic that we will have her back on schedule by the time this weekend is over. We did reach a new milestone this week - she rolled!! She went from her back to her front and seemed very surprised once she got there. Of course, she is not the biggest fan of tummy time so after resting for a few minutes she started getting pretty upset about being stuck there. Now we will just have to work on getting her to go front to back!
So far things are going great in Shanghai. Rich and I are so happy to be back living under the same roof and we are very optimistic that our time in China will be wonderful. I've managed to get a few pictures uploaded and will hopefully get more up here soon!
Miss you all!
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