Hello world!

Ok, I’ve gone and done it.  THE BLOG.  This feels quite momentous.  Perhaps trumpets should be sounding? Firecrackers shooting off our balcony?  After all, I put this together all by myself.  Yes, it’s true, the calendar is a day behind, but I’ll just pretend I’m still jet lagged.

Some of the things I’m going to be posting early on here may be redundant for those of you who are my friends on Facebook, but that’s because I’m only so clever and right now my head is about to explode with all the cleverness that’s coming forth from my brain. I actually asked Meredith’s culture training teacher if she wanted water this morning, in Mandarin! (Ni yao shui ma?) I may have staved off dementia by at least 2 years in the last 2 weeks.

Spring, the culture training teacher has told me the location of a wet market that seems to be only a 5 minute walk from our apartment! I’m so thrilled. I don’t think I have enough Chinese yet to actually purchase anything because everything is bargained for. I’m going to have to be a lot snappier on the uptake on recalling my numbers or the vendors will just get bored and go on to the next person.

Hopefully the wet market will expand our options of groceries because the local groceries stores are expensive if you are buying anything other than apples and bananas and oranges.  One store had a small bowl of cherries for $28.00 US!  Fortunately I took the time to do the math before I threw them in my cart!

This morning Andy left at 6:30am for the states.  Looking across to the other apartments we saw a man standing, bare chested, at his open window doing slow yoga-like stretches. Unlike American high-rise windows that will only open 2 inches so you can’t jump out the window, ours will open all the way, so at times the man would be bending all the way out 0f his window, 27 stories up!

Scenes from the street:

 

These guys can load an entire room full of trash(?) on their bikes, but I’m never coordinated enough to get the camera turned on in time so that I can take a picture of anything but the back of them as they shoot off into the distance. These bikes seem to be 3 wheelers but I’ve also seen similar loads on two wheeler.

Yes, people use bikes to transport stuff in a city where you have:

to name a very few of the high end stores that are within walking distance of our apartment. It was fun just to see the people dressed up on a Saturday night at the mall where the Dior store is located. (We were a bit underdressed.)

Saturday night the typhoon was coming in and it was incredibly windy, although pleasant outside.  Sunday morning brought more wind and periods with sheets of rain being driven horizontally past our windows. Then suddenly the sun was out, there were lovely tropical breezes and the humidity was the lowest that it has been since we’ve been here.

Monday was back to hot and humid, but there is often a breeze.  I’m finding it more comfortable than Taiwan when I would literally have moments when I thought I was going to suffocate if I didn’t get inside into some air conditioning STAT!

Here we are on Sunday.  It was the last time we were all going to be together for awhile as Mark had to go to Bejing and Andy was going to be leaving for the States before he got back. Ben says this picture makes us look like giants.  I say it’s because in China we are no longer in the land of giants, so now we don’t look like midgets.

The big news of the day is that the sea shipment has cleared customs.  We will take delivery on Saturday.

I will leave you with a picture of the flower arrangement that is by the elevators for our old apartment.  I consider these flowers a big bonus for where we’re living, because my flower arrangements look like something a monkey would do and these things are amazing and they make me happy.

So, the experiment begins.  I’ve never really thought I had enough to say to have a blog. I’m still not sure, but at least I’m living somewhere that provides a lot of fodder to feed the beast. And I still really don’t have a clue what I’m doing, so….be gentle with me!