This is for kids??

I remember spending quarter after quarter after quarter for those cheap stuffed animals in these crane machines... Is this to promote parental participation?? Teddy bears and cigarettes???

The Saga of the Great Oven Escapade

So, thinking that we needed to be able to bake things, we set out to buy a counter-top oven.  In the expatriate area of Jinqiao ("Jin-chow"), there is a shopping mall known for its selection of goods aimed at pleasing us expats.  At the Carrefour, we found the oven for us and maneuvered it home in an Ikea bag.  It barely fit in the backseat!

Imagine our surprise when we got home, opened the box and found two smaller boxes!  

Yes.  Two SMALLER boxes.  Of smaller toaster ovens.

Commence the banging the head against the wall.  

The following weekend we lug it back to Carrefour (along with a note in Chinese, written by a kind Mandarin teacher, explaining the mistake).  

Here's the picture of us returning it:

I swear, they had to have called every worker to come over and see two boxes in one!  The novelty!  Really, it was an easy trade (for an even bigger box, mind you).  And we definitely opened it to check before we left for the 20 minute cab ride home.  

Look at him all happy in our blue kitchen!  :o)

The goal this weekend is to find the ingredients for some cookies.  Wish me luck!!

Cirque de Michael Jackson

Most of us newbies decided to go for a night on the town to see the Cirque du Soleil Michael Jackson show. Because there were eighteen of us, the school let us have a bus and driver to take us to dinner, the show, and then anywhere else.

Silliness!

The Mercedes Benz Arena...

The cool building across the street!

The whole row of us.  And yes, there were a million light-up gloves. 

The stage. 

About the show, it was very entertaining, but not what one would expect from Cirque du Soleil.  Great dancing, way cool costumes, but I think I was hoping for more amazing acrobatics.  Look at me being picky... Sheesh!  

All I wanted to do was let you know that we had a very fun night. :o)

XOXO

Food time!

A blast of food:

One street up from my school is a "food street." Every few feet is another grill attached to the back of a bicycle or a tarp on the ground with produce or a kitchen/scooter contraption that will make you a noodle bowl on the spot with the meats and veggies of your choice.

While this is going on on the actual street - along with pedestrians shopping, mixed in with the normal two-way traffic of cars and scooters, interfered with by the "every-which-way" of normal bike traffic - the tiny store fronts behind them offer quite the plethora of goods and services.  There are a ton of restaurants that have two tables inside.  There's a soy sauce store that has earthenware jars and urns of every size filled with different soy sauces. Is it weird that the jars kinda reminded me of Egyptian burial jars?? Except that the man would open the top and ladle out the soy sauce into the waiting bottle. There was also a store selling live fish out of little basins on the ground.  You could pick which one you wanted, watch the woman expertly remove the head of this chosen fishy, and take your plastic baggy of fish to a nearby food vendor for a quick meal.

Mark and I were not so adventurous.

Maybe on our second trip down this street.

We actually didn't make it too far because it was so overwhelming, all the things to see, vendors shouting their products, and interesting smells with each step.

We opted for a quick grill of veggies, tofu, mystery sausage, mystery meat, and some unknown orange lumps (turned out to be a glutinous, sticky, sweet bread). Just enough for a light dinner.  All this for 8 RMB, or about $1.35.

Here she is!  (And you can see the soy sauce shop behind her)



And hey! Even better news: no food poisoning! Yay!!

Also, in case you were wondering, this is what our soda cans look like here:



Pull tabs!  This was taken at a Korean BBQ. It left us to sticky-fingered to take pictures. :o)


Can't wait to take you fooding!

Only in China

Just a brief story: 

The other night, I went for dinner and girly shopping with two local gals from school. Since I'm half Chinese, they decided to take me to a Chinese place "because I know." Through a round of appetizers, where they were complimenting me on my chopstick skills, a peanut dish came up.  Think cool peanut with a light dressing and a few extra veggies (not roasted peanuts - more like raw...maybe boiled?).  One of the girls asked if I was allergic. "Nope! No allergies. Just cats."  Cue a very surprised reaction from the gal. "Oh!! You tried before???"

It took a few rounds to figure out she thought I meant eating cats, not cat dander. 

Cue relief face on her part.  

Playing Dress-up

So one of the neat things about Shanghai is going to all the different markets.  These aren't little stores of a specific type something.  These are multi-floor centers of specific industry.  There's a couple plant markets, there's an electronics market, and there's the fabric market.  Here's just a glimpse of how it works.

First you find a stall that has something that you're interested in.  Then you point it out and how you'd like to change it.  Then you haggle the price down, pick the material, and get measured while the lady working there fans you with a magazine.  See her in stripes?

Go back a week later to pick it up and enjoy the results!  

I'm thinking it'll be a good work dress.  The kind of grey/khaki that's easy to color-fy with accessories.  

$30 well spent, I say. 

XOXO

Back to School, Back to School

So this was our first week with kids!  By week, I mean three days.

It didn't start well on Monday though.  It started with finding out that my hard drive full of all of my teaching material is most likely dead - though the super-duper tech solutions department is trying some dissection...  Cross your fingers!!  Then, my stomach decided to show me what our newbie info packet meant by "intestinal distress."  Then when I was leaving school at 8 PM with two bags and my arms full of more things, the cab I got into kicked me out.  And the next two drove by waving!  So then I had to walk home in the heat, just to ride back two hours later to try conference calling with our insurance back in the US and then emailing the fathers and more bank/insurance people to make sure everything is ok again.  Yep, we were at school until midnight because our internet was down at our apartment.  :o(

As Alexander would say, "I'm moving to Australia."

We're all good now, don't worry.

The lobby.  To the right, the offices; Pre-Kinder and Kinder down the hall to the left. 

Go up those stairs in the lobby (stairs are inside those glass doors) to the cafeteria.
The hallway on the other side are the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade classes.

Up the stairs again to the 3rd floor and you can get to the walkway to my classroom.  This is from that walkway.
You can see the classrooms on the left.  Third floor has the 4th and 5th grade classes as well as a few apartments.  The fourth floor is all apartments.  This is the courtyard/playground.  The building on the right is the gym/stage.  The floor of that starts at the floor of that protrusion.  Under it is more play area (for shade!) as well as the ballpit that's the darker window towards the back.

Tuesday was getting ready for the open-house.  People kept saying that no one would come visit (since my classroom is a bit isolated), but I had a nice steady stream of visitors all 3 hours!  Everyone was very friendly.

I had this panicky realization that I've only ever had one "Very First Day at School." Somehow that translated into my brain as "I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow" with a very healthy serving of "I have to do all of these projects for the first day of school."  My first day ended up being the product of three hours of sleep, but it was one of the best days ever!  I loved it!  The kids were fascinating with all of their accents and names - though I'm going to have a rough time remembering Seo-Yi, Yuahnn, Hyeong-Rak, and Ji-Woo all in one class!  :-\   I don't mean to!  They were so enthusiastic.  Weirdly, the hardest part so far is trying to figure out how to do dances and games and parts of music with only 13 kids...

18 keyboards, anyone?

The dark smudge are the three racks of guitars. 

Man, I'm excited about what this year will be like!  On the other hand, it's very weird to be without people and things that you get used to for five full years.  I've never worked without you guys!

Ach well, we'll meet again. :o)

Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil Saturday night!  There are us 18 newbies going.  Good thing we're taking a school bus!

XOXO

It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's me on the roof!

So the school threw a staff welcome back to school shin-dig.

"Oh, that's nice," you say.  "Au contraire, mon ami," says I.

Let me present you the roof-top club of the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Shanghai.  How downtown?  Check it, yo:

BAM!  Right there. 

Night!  

I could get used to a view like this!

Certain Shade of Green

That's for any Incubus fans, but doesn't have a lot to do with this post. :o)  

My principal mentioned that she loved to go to this plant shop, and since we had free time yesterday afternoon, she organized one of the buses to take whoever was interestd. Surprise! Everyone went. 

Think multiple stories...gigantic greenhouse with hundreds of separate stalls... gazillions of plants. We didn't make it very far in before finding what we wanted.  Since the bus didn't have any extra seats, we decided to buy from the same place to split the cost of delivery.  

Here's what I got:

Spider plant, snake plant, bromeliad.

I don't know #1, I don't know #2, I don't know #3, and a big jasmine plant that has way more than 5 petals a flower.  The green part of this jasmine plant is over two feet tall!  What a big'un!

I also got pots for them all...

Then, I got them repotted.  Notice that I added a pretty orchid while I was waiting...

Plus delivery.

All for 315 yuan.

How much is that, you ask?  According to my handy-dandy currency converter, that's $51.44.  

Holy moly!  That's like a plant and a pot normally!  I think I'm going though sticker shock...

Now let's just see how long I can keep them alive!  Any suggestions???

XOXO

Quick Pics

Just a few interesting sights.  Enjoy!

This is a dragon fruit.  It's very mild in flavor, and the texture is a bit like a soft melon (without being icky). Good with a spoon!  :o)

 

The day after we landed, we went to Ikea to feed ourselves.  This was the line to get into one of the sides of the buffet line.  Yowzers!  A lot of people wanted meatballs!

 

From our main balcony into what we think is a military school across the street.  We don't know though....  They play some drums at the main gate sometimes...????  We'll keep you updated! 

 

 



 

Day trip to the Puxi side of Shanghai.  Puxi, pronounced "poo-shee," means "west side."  We live in Pudong, "east side" and take a guess on the pronunciation.  This picture is from the famous part called the Bund, which is just a bend in the river in the middle of the city.  This is the Huangpu River.

 

 



 

This is called the Oriental Pearl Tower.  It used to be a radio/TV tower, but not anymore. 

 

 



You can see the "can-opener building" and then the building to the right under construction is the Shanghai Tower which is supposed to have 120-something stories. 


Neat, huh??


On our picture to-do list:
-tour of our apartment/complex (We get our new couch tomorrow!!)
-pictures from our balconies (waiting for a clear day...)
-picture of our schools (Mine has a ball pit!  A staff meeting in the ball pit needs to happen!)
-ummm  everything?????

Update: The health check was wild.  There were about 8 different rooms with a nurse/doctor in each: one to have you change into a robe, one to take your blood pressure, one to draw your blood, etc.  There was also another lady that would tell you to wait here or scoot down to there.  Can you imagine taking the blood of a new person every 3 minutes?  They were that stream-lined about it.  Apparently,  this is good enough for the government for the rest of my life.  Woohoo!

Xiajian!
XOXO!

Health Class

Today is our government-mandated health check. We couldn't eat anything past 8 last night, so we had a water party. :o)  Luckily we have an hour-long bus ride to make us good and grumpy!  I'll report back.

Have a wonderful day!

Finally! Almost...

Hi hi hi hi hi hi!  I'm finally posting!  It's been interesting, let me tell you...  So it's called the "Great Firewall of China," which is a pretty catchy name for being what it is.  Long story short: I think I'm all set.  I hope.  

Highlights of our first week in Shanghai:

- Chinese beds are as hard as concrete.  With rocks in it.  (Whatever that means!)  Word of advice: it helps to fit your shoulder bone and pelvis in between the springs.  

- Eating can really be a hobby.  Take today for instance... Breakfast: Something like a Chinese hotdog.  A thick tortilla thing, fried egg, veggies, hotdog, condiments.  Surprisingly tastier than it sounds.  Lunch: Turkish restaurant for donar kebabs. (Like sandwiches.)   Dinner: meatballs at Ikea.  And I promise that it's the last time we go to Ikea because three times in a week is definitely too much... ;o)

- Wonky translations will always crack me up.  Check out my new toothbrush holder!

- I have a new fondness for showers.  Lots of showers.  My head of schools keeps saying that it's the hottest it has been since "they've" started keeping track of the weather.  While I'm not "big in Japan" (or whatever those t-shirts say), I do enjoy multiple wardrobe changes a day.  Luckily I have my own washer!   

- I am so stinkin' excited about my new job!  Everyone has been wonderful.  Us newbies have really bonded, and the administration has been taking such good care of us.  Mark and I feel very comfortable and supported while we figure things out.  And fed.  :o)   Check out the elementary gym/stage:

(Sorry about the iPhone picture!)

There's always more to tell you about, but I'm quite wearied.  It's just been nonstop!  You'll have to forgive me for ducking out early, but I'll talk to you soon.

XOXO!