Adventures By Design

This is an atlas of all the places I’ve lived, worked, and gone to school.

(still a work in progress)

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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).

The school year is almost over here in Suzhou. (Yes, it’s July 1st and we’re still teaching; Friday is our last day)  Things are really busy with trying to get everything finished and packed up.

At school this week my grade had a poetry and coffee morning with the parents to share some work the students have been doing on our last unit, and to have a chance for the parents to come in one last time. It was a pretty relaxed occasion and went over really well.  Most of my class’ mothers came (most mothers here don’t work so they’ve got loads of time to come in for school events) and I think I took a photo which each of their kids, once one parent did it they all thought it was a fantastic idea so we had an impromptu photo shoot.

I think I’m going to stop apologizing for the lag between blog posts. I’m busy, I’ll try to write more, but am having trouble keeping up with work and life, let alone writing on here. You’ll all just have to be happy with what you get.

School is good still. We had a bit of a shake-up with too many teachers in elementary, and not enough in middle school which meant someone had to move. Luckily neither Ric nor I ended up on the chopping block. It was crummy, but it’s hard for international schools to estimate their enrolment figures, and even harder to hire new teachers quickly. In more positive school news, I went with Grade Three on our first field trip to learn about the city of Suzhou. The trip went well and the kids had a fun time. Now we’re preparing for a sleepover at school next month… hmm… 120 10-year-olds sleeping in the gym, sounds like a great time!

We’ve just started a week-long break from school today. Neither of us is really sure what holiday we’re celebrating, but we know that we like weeks off, especially when we have a lot of stuff to catch up on, in school and out. We haven’t got any big plans for the week, just relaxing, seeing a little more of Suzhou and hanging out with the dog. After spending four months traveling earlier this year we didn’t feel a big drive to go anywhere for the week, but lots of other people from school are going away, so I’m excited to hear about their trips.

We were going to spend this week getting our apartment all set-up and settled, but we recently found out that we might be moving! This is good news for us, since we don’t really like the location of our apartment: it’s far from everything, and there are many people from school near us, just two families with three kids each so they aren’t really in the same life-stage as we are, and are never up for spontaneous drinking bouts. If we move it’ll be to a nearby apartment complex that has loads of shops within a five minute walk, and several of our friends live in the same complex (one is even in the same building!).

Last weekend we went to a town/tourist trap near here called Zhou Zhuang. The outing was arranged with Ric’s photography club (just a group of teachers at school) and we hired a van and driver to take us there. Since we had private transportation, we decided to take Inca too! She met a few other dogs on the trip, including a teeny tiny little puppy that she couldn’t figure out what to do with. It was cute because the puppy was nipping at her and harassing her in exactly the same way that she nips at and harasses bigger dogs. The whole thing was a fun day, but really, really hot. The town was cute, but not really Ric’s thing photo-wise and way too busy and commercial as well. Hopefully if the photo group does more outings we can go somewhere a little calmer. See below for some photos of the day:

Whoops, it’s been 10 days since I’ve written anything on the blog. Sorry to anyone who may have been waiting for to hear about our Suzhou adventures. The usual excuse of being busy with school still stands, and probably will for a while yet. However, we did have a three-day weekend a few days ago, and we have a whole week off at the end of September/beginning of October, so it’s not like we’re being over-worked. It’s just that I’m tired by the end of each day, and don’t really feel like writing. School’s great, our classes are small (14-16 students) and the kids are great (except for one notable exception who is a serious handful and needs some support that isn’t really available). Ric had his first field trip today to an art museum in Shanghai (you’ll have to ask him for details) and I (Gin) had a great time yesterday taking a group of kids on a tour around the school comparing elements of it to the systems in a city. We also did the Terry Fox run yesterday, which was fun (though really, really hot… it’s much cooler by mid-September in Canada where the run originated).

So, enough about school, I’ve got a request for some specific details about last weekend. If you are my friend on Facebook, you may have seen that Ric and I spent an exorbitant amount of money at IKEA in Shanghai last Saturday, so here is the story of the day:

Every year someone at our school organizes a trip into Shanghai to go to the IKEA. Perhaps someday they will build an IKEA in Suzhou, but I think that day is a long way off still. Since our trip was this school organized outing, we took the school buses, and didn’t see anything in Shanghai other than the IKEA. If you were hoping for stories of the Oriental Pearl, the Bund, the shopping (for things non-Swedish), or the gardens, you’ll have to wait until we go back on our own. This will be a story dedicated to bent-wood, flat-packed, economical furniture.

We woke up early, and headed down to the Starbucks where we had to meet our bus. Whoever decided on Starbucks at the meeting place is a genius, since it allowed us to pick up a much needed coffee and scone before piling on for the two hour ride to Shanghai. The ride in was uneventful and traffic was good until we hit the city, then it ground to a painful, boring halt (especially painful with children on the bus). Finally we made it and were told to meet back at the bus in four hours to load up and drive back to Suzhou. Hmm… yes, four hours might be just about long enough for us. Knowing how long a trip through IKEA can take Ric and I headed off right away for some serious shopping.

The IKEA was nearly identical to any of the ones I’ve been to in Canada. If it wasn’t for all the Chinese signage and people we could have been in any IKEA in the world…weird, but familiar for us with our years of working for Ingvar.

We shopped around the top floor where all the furniture was, wishing that our apartment hadn’t come with tacky, poor-quality furnishings and that we could pick up some sofas and dining tables. Alas, we will have to continue to live with our landlady’s substandard decorating instincts for now. We did decide to get a Poang chair and footstool, since Ric has been wanting one for the past eight or ten years now. We also had to get a bookcase; we flew over with half a suitcase full of books, sent some more in boxes from Korea and Canada, and are sure to buy lots here too… it’s a bit of a sickness really. Our final purchase from the furniture section was a mattress pad to dampen the pokiness of the springs on our bed. Ric’s side of the bed was far worse than mine, and he’d been contorting himself trying to get comfortable for weeks now.

After that we had lunch in the restaurant (huge, well-laid out, and basically the same as in Canada). Ric had meatballs and I had salmon. I don’t think there was anything Chinese-y on the menu at all. Once we finished lunch we headed downstairs where the real shopping began.

We got dishes, a dish drainer, an apple-cutter thingy that Ric is quite taken with, canisters to hold our sugar and coffee and rice, pillows and covers to dress up our ugly boring sofa, a soft blanket that Inca is not allowed to use (it’s mine), tea towels, pillows for the bed, a duvet cover that isn’t Pepto Bismal pink, a rug so that Inca doesn’t go sliding across the hardwood quite so much, gigantic towels, a nice floor lamp, and bunches of other random Swedish-designed items.

Once we hit the warehouse with our fully-loaded cart we were asked every few seconds if we needed delivery. In one glaring difference from IKEAs in Canada, there are heaps of independent drivers hanging around willing to drive you and your stuff home (as far as Suzhou too, as I understand it). One man asked me if I needed delivery, and when I said no asked if I had a big car. “No,” I replied, “I have a bus.” He didn’t really know what to make of that.

Loading the bus with everyone’s purchases was quite an adventure in organization, and re-packing. We finally got everything on, though there were bags on a lot of laps, and a few flat-pack boxes in the aisle. We drove back to Suzhou, and the bus dropped us off outside our apartment complex. Unfortunately this was still about 400-500 metres from our actual front door. We stood on the side of the street contemplating for a few minutes until the high school principal’s wife (who’s Chinese) came by and helped us flag down some guys with a cart who loaded up all our stuff, drove it to our place, unloaded it and brought it in for about $7. $7 is really expensive for a service like that here, but after spending many times that at IKEA, and being faced with an hour or so of dragging our stuff back one trip at a time, we were happy to pay.

Inca was fascinated by the boxes, but less excited after she sniffed them and determined there were no treats inside. We spent the rest of the evening setting everything up and once we were done the place felt so much more like home!

We’ve been in Suzhou for a week now, and have been super busy the whole time. Things are going well with school but they’ve certainly got a lot for us to do! For the first couple of days everything was pretty low-key; we went to see the Master of Nets Garden and the Suzhou Museum one day. We also got to go on a little boat ride on one of the canals here and see part of Suzhou’s old town. The part of town that we live in is called the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) and it’s new, clean, and modern, as we were promised from the school. We haven’t taken a lot of photos, but we plan to put some on here soon so you can all see.

The best part of this first week being over though, is that Inca came home today!! She has been in quarantine since we arrived, and we’ve been quite lonely for her. Today the company we hired to take care of all the customs and quarantine stuff brought her home to our apartment. As we walked up after school we saw a bright red van waiting outside our building and had to restrain ourselves from running to go see our puppy! When we got up to the van we found both the driver and Inca sleeping inside. We woke them up, greeted Inca, paid the driver for everything, and then brought Inca inside to see her new home.

Inca seems to like the new place, although we’re going to have to get some throw rugs; all the tile and hardwood is a little tough for her to run on (it’s entertaining for us though!). There are huge window seats on two of the windows so she can hang out there and watch the world go by. Inca’s tummy seemed a little off tonight (we’ll spare you the details) so we’ll have to keep an eye on her. Isn’t it ironic that she had to go to quarantine to make sure she wasn’t sick, and ended up getting sick there?