Settling In

Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in posting. For the first few days we were so busy and jet-lagged I felt like every time I had a free minute all I wanted to do was sleep! Then, to my horror, we tried to get on facebook and our blog and found them both blocked! The government here tends to block certain sites after periods of political unrest, but oftentimes they are unblocked eventually. From what I understand though, most blog sites have been blocked since the events in Urumqi this past summer and there's no telling when/if people will be able to access them again. In the end we were able to buy some software to help us get around the block so here's to hoping it keeps working for us!

We're settling in pretty well after our first week here. We arrived on a pretty gray and polluted day so the city definitely didn't look great on first impression. Luckily since then the weather has been gorgeous-about 75 every day and very clear skies.

Our apartment building is in an area of Puxi that boarders the French Concession and is also pretty close to Andy's office . The apartment is gorgeous! Everything is brand new, and we have a lot of space. I'll be happy when our shipment arrives though, because even though the place is great it really needs some homey touches. Our building consists of "serviced" apartments, which means they are furnished, and also we have a maid come clean every day! Heaven.

We spent most of this week taking care of some administrative issues related to getting work/residency visas. It's also taken us a little time to get a handle on grocery shopping. There are a lot of markets in Shanghai that are fine for buying produce, but for meats and international foods most expats shop at certain specialty food stores. There's also the French store Carrefour here, which sadly doesn't sell many French things, but they do have a lot of good groceries at decent prices and best of all (for city dwellers!) they deliver!

Evelyn seems really excited to start at her new school tomorrow. We visited her class last week, and she was really upset when we had to leave. Andy actually picked the school when he visited Shanghai a month ago, and he definitely gets brownie points from me for his choice. It seems like a great place, and very importantly they have a big outdoor play area. One thing that I can tell is going to be hard to adjust to is that there are just no American style playgrounds here-i.e. with swings, slides, etc. Our building has a decent play area, and a nice lawn out back where the kids can run around. But playgrounds just don't really exist in the city. In Boston we would be heading into winter, so I guess our playground time there would be ending soon anyway!

I plan on taking some photos of our place, the neighborhood and Evelyn's school tomorrow, so we'll post those soon.