Adventures By Design

We think we’ve installed a plugin that will allow Wordpress and Facebook to talk to each other. Now, whenever we write on the blog it should show up in Facebook too (but just Gin’s account).

We’re not sure if it is actually working, so if this looks ugly or doesn’t work, sorry.

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.

So we had a great weekend, got some shopping done, hung out with new friends, had yummy Indian food for dinner (and lots of drinks), went to the old part of Suzhou to look around. And took absolutely no photos… sorry. Maybe next time we’ll remember the camera.

While we were in old Suzhou (as opposed to the sparkly, new industrial park we live in) we went to a place called U-Town. It’s a giant electronics shopping mall thingy where we looked at cell phones (but didn’t buy one because we need our passports to activate it and the school still has those), bought a cord that should connect our laptop to our TV (but it doesn’t work, blast!) and got a new power cord for our Nintendo Wii. The power cord was necessary because last week when I (Gin) plugged the Canadian Wii (110 volts) into the Chinese socket (240 volts) it made a nasty popping noise, smelled like electrical fire, and then stopped working. Uh, I swear I thought it had a built-in voltage converter. We were pretty bummed by the death of our Wii, once we get settled into school and have more time it’ll be fun to play, and it cost a lot! We had to hold out hope that the whole system wasn’t fried and that the popping and fire-ness were just from the cord, not the console.

So back to U-Town: since we hadn’t planned on going we didn’t bring the old cord from the Wii, and almost didn’t even try to buy a new one. We figured trying to explain what we needed would be stressful and irritating. In the end though since we were already there we thought it was worth a shot so we headed to a booth that sold Wii’s, ready to pantomime. Little miming was actually necessary however, it seems this nasty popping noise must be common with Wii’s here. The girls at the booth knew exactly what we needed and pulled out a power cord that can accept up to 240 volts. Yay! (With later research I think that Nintendo Wii’s aren’t made for the Chinese market, so there must be all sorts of North American ones kicking around and requiring new cords).

We brought the cord home, still not convinced that we hadn’t fried the whole system. When we plugged the Wii in though, it worked great and I had a wonderful time playing, that is, until our TV broke… I guess we’ll have to go back to U-Town for a new one?