MBA Orientation Weekend

This weekend “Orientation Weekend” for the new MBA class – was I in for a treat! I left home Friday just before lunch and returned home late Sunday evening. It was a weekend of team building exercises for the new class (130 MBA and 65 EMBA students, broken up into 15 teams of 13 people) to get to know each other and work together so that hopefully we will be able to study together better. We all met up at Fudan University and were bussed out to the southeast side of Shanghai where, and I still can’t believe, Fudan University’s business school has its own hotel and conference center, complete with two full-size soccer stadiums – not just fields, stadiums. It is a brand new facility/hotel, that besides our group and the workers there, was empty. I was blown away by how much money this place must have been to build and how under-utilized it seems to be used. I thoroughly enjoyed being there, but at the same time I kept asking other classmates why Fudan University would build such a place and they all responded similarly, basically “Why not? Fudan University is very famous in China and has a lot of money.” Ok, wow.
This is probably a good time to talk about my university and my program. I am enrolled at Fudan University here in Shanghai, which is widely regarded as China’s #2 university, second only to Peking University (Beida) in Beijing.
The MBA program that I am enrolled in is a University of Hong Kong (HKU) program that is taught at Fudan in a joint collaboration to unite the two economic capitals of China. I will graduate with an MBA from the University of Hong Kong and will have alumni status with both universities. This HKU MBA is a significant program. It was founded in 2001 with Columbia University in New York and the London Business School. The curriculum is derived from Columbia’s and LBS’s MBA programs, meaning that my textbooks will be in English, but most of the instruction will be in Chinese (the interview for the program was both in Chinese and in English). The Economist this past year ranked this program #39 in its world rankings of MBA programs: http://mba.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=2002rankings. BusinessWeek and the Financial Times will not rank this program until it has been in existence for a certain period of time.
My intention is to say that this is one of the top MBA programs in the world and since this year I am the only non-Chinese person in the program, I will have frequent interaction with 129 of China’s top up-and-coming leaders. It is truly a privilege that I cherish.
Fortunately for me, my roommate was a person that I had met in early-July when I went to a Karaoke bar with a group of MBA students after registration day (see past blog entries for that experience). His Chinese name is Tony and lived in California for a couple of years when he worked for Intel. His English is very good and he kept me going in the right direction the entire weekend! I was happy with how much Chinese I know – I was very comfortable in casual conversations, but once the program directors shouted out directions for the various tasks/competitions we had throughout the weekend, I was lost. Tony and others were very helpful were very helpful by either telling me in Chinese that I understood or telling me in English. So it worked out just fine.
The one picture here is a picture of my friend Eric and me. Eric is a great guy, I mean a great guy. We met back in April at the MBA interview – we were in the same interview group for the English portion and we just hit it off. Since then we’ve kept in touch and have formed a good friendship. Fortunately we both made it into the program! He just became a daddy himself to a little girl – Morgan and I will have to have his family over for dinner soon.
Throughout the weekend there was a lot of socializing time where I was able to talk to a heck of a lot of my classmates (and mostly in Chinese!). Everybody seemed very excited to have an American Air Force pilot in the program with them. Perhaps the most fun I had during the weekend was when my team got together on Saturday evening to play cards – we played a game called “Assassin” which they told me was wildly popular in China. We played from 10:30 until 2:30 in the morning. It is less of a card game and more of a social game – cards are only used to assign roles: 2 assassins, 2 policemen, 1 judge and the rest are citizens. After the judge oversees the game and allows the assassins to kill one person each round and allows the cops to secretly guess one time each round who the assassin is. Then during the round people accuse each other of being the assassin and at the end of the round the living people vote off the person they think most likely is the assassin. The game goes until the assassins kill everybody else or they are caught. At any rate, it was a blast with lots of fun discussion – especially fun is at the end of the game when everybody then criticizes each other for what they should have done. It’s a riot! And it was also nice to be able to hear everybody talk, I picked up on so much and could just feel the rhythm or their speech and the structure of their sentences. At any rate, in the eight rounds that we played over four hours, I was the assassin five times in a row and a cop twice (definitely breaking the odds). The first time I was the assassin I got caught in the last round only because my chair squeaked when I selected my target, but then the next game I or my partner and I won. No other assassins who played won, so I then developed this mystique that the American military guy is a great assassin. The next day I had people come up to me from other teams and tell me they heard about how good I was at playing assassin!! Oh how fun, it really was.
Classes start on September 14th, so I still have a little bit of time left before I have to really start working. I’m looking forward to working with a great group of people!
Tim

Hangzhou Trip

I may get a few more pictures on later, but this is a good start. Tim even helped write this one a bit (you will notice he definitely helped on the pics as they are in the right order and not sideways). Thanks hun!

Quick side note...I love ice!!! I have always loved a good ice water, but I forgot how much I really love it. You see here in China not only do they not use ice, but they actually prefer their water warm. So I have just become somewhat accustomed to have warm water, I don't like it, but it is all that they have. Anyways, I finally found some ice cube trays and just finished the best glass of ice water ever!!! Just needed to say that.

So Hangzhou....we decided to only go to Hangzhou as the mountains were supposed to have lots of rain. So we left Tuesday morning and headed to the Shanghai train station. First of all the train station was amazing, it must be fairly new. We found the ticket counter, only to be told that the train we showed up for was already sold out. The next one didn't leave for 2 ½ hours, so we bought the tickets and found a place to eat lunch.

The girls played and then Adayla needed to go to the bathroom. We are thinking "couldn't be that bad" as this facility seemed very nice.

Tim took some pictures, I don't need to say anything else. I will let you know that people don't flush toilet paper and this is the men's bathroom......

Anyways, we loaded the train that was quite nice and headed towards Hangzhou. The fast train is only 1 ½ hours direct. We can handle anything for 1 ½ hours.
Hangzhou is a “small” Chinese city of “only” 2.5 million people (it would be tied for third largest in the U.S. with Chicago). Hangzhou is known for its beautiful scenery (lake, trees, mountains, etc) and beautiful women! Hangzhou served as the capital city of the Song Dynasty during the 12th and 13th centuries, when the emperors ordered that China's most beautiful women be brought to Hangzhou – centuries later those genes are still in the city! When Marco Polo visited Hangzhou during the 13th century, he remarked that “Hangzhou is the most splendid city in the world.”

We arrived and took a taxi to our friends house. After the train unloads there is a mad rush towards the taxi line. Have any of you read about the Beijing people having to practice waiting in line for the olympics?? There is a reason they have to do this and it makes us crazy. But it is just their way of life and they don't get mad at others for doing it. All I can say that our strollers are coming in very handy in “knocking” people back into their place. We put the girls down for their afternoon nap and then headed to the most famous part of Hangzhou, West Lake.

The only not as fun part is that there are lots of Chinese tourists there and therefore we become an attraction, again.

We headed back to our friends house. These are the same friends that stayed with us a few weeks ago, the ones that got sick at our house. Then our other Olmsted friends came and we got sick. Then we go to our friends house and I get sick again. We are seeing a pattern, every time with get together with fellow Olmsteders somebody is sick. So I have solved this....we just won't be hanging out with them anymore! Really they were great hosts and we enjoyed staying at their beautiful home. Adayla and Tally loved playing with their kids and their toys.

The next morning we walked around a different part of the lake and took a boat tour on a hand crafted wood boat.

The tour guide rows you around the entire lake. Quite different views than we had seen before. Thankfully it was a bit overcast and so it wasn't as hot as it was the next day. Tally loved the boat, she just wanted to only hang out the side. Her parents thought this wasn't a good idea and so she screamed for a good 20 minutes until we got off the boat. The tour was round trip with a stop at little store for shopping, we happily declined the return trip and continued around the lake.

This was early on in the trip, we have pics of Tally's grumpy moment, but we will keep that to ourselves.

This is not a pic of the big pagoda, just a cute one of Tim and Adayla.

Eventually we came to a big Pagoda right on the lake. We were able to go all the way to the top (it had recently been reconstructed and they added some elevators!) The top had amazing views of the lake, we loved this peaceful place.

What to you think of the two individual strollers? We decided to buy another single because the double jogger is just too big to fit in the taxis and so we can't take it out of town. This works and we don't have to carry one kid half the day. Now they only fight about who gets to sit in the new stroller.

Tally and her mom at the top of the pagoda.

We returned back to our friends for the afternoon nap and the guys took the kids swimming to give the moms a break. We enjoyed it while I “helped” fix dinner. She is Russian and we had some tasty Bierocks! It is good to get together with other scholars to compare notes and get some ideas off them. So we had quite a bit to chat about.

My friend took me shopping that evening and took me to where I could buy a cake for Morgan's birthday! There were no birthday cakes, per se, so I bought the next best thing – a cheese cake. It was a beauty. We brought it back and surprised Morgan with it. We sang “Zhu ni sheng ri kuai le” and Morgan blew out the candles with the girls' help. Like so many desserts in China, it looked so good, but they forgot to add the sugar! It was good, but was much better the next evening when we thought of putting Nutella on the cheesecake – Mmmm! That was Morgan's first of THREE birthdays here in China as this fantasy assignment comes to an end in September of 2009.

The next morning we headed to an ancient Buddhist Temple. The grounds were again amazing. And the inside was interesting to say the very least....

Tally and Adayla outside the temple taking a rest off their feet from all the walking....

Tally at this point had this monster mosquito bite on her face that made 1/2 of her face compeletly swell. She looks quite normal in these pics, but ahh, it was kind of scary.

Tim goes to buy the tickets to the temple and he comes out to a gathering crowd....

He knows where to find us.............

I think the best part of it all was at the end we found the closest thing to snow cones in China. It was crushed ice with a strawberry flavoring on the top. Usually you can find all sorts of food and deserts that look absolutely fantastic and then you taste it. As Tim noted above, the Chinese forget to add sugar to almost everything, but this was sweet, cold, and very refreshing.

We then headed back for another quick nap for the girls (see how our lives revolve around the naps), but that is just our life. We packed up, thanked our friends, and headed for the train station. We arrived with about 30 minutes to spare. We lugged all our stuff up the stairs and showed our tickets to some folks to find out where we needed to go. They started laughing at us. We had gone to the wrong train station. The other one was far away and there was no chance of making it. We would have arrived in Shanghai at 8 pm and decided that the later train was not an option. We called our friends to say we would be heading back to their place for the night. This is what we will now refer to as the Hangzhou curse. We are not as cursed as them or we would have made at least one visit to the emergency room. Tally's big mosquito bite that swelled half of her entire face was just her body reacting to the bite and after two days her face returned to normal. What the heck, we enjoyed another night with them. We made it back on the 11 am train and arrived home just in time for afternoon naps, this time for the entire family. Tim was also still able to squeeze in his now weekly massage.

Saturday morning we had Chinese class and Tim had Jane help him translate the information on his weekend get away. He will be joining his classmates this upcoming weekend for some get to know you and team building exercises. I will let him tell how it went next week. The rest of the day was quite lazy, we didn't even go outside. The girls were happy to be home and playing with their toys. We woke up and went to church today. A few exciting things happened. First, a Japanese family sang a beautiful song in Japanese that brought such a peaceful feeling with it. This family faithfully attends each week, though only the father speaks English. They are a great example to the rest of us. The second was that Tim and I found out we would be teaching the 3 years olds. They will be quite a handful, but I think we will like it. Lastly, another family just moved into our complex!! They have a 3 year old boy and one due in November. We are very excited! There are mostly Chinese in our complex and quite a few Germans. It will be nice for Adayla and Tally to have an English speaking padre (and nice for their mom too!)

That catches us up, we are off to bed!

Add a comment if you like....

I have figured out how to view my comments and actually view some of your blogs! Most blogs are blocked here in China and it does take a bit of work to be able to view others, but well worth it to see how our friends are doing! So feel free to say hi, if you are peeking in on us!

Today....really!

Today was busy. We were planning on leaving to go to Hangzhou this morning and staying the night with our friends there. And then heading up to Huangshan in Anhui province, a beautiful place in the mountains, but it looked like it was going to rain all week. So we axed that part of the trip and are now going to spend a few days in Hangzhou, just to get out Shanghai and see other parts of China.

Jane, our Chinese tutor, came today. I don't think I have said how fantastic she is, Tim and I both think she is great. Next time, I will have to post a picture of Jane the Tutor. We are so lucky/blessed to have found her. She speaks great English and her Chinese is decent (haha...she is Chinese). She motivates Tim to study and he continues to improve. The girls like her and she is just quite pleasant. I spend part of my time talking about Chinese culture, which is also helpful in understanding things here. She comes to our house twice a week, but we are thinking of having her come 3 times a week. This Friday we are going to take her swimming at our pool. Swimming for the Chinese is very expensive and so many Chinese have never even gone before. She is going to go shopping with us next week as well, it should be good times. We are just trying to convince her to not get a real job and just be our tutor! Seriously, things really seem to be just falling into place here in China and we are so grateful.

Adayla went to preschool and happily went in on her own. Sometimes she has a bit of a struggle, but I think it is mainly because the other kids are crying or have their grandparents with them. She loves it and still speaks mostly in English, but will respond as her teachers are speaking Chinese to her.

Tally is continuing to speak more and more, she is doing quite well at imitating words. She will say Ayi, Ayi! It is quite cute. Yesterday we went over to some friends from church who had a dog and Tally cried when it came near her. This little thing was all of 5 pounds, but it made me sad that she has already forgotten Binx. (Don't worry Binx, Adayla hasn't!)

One American living here in Shanghai told us this story and I see myself telling it a few years down the road about Tally. His little boy was at the table with some of his cousins back in the states and they were talking about their favorite foods. One kid was like, I love pizza. Another kid says, chicken nuggets are my favorite food and his boy chimes in, I like rice! Tally loves rice! Tonight at dinner she saw the rice and started going berserk.

This evening was the first time we let Ayi cook since the day of poisoning at Taco Bell Grande. Her food is yummy! We don't even bother to go try to eat Chinese food. It is impossible to just go and order off the menu. It just isn't good. We tried this on Friday night, we thought surely we can find something tasty....yeah right. We found a little place a few blocks away that brought a fondue bowl out filled with food. We saw something that looked good on another table and said we will take what they are having. They brought it out and we thought the meat looked “interesting” and found out we had just ordered frog. Tim said it tastes like chicken, but I didn't see him eat more than one piece and I didn't dare try it. We also ordered a shrimp pot and so we were able to eat a little bit, but mostly we will be dining within the walls of our own home.

A few more quickies about some things in China. A few weeks ago and I thought I need a haircut. There are a few places outside our complex and I thought I would try one. I go in, decide on the 80RMB stylist (prices vary by experience) and I went with the more expensive one. He was about $3 more than the other. I am thinking this will take 30 minutes to an hour. Ha! Two and a half hours later I left with a nice looking haircut. They washed and massaged my head, cut my hair, massaged my back, arms, hands, and neck, and then blow dried each hair (individually)! So when you come visit us in China, come needing a hair cut! It is a little more than $10 to have the whole experience!

Speaking of massage, Tim FINALLY made it there after almost 2 months here. I told him he can go once a week if he'd like, but he just hadn't gotten around to it. I am thinking he will be getting there nearly every week now! An hour massage is about $9.00. We just had to make sure it was a legitimate massage place....it was and he came home feeling pretty good.

As for our Saturday, it was another one of my “adventures”. Tim keeps agreeing to go, maybe one day he will learn. There are so many places to explore and I decided we would go to a flower and bird market that also sold artwork and furniture. We have to plan around naps and so decided not to go until late afternoon. As we packed up, Tim looks at the window and says it looks like a big storm is coming. I don't worry about these kind of things and say lets go. We took the metro there and when we exited the station it was POURING. And as Tim is saying “I told you so” he insists that we start walking to the market. Thankfully we did have two umbrellas, but they didn't do much good as I was also trying to push the stroller. Needless to say, Adayla and I were both soaked. Tim and Tally were somewhat protected under their umbrella, other than his feet. Anyways we arrived wet, but loved this little market! It had all sorts of pet turtles and fish, plants and flowers, and all sorts of things upstairs. Absolutely fascinating! We will head back next week to put in an order for some large plants! Pics later...

Last reason on why we love China for tonight. Our church here is a whole experience in its own. I think I have explained it a bit before, but here it is again in short. You must be a foreign passport holder or a Chinese married to a foreign passport holder. So we literally have people from all over: Germany, Argentina, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Phillipines, the State, etc. Most speak English either very well or just a little bit and so most of the meeting is in English. But many times prayers and during class as we read scriptures, it could very well be in another language. I just love how here we are people from all over the world worshiping Christ and God in the same way. The Spirit that is felt is just such a good feeling.

So until we return from Hangzhou and our first visit out of Shanghai.....

Christmas in Shanghai

I can't seem to catch up, so I am just starting from today with a few stories from the past. Today we had a good day. Studied Chinese, Adayla went to school, Tally had a few naps, the girls played together, Ayi cleaned and did laundry, and our stomachs still hurt a bit. We are still recovering!

The biggest news: WE HAVE OUR STUFF!!! And it is was like Christmas for the girls, except that Adayla knew what she was getting. A few days before we got our stuff, we told Adayla that all her toys were coming. She starting saying what she was going to play with, my red purse, my pink stroller, and my big baby (the smaller baby we brought with us). Tally and Adayla have played and played! It is SO nice they can finally entertain themselves for a few minutes. And we have our cereal!!!!! For those of you that have that care package started and don't know what else to add, I will get you my list really soon of a few things I wish I had brought!

That was all I wrote that day, I Tim and I have started watching movies about once a week after the girls go down. Well, we started the movie and I was going to type a bit during it...didn't happen.

Real reason I haven't posted sooner....

August 7th, 2007

So I was in the middle of catching up here and a bad case of food poisoning hit. We are now mostly recovered and it is only 3 days later. Though it took us a good week to actually get back to where we felt normal again.

Tally, I think, misses Adayla when she is at school. We play, but I know she would rather follow her big sister around. When we go to pick her up, Tally is so happy to have her back.

Last week, Tally had two more bottom teeth break through. She now has 8, 4 on the bottom and 4 on the top. Teeth just make her look like a little girl. But I guess since she doesn't have too much hair, it keeps her my baby! She is so strong willed. When we pray for the girls, we are grateful for their strong minds and we ask that they will continue to have such....I am thinking about quitting doing this. They do have strong minds and therefore like to think of themselves as independent when they feel like. When she decides she wants a toy, she lets Adayla know it. When she is grumpy, there is not much you can do to distract her. When she is mad whether you picked her up and stopped her from going somewhere she planned on or have her next to Adayla in the double stroller and she is not happy about it, she lets you know it. She knows that she can quickly give a good tug to Adayla's hair or mine. She will hit or scratch you, if she can't get to the hair. I know some of this is learned behavior, but I know she doesn't have hair that anybody pulls...she does this all on her own.

Tally learns so much from watching us interact as a family and the things that Adayla does. She knows before we have a meal, we always say a prayer. She happily keeps her arms folded throughout the entire prayer. But the funniest is that she likes to push the on/off button on the TV and she knows that she is not supposed to do it. The next time she did it, I said, Tally you go to timeout. She marched her little self right to the corner and put her nose in it. We tried to control our giggles. She stood there until I counted to ten. Then she came back out and played. I was so amazed that she knew exactly what to do, just by us having timeouts with Adayla. Next time I am going to take a pic!

Obviously she understands quite a bit. Every time she has a stinky diaper, I tell her “stinky” or “hen chou” and she grabs her little nose. We just think she is quite cute!

A few quick funnies:
When you go to a market to go shopping, the store attendants immediately shout at you in English to try to get you into their store. I don't like to just ignore them, but if you show any interest they won't let you go. I usually keep walking and will say, “bu yao, xie xie.” Which means I don't need, thanks. The other day we were with our friends and Tim was push Adayla in the stroller. I had already walked past when Tim came along. They started shouting at him, Adayla says on her own, “Bu yao, xie xie!” We cracked up!

We have mentioned that small kids her in China only have a slit in their pants. It is actually more than a slit, it is a big hole exposing everything. Quite frequently, they like to bring their little kids up to our little kids who are in the stroller. This past weekend, this lady brings her little grandson up to say hi to our girls. There he is looking at our girls, with his parts there for everybody to see. I know this is just life for them, but Adayla is going to start noticing the difference really soon. How am I going to teach these girl modesty when their are bums all over the place???

We had our 2nd set of visitors, another Olmsted family from China. They arrived Friday evening, after riding a fast train, with their 3 kids. Ayi cooked a Chinese dinner complete with homemade dumplings. I was going to help, but we got busy with other things that day. It rained hard both evenings they were here, so we mostly stayed inside and traded stories on how things are going. The older two kids are 11 and 9 and they were so good with Adayla. She loved just hanging out with them and they were very good to play games with her. They have a little guy around Tally's age. They were just happy to have toys.

Back to our weekend....
We headed out Saturday morning to see a bit of Shanghai. We took the ferry across the river and then headed down Nanjing Road over to People's Square where we went to a city planning museum. You can see the pics later. I didn't know how Shanghai really spreads out. (I don't know where else 22 million people would live, but I am in my little bubble of how to get places.) We are going to have to venture out to other places. We saw one sad part about the city...our views in 10 years will be completely gone, all we will have is big buildings to look at. So as long as it is in 5 years and not 2, we are good. But we noticed they just started a second building that will definite block our views :(
We then headed over to Taco Belle Grande to have a fabulous mexican dinner. They had chips, they had salsa, and they had cheese. Life couldn't have gotten better and it is was along 2 metro stops away! Until later that evening which led me to stop blogging and have a 3 day break...and even then we are feeling the best. So no more Taco Belle Grande.... : ( We learned all about la duzi and ou tou....

We had a great time with our Olmsted friends and look forward to a visit in Nanjing...once the days aren't quite so hot!
We were supposed to get our stuff today....we still don't have it. They called late Monday night to say it hadn't cleared customs yet. Bummer! But they called again today and set up for delivery tomorrow....we are keeping our fingers crossed.

I am hoping to improve my cooking skills while here, if not we won't starve to death, but I have the time and there isn't much else to eat other than Chinese food. I actually like it, I have to look hard to find other things to eat, but it gets us eating things outside the box!

Adayla on the other hand is a real concern for her teachers. We feed her breakfast before she goes to school (of course) and then they feed them a snack of cookies. Cookies are what they call them, I would probably call them sugarless and therefore flavorless tummy fillers. Adayla eats them and then the teachers wonder why at 11:00 am she is not hungry for lunch. First is is Chinese food, things that she is not familiar with and because she is not hungry.

I am going to bed now, more later.

Adayla's First Day at School

My sweet little girl now goes to school all by herself. I am not quite used to it, but she seems to be doing well. Here is here first day of preschool (though the Chinese call it kindergarten) in Tim's words:


I got the chance to go with Adayla to her first day of Kindergarten today! It was so much fun to watch her - she's a big girl, especially when I see her wearing her "bei bao" (backpack). Class is from 0800-1145 and includes a snack and a lunch.There are 10 kids in her class with two dedicated teachers and several floating teachers. Today there were only 8 kids in class, and Adayla was the only non-Chinese. Since today was the first day, they asked that one parent stay the entire day to help their child transition. Adayla was the only child without a grandparent there. There were only two parents there as one child had a grandparent and a parent. In China it is customary that the parents give their children to the grandparents to raise so they can go out and work.

Here's the funny for the day: So this young Italian guy comes in to teach the kids English with his heavy Italian accent. The kids are sitting around him and he just starts talking English, no Chinese at all, and says "My name is Julio, what's your name?" He did this to the first three kids and made them all cry. He finally got to Adayla and said "You must speak English, what's your name?" and Adayla told him. He then asked where she was from and she said "America." He then told her "you need to help me teach your friends English, ok?"He then played some silly song that was in English, then he said, "Now we're going to learn the alphabet." He held up a sign that had the letter "A" on it, with a picture of an apple with its name. He told everybody that this was the letter "A" and had the kids repeat it several time, which they did. He then said "A is the first letter of this, do you know what it is?" No response, then he asked Adayla, "Can you tell everybody what this is?" and she firmly responded, "Ping guo" (apple in Chinese). It made all the adults laugh - I was cracking up! A little later he got to the letter "B" and did the same thing with it. There was a picture of a baskeball with the word "ball" written next to it. He asked his English-speaking helper again to tell everybody what it was and she again clearly stated "lan qiu" (basketball in Chinese). Again, everybody laughed - I was dying laughing!He had one more sign, this one for the letter "C." I couldn't wait for this, as it had a picture of a cat and I knew Adayla knew this in Chinese as well. But this guy wised up and just told everybody that "C" was in the word "cat." Oh too bad, I wanted to hear Adayla tell him it was a "mao."

Me again, I like hearing Tim's perspective on things. One of the many great things about this program is that he gets to do many things he normally is just not around for. And the girls are getting quite used to him being around!!

August 4th

Once again, I am falling behind on my posting to my blog and not just typing it in word....so here it is....

August 4th, 2007
How is it August already? Time is going by way too quickly and you would think that I could find time to update this everyday, but..... We are still settling here and waiting for our household goods, hopefully they said this Tuesday!! Ayi will take care of the kids and I will put the things away. It has been almost 3 months since we left our stuff, I don't remember what I packed and what I stored. So if she puts it away, I might not even know that I even have it!
We have been quite busy the last 3 weeks. We had some exciting things happen. Let's see what I can remember. We had our 1st house guests about two weeks ago and our 2nd house guests this weekend. The first ones were just supposed to have dinner with us and then go home, but ended up staying the weekend...it was a long one for them and if you know our friends in Hanzhou, they can give you the whole story. It goes something like this, emergency room visit for stitches, train tickets all sold out to go home, and then ended with a case of food poisoning. We enjoyed having them and say again, anybody is more than welcome to use us for a place to stay! We look forward to visiting them and staying at their house, once the weather cools down.

We have realized some things here in Shanghai and everyday we learn a new and better way to do something. For example, taking a taxi, which is really not that expensive. About 5 bucks gets you about anywhere you need to go. The only problem is that the girls, namely Tally, HATE taxis. Okay, it is not the taxi that the hate, or the seat belts in them (that's right, they don't have them), but how they must act while inside them. The drivers are surrounded by a big plastic shield, that would make a perfect drum for a 1 year old right? She wants to bang and is quite frustrated that we are restraining her to our laps or beside us. Then she would love to crawl on the ground, which as mentioned previously, not going to happen because of all the funk. So we take a taxi to church it takes anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes, depending on traffic, and she cries a good part of the time. So we are finding that the subway system is not only really cheap, but our kids are actually happy most of the time and a millions times safer! I think the constant changing of people gives them a different focus. We hardly take taxis altogether anymore. We are walking much more and it may only take a few minutes longer if going across town. But we are much happier as the kids are quite happy!

Pics Alas....

Here are a few pics, in random order....there is a better way, I am just too lazy to figure it out. We have high speed internet here, at least that is what we pay for, but most of the time it is about the same speed or slightly faster than dial-up. So I thought it would take to long to add pictures, it did, but is wasn't as bad as I thought....maybe I'll do it again before Christmas!

Tally walking (again I think I need to edit BEFORE I add it, maybe next time)

Tally and Adayla playing at a play land in a children's market. You pay 2 bucks and they can play as long as they like. There were balls, swings, you name it. It was all great until Adayla and her Chinese friend were playing in the balls. The little girl stopped and Tim saw pee-pee coming down her legs. We realized this was not the first time.....

Playing in their new house!

Dancing in the big mall together. We love watching them play together. Adayla just loves Tally and Tally loves her big sister. Tally loves to just grab onto Adayla and hold on while Adayla walks, that is probably what was going on here....

A night on the town...

Adayla's first day at preschool, she LOVES it!

Ayi with Tally
Adayla took a picture with this girl, Adayla was happy only if she got to see the pic afterwards.

So we STILL don't have our household goods and therefore only a few toys, so we went to Toys R Us to let them enjoy some. It looks like we were the only ones there, but there were about 50 other kids playing too.

Adayla Big Day - Her first day at her new school!

Adayla was actually quite happy here. Tally loved to push and then they would switch.
A stranger wanting a pic with Adayla. Since we are in China, this is okay. If we were in the States, I would think he was a sicko....

Hot, sweaty day the with girls seeing the sights of Shanghai. We are slowly getting used to the heat, okay, not really! We can't wait for September to come!

Having a Ayi to cook is great, we said she could cook whatever and we would eat it (at least try it.) Here is our fish for the night with eyeballs and all, thankfully she already took out his guts! The fish is actually quite tasty, but it has too many bones. So we told her we prefer not to eat it. At least we know by looking at this what it was. A few weeks ago, we had some Tofu and Chocolate pudding looking stuff....so Tim tries it. I hadn't yet. He thought it had a "interesting" taste and so he asked what it was. She replies ya xue....what? Ya as in duck as we are flapping our wings and she says yes. Xue....we didn't know. She started talking about Adayla and how she went to the doctor. She then squeezes her finger. Tim went to get his Pleco (his palm pilot dictionary) and confirmed the fear...Blood. Together Tim had just eaten Duck Blood! Note to ourselves....ask BEFORE eating! Tim says, "But I never would have tried it if I had asked." Morgan says, "DUH!"