Well, we've been in our new house for 3 days and in some ways it feels like we've been here a lot longer! I'm not sure if that is good, or bad, but that's how I feel! We are all suffering from jet lag at this point, so patience is hard to come by! I have been getting up with Cooper at least 3 times a night. A few times I have even caught him trying to crawl in bed with Eensie! It would have been endearing if it were not 2:00am. Last night Danny thought someone was at the door at 1:00am, turns out it was just Cooper knocking away on his door upstairs! Due to lack of sleep at night, Coop attempts to take nice long naps during the afternoon! Oh how I wish I could have one of those!
We have been very busy trying to get everything unpacked! As of yesterday, all of the suitcases were put away and all the boxes from the air shipment were empty! Now we just have to wait for the big arrival of our sea shipment which should be in the middle of August!
We are learning that for everything that is easy in China (ayi cooking, cleaning, doing laundry), there are about five things that are harder here! Just to give you a couple of examples, I got a digital alarm clock 2 days ago and we cannot set it correctly. All of the instructions are in Chinese and even the Chinese cannot figure it out! Then, I decided I needed to get a cell phone to be able to call our driver to pick me up, talk to ayi, or Danny during the day. I have no idea how 600 million (I just read this statistic) people in this country use cell phones. First you have to buy the phone, should be easy, right! Not quite, you have to go to the booth, decide the phone you want, take the phone booklet across the store to the cashier, pay, she stamps a bunch of paper, and then you go back to the booth, they check all of the stamps and then you get the phone. Next you must purchase your service. To do this, you must go to another building altogether. We had to find a specific China Mobile branch that would allow me to make and place calls outside of Tianjin! And the worst part is, I have to go in the branch and physically pay every month - have they not heard of on-line banking???
There is a funny part to the whole cell phone adventure! Dan and I have figured out that it takes about twice as long to do anything here, so we thought that it would be a good idea to leave El and Eens at home with our ayi while we got the phone! All was going fine until we get a call from our ayi. We can't understand her, so she puts Eens on the phone. He is sobbing away to the point that I can't even understand him. I finally get him to calm down and ask what was wrong. It turns out that ayi had given him a princess sippy cup and not a Thomas sippy cup to drink out of!! We got a much needed laugh out of that on our way home and for dinner, ayi was giggling and made sure Eens got a "boy" cup!!
Today we decided to take the kids to the water park in the city. It is a nice park with water features and a little amusement park. I'm not sure how safe all of the rides are, but El and Danny went on a log ride and had fun! We rented this little car that the kids could drive around the whole park! It was fun, but extremely hot!
We also had to get our US fix - a little McDonald's for lunch and TGIF for dinner is always good for the soul!
This last picture is of El toothless! She lost her second front tooth at about 5:00am this morning! She is very excited to see if the toothfairy will bring her US money or Yuans (Chinese currency). I'm pretty sure she'll get the Yuans - it saves the toothfairy a little money!
We continue to miss everyone a ton, but hearing from so many of you brings many smiles to our faces! We're off to church tomorrow, I'll let you know how that goes!
2 comments:
See, you are having adventures already! ;)
That is too funny about the sippy cup! Poor ayi. She must have been bewildered.
I like that pink car at the amusement park! I need one of those for here.
I remember the joys of overseas life---although England was more similar to America than China. The cashier at the liquor shop in our village had never seen a photo ID before! She thought my American drivers license was pretty cool. Got me wondering about how they card people then. I remember watching BBC News and laughing hysterically because they were talking about getting photos on their drivers licenses and what a big deal that was.
What a bummer about the hastle of getting a cell phone. I hope you get the hang of things soon!
I LOVE the sippy cup story!
I'm so glad to hear that you are now just a phone call away. It felt so unsettling to say goodbye the other day, especially when I realized I didn't have your new number!
You do such a great job of giving us snapshots of your days!
I'm sure you'll continue to have those stressful moments but lots of comic relief (which you already seem to have plenty of).
Love, Aimee
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