Settling In

I’m a day late on this post since Marty was setting up our WiFi last night, but I wanted to share about our day yesterday.

Yesterday we moved into our new place. When I say we, I really mean Marty made multiple trips back and forth between the hotel and our new place, hauling all of our stuff. My contribution was shopping for essentials (and a few non-essentials, too ; )

I went with several coworkers, and our first stop was IKEA, which was a treat because I rarely get to go there even in the States. It’s set up exactly like an American IKEA with the same products. They even have Swedish meatballs! : ) Of course, since it was a Saturday, it was incredibly crowded, which can be frustrating when you don’t know how to say “excuse me” in Chinese. Something to learn, for sure. I made a pretty good dent in our $3000 settling allowance, and still didn’t get everything on our list. I think we may try another trip today. I could use the extra set of hands – getting things from point A to point B by yourself and without your own car is difficult.

We also went to Wal-Mart later in the day. Oh. My. God. I’ve tried to refrain from swearing now that we have an almost-two-year-old who can repeat things, but there truly is no other word to describe the scene other than clusterf@$k! There were people everywhere! Adding to the congestion were the Wal-Mart employees. I kid you not, there are 4 employees standing in every aisle, waiting to assist you (in Chinese, of course). If you ever see a statistic showing unemployment rates, and China looks impressive because it has such a low unemployment rate, it’s because of Wal-Mart. I’m also pretty sure they work on commission because they’ll try to sell you anything in the aisle, whether you need it or not, or get you to upgrade to something more expensive (like the blow dryer I bought).  The Google Translate app was my best friend there since things were not necessarily logically organized. For example, the cat food is located with the toys. Go figure. Anyways, after another hefty purchase, some impressive cramming into a cab, and the generous help of our gate guard who helped me haul all of my stuff up to our apartment, my shopping was complete for the day. After putting things away the place is starting to look more like home. I’m eager for our shipment to arrive as it has most of our pictures and personal touches. Although that probably won’t be til mid-September. 

All that shopping worked up an appetite. We ordered our first Chinese food here in China. Delicious! Everleigh especially loved the noodles, which is good because she has been requesting them for months now, ever since Tolee and HoHo tried noodles in her Kai-Lan’s Trip to China DVD. ; )

Since there’s no food in our house, grocery shopping is on our agenda. Also on today’s agenda: a bags tournament with coworkers (or corn hole as they call it). Apparently there’s even a trophy involved. Sounds like a nice Sunday Funday!