Adventures By Design

It’s been a busy couple of days. We’ve been trying to get our apartment marginally organized before the painters come, and packing and preparing for our trip to Canada.

Inca isn’t coming with us to Canada this time.

Ok, so we lasted only a week with our “Month of Blogging”, but it isn’t our fault! For the past couple days we have been busy moving to our new apartment, and we just got our internet back up.

Our old apartment was too cold in the winter, especially for a little one. We didn’t particularly want to move, but our landlady refused to upgrade the heater, so we felt we didn’t have much choice. We found a great apartment that our friend Emma was living in (she’s now moved to Bali). Emma had spent a lot of effort personalizing the apartment, and we saw the potential that it has. Although the location isn’t a three minute stroll from Mark and Lyndal’s apartment, it is a three minute stroll to Ryan and Maggie’s (and their dog Button). It’s further from some shopping areas, but more central and closer to many restaurants and coffee shops (i.e. Starbucks), and Jin Ji Hu (Jin Ji Lake). We think the location will be nicer for Gin next year when she can go for a walk with the stroller (er, and baby).

Yesterday, I continued our redesign (or at least revision) of our blog. There are a bunch of things I want to change, although I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to do so. I wonder if this sudden need to make our blog more user family-friendly is just an online version of the fabled Nesting Instinct.

Late Saturday evening I started fasting.  On Sunday morning we took the train to Shanghai and arrived at the hospital where we immediately checked into our room.  At first I wasn’t sure if this was really our room, or just a holding area.  The room was rather nice: leather couch, coffee table, private bathroom with towels, toothbrushes, and soap.  It’s nicer than a lot of hotels we’ve stayed in.

As some of you know I have been entertaining an unexpected and unwanted guest in my left nostril. Nicknamed Norm, short for Abnorm, I noticed a small lump in my nose several weeks ago. At first I thought it was just a scratch and would go away on its own. But after a few days, it continued to grow and worse yet, it would spontaneously bleed. This was right at the start of our trip to Egypt, which was not an ideal location to hunt for a reputable international clinic (to be fair, we never actually looked, since in our experience the Egyptian approach to honesty and integrity do not inspire any confidence).

We haven’t been writing on the blog much, and we’re sorry, but we’ve been very busy and school is pretty exhausting so far. We’ve been here for about two weeks now, though it feels like two months most of the time! In all that time we haven’t had an actual day off yet, so we are really looking forward to the weekend. Hopefully we can sleep in a bit (if Inca doesn’t jump on our heads too early) and do some exploring around our new city. We don’t have much housework to catch up on because we’ve hired an ayi (literally ‘auntie’) who comes in to clean, do our laundry, and take Inca for a walk everyday. She comes in the morning, so we don’t actually see her or talk to her, but she’s good at her job. Hopefully Inca will get used to her soon. So far when we get home from school in the afternoons Inca freaks out and jumps all over us. We figure she’s trying to say: “That weird lady came again, and she moved things, and made the house smell funny, and she put my leash on me and took me outside…. I was afraid she wasn’t going to bring me home!!” or something like that.

We’re pretty impressed with Suzhou so far, although we’ve mostly just seen it out of the school bus’ windows! The part of the city that we live in is well-planned with tons of green space, which will be wonderful when we get Inca out a little more. There’s lots of space in our apartment complex too, including a little fenced in area where Inca’s been able to get off leash. However, the first time Ric took her there to play Frisbee, he accidentally threw the Frisbee over the fence around our complex. He had to climb over the wall to retrieve it, which set off the motion sensors, which sent the guards our way. Thankfully, by the time the guard arrived Ric was already back on the proper side of the wall so we just got a polite smile and bow instead of a cavity search.

The school is good, the beginning of any new school year is a stressful and busy time, so although we exhausted by it all these days we’re still really happy. The other teachers (both new and returning) are very friendly and helpful and we’re already making friends. We’ve got plans this weekend to have another couple over for dinner and drinks (we’re going to have to order dinner though; our kitchen is in no way ready for entertaining!). So stayed tuned over the weekend and next week, hopefully we’ll have some stories and photos for you.