Our Family Blog – Mike, Louanne, Nadia, Amelie, & Dani
At Brandi’s request I took some shots of the apartment after my cleaning fest. Overall you can just envision the place as a narrow rectangle. You come in the front door and everything branches off the hallway.
Here is our room – notice the new blue quilts…..they are so soft and comfy.
Here is Nadia’s room.
The bathroom.
Each side of the kitchen.
The hallway and the balcony/clothes drying area. Lots of people around us use this area for storage and you can see the boxes stacked to the ceiling.
Once Nadia was up from her nap on Sunday we headed out to explore, but the biting wind was terrible and we didn’t want to keep Nadia out in it. We headed over to the school to check things out and it was open with some students in there doing martial arts and playing ping pong. The school is very nice and we saw Ethan and met his wife and son. They lived in America for 3 years and now he is the VP of the school. He told us that they are trying to cater mostly to western students.
We also made another run to the store for some odds and ends including a broom, mop and various cleaners. Then I went into super scrubber mode and cleaned the living room and kitchen like a maniac. Mike said these floors probably haven’t been this clean in months 🙂 But I was grossed out from all the dust and stuff caused by the pollution – it just gets all over everything here. And Nadia will be spending most of her waking hours in the living room and I wanted it to be clean. I am going to attack the rest of the apartment Monday after class.
I have included various shots from our area. On the bottom floor of the Microsoft building there is a Starbucks, no surprise there. In the school there is a Subway franchise – I wonder what sort of “interesting” meats they have to offer?
Here you can see Nadia has taken over the living room.
Blue skies in Beijing. Shocking!
The entrance to our apartment building.
Our building. Number 9.
A couple more shots from the balcony.
The pizza place and some very hard workers carrying all kinds of items from pineapples to recylables.
2 views from our balcony at sunset.
This photo is the view from our little enclosed balcony/clothes drying area of the apartment. It was taken as the sun was coming up on Sunday morning.
Okay so with some sleep Saturday arrived and we all bundled up and headed to the Lotus Center across the street from our apartment. There was American pop music blaring from one of the office buildings and as we were getting ready to cross the very busy street where traffic laws don’t apply, “Staying Alive” came on. I started laughing and told Mike it was the perfect song to be playing as we took our lives in our hands! As our guide told us on the adoption trip, “If you need to cross the street, get behind a Chinese person. If they move, you move. If they stop, you stop. This will save your life.”
The Lotus Center is a very big multi-level mall and grocery store. There is a Watsons Drug store on the bottom floor that reminded me of CVS. There were also multiple restaurants on the bottom floor and a bunch of shops and kiosks. “Learn English for 8 yuan a session!!!” and those sorts of things. We moved up the second floor and started shopping. For housewares we got another quilt and some pillows for our bed. Towels and wash cloths and a tub to give Nadia a bath in. For the kitchen we got 2 each of forks, knives and spoons, plus 3 bowls. Assorted cleaning supplies. Assorted snacks including Ritz (which are better here – light and fluffy) and of course what I have decided is our China tradition – Snickers. They had all kinds of yogurt including what looked like Dannon in Chinese. They have some wild flavors, but I just got Nadia the old strawberry standby. I think she might like to try Kiwi and a couple others, so I will pick them up while we are here.
We ran all that up to the apartment and then came back out in search of food. We ended up at the Pizza Company which is a sit down restaurant. We learned last time that the Chinese are serious about their pizza and it’s a big deal. We got some garlic bread and a couple of pizzas and headed back to the apartment because they were coming to set up our Internet access. The Internet guy fried our wireless router that we brought so we could use both laptops. We were trying to tell them we had a transformer and adapter and he just plugged it into the wall and it started to stink and by then it was too late 🙂 The man from the school ran over to their offices and got us one of theirs, so now we are all set up and good to go.
There was a little boy who looked about 7 years old at the pizza place waiting on a to-go order with his dad who was fascinated by us and Nadia. He kept staring at us and making comments to his dad. We handed the father the little laminated cards that I made up and they read it (it has a family photo on one side and then some information about our trip on the other side in Chinese). Then the little boy tried to talk to us and his dad said, “Speak English.” The little boy wanted to know if Nadia could speak English and we said yes and that we were also going to teach her Chinese. He was a really cute kid and obviously thought that we were quite the oddity, but that Nadia was really cute.
We put Nadia down for a nap at 5pm and thought she might sleep a couple of hours, so we decided to nap too. At midnight we woke up and she was still asleep, so we woke her up, fed her and forced ourselves to stay up until 3 am even though we were all fighting the jet lag. We got back up at 6 am and are all feeling a lot more alive. So for those who wondered if our sleep experiment from home worked, I would say so. We all need to move about one more hour and we will be perfectly on China time. Go Mike with the great idea!!!! The shower set up is just fine. The water gets really hot and I am sure by the end of the month we will have our speed racer technique down to perfection.
After Nadia gets up from her morning nap we are going to head back to the store for some other odds and ends that we realized will be helpful to our stay. It’s funny how you just get used to all your “stuff” at home that you have accrued over time and when you don’t have basic items it throws you for a loop. We are going to go out exploring today and I will get lots more photos of the area that we will be living in for the next month.
It’s a little surreal that we are back in China, but so cool! School starts for us in the morning. Mike will be going from 8 am – 12 pm. The tutor will be coming to the apartment for me from 10 am – 12 pm. Then Mike will be working every night from the apartment and he has a nice little set up in our bedroom to be closed up in. I am planning on taking Nadia on walks and to the park and stuff in the afternoon so we can explore and leave the apartment quiet for Mike.
And we even have our luggage! I will post in more detail later and include photos, but as we were on the way to the airport we got an email from the school saying they upgraded us to a 2 bedroom apartment because they “thought our little girl might like her own room.” WOO HOO! Then we got to the airport and United DIDN’T charge us the upgrade fee for Nadia’s child’s ticket to go Economy Plus. WOO HOO! So I was feeling good at 5 am and ready to catch our first flight. Both flights were uneventful and I was very pleased with the service we got on United and so, so, so happy that we went through Chicago and cut out the travel time that we went through using China Southern through Los Angeles (like we did for the adoption trip). 3 people from the school came to meet us at the airport including the VP which was nice. They got us up to the apartment and Nancy took me down to a little store right by the entrance for bottle water and “Coca Cola Light”. Then she pointed out to us the major grocery store/mall that is just across the street. She showed us where we were on a map and then asked us if we needed anything else right then.
Now by the time we rode through Beijing traffic to the apartment we had been traveling for about 26 hours and were zombies. Nadia had only slept about 5 hours in the last 24 and we were just beat. The apartment is a good size and it’s fabulous to have a separate room for Nadia. But as we were trying to get her to sleep and get a little settled we kept finding things it didn’t have and that I didn’t pack like towels, toilet paper and the like. It said it came with basic kitchen utensils and here is what the kitchen had:
That’s it. No silverware (or chopsticks if you like), plates, cups, bowls or anything else. I would have laughed, but I was so worn out I wanted to cry. But instead we decided we would hit the store in the morning. We fed Nadia and got her in bed where she promptly threw up. All over her baby, blanket, the crib sheet and Taggie. So we got her up, changed her and the sheet (thank goodness I brought 2). And finally got her back to bed and ourselves into bed.
We both really wanted a shower, but as I said, there were no towels. And there isn’t really a shower……there is a shower head handle that just sprays out all over the bathroom. No joke, all the cupboards are up high in there (taller than Mike) so they don’t get wet. Mike says we are going to be having Navy showers for a month. Hee hee. But it’s got a western toilet and I am one HAPPY camper about that. I can handle all the rest like brushing our teeth with bottled water.
This apartment is very nice and GIANT by Beijing standards. I would say it’s the size our old apartment minus the extra bathroom and walk in closet for those of you who remember that place. There are tons of things very close to us and the school is in walking distance. Our apartment is on the 14th floor and everyone has been really friendly so far. We have gotten quite a few double takes, but that’s to be expected. A man on the plane with us told us afterwards that Nadia was such a good baby they didn’t even realize she was there. He said that he is used to parents going home with Chinese babies, not coming back. The man in front of us on the flight also said she was so good and quiet and thought it was really neat that we were bringing her back to China already.
Now I am off to finish unpacking to help us get settled in for our month long adventure. I will tell you more about today in the next post and include some photos.