Wow, this week flew by, and it was eventful! First and foremost, on Wednesday our shipment of stuff finally arrived from the US!!! It was pretty much like Christmas because I couldn't remember what the heck I packed in these boxes 2 months ago. Although, it turns out that we packed about 40 boxes full of stuff for our kids and about 3 boxes of stuff for us. :( One of the things that we have been looking forward to was getting our DVD player from the US so we could watch some TV series and movies that we brought from the US. (The movies we buy in the US don't work in the local Chinese DVD players, only US DVD players.) We plugged our DVD player into a transformer and then got it hooked up to the TV and working. We put a movie in for the girls, but a few minutes later we paused it to eat lunch. When we finished lunch (maybe 15 minutes) I returned to the DVD player to un-pause it and smelled something burning. The transformer melted and stopped working and the 240 volts went straight into the DVD player and fried it!

This leads me to a quick conversation about the quality control on goods in China - it is NOT good. I think everything they reject to export due to quality reasons stays here in China. The first iron I bought had about 4 features and only one worked (the heat!). The Q-tips I bought have very little cotton on the tips of them (ouch!) and the first time I used one the cotton came off in my ear! I had to use tweezers to get it out. The light bulbs burn out fast. The computer monitor Joe bought had a VGA cable that didn't work and the first set of computer speakers we bought had such a loud "bass enhancement" that we couldn't actually hear the words in the song. In the US, not only is the quality control better, but it's a normal thing to take goods back if they don't work like you expected. Here, it is incredibly difficult to take something back. Not only do I have a language barrier, but I would have also had to have the foresight to get a special fa pio (government receipt) when I bought the item. This requires a whole different counter and different line. If I don't have this special receipt, I cannot attempt to return something. So needless to say, we have learned to ask around about local brands before we buy and NEVER buy what is on "promotion".

On Wednesday night the family went for an evening bike ride. We went in a new direction and discovered an entire streets of shops that we hadn't seen before. So on Thursday morning after I dropped Gigi off at preschool on my bike I decided to find this street. I was fairly certain how to get there, but somewhere I either missed a turn or took a wrong turn and ended up hopelessly lost. And here's what I learned about being lost on a bicycle: unlike being lost in a car, you get thirsty and very tired while you're trying to find your way out! I had to stop and get a bottle of water at one point. I got so turned around that I finally had to backtrack my entire route to the school and go home from there. A trip that usually takes me 20 minutes took me 1 hour and 20 minutes. I need to keep a map of Pudong in my purse!

By Thursday afternoon we had unpacked most of our stuff and I said to Joe that in a weird way I already missed the kind of minimalist life we had been living. We don't "need" all the junk we packed, we only need about 1/3 of it to live comfortably. (that 1/3 being the kitchen stuff and the books and games for the kids.) I am realizing how much we have bought into the "accumulation of stuff" in the US. Of course, if everyone in the US didn't buy all this stuff, 80% of China would probably be unemployed. It really is a small world these days.

Saturday night Joe and I had our first night out on the town without the kids, a real date night. We decided to go to a classic mediterranean restaurant on the Bund. The Bund is the street along the waterfront of the Huang Pu river. The river divides the Puxi and Pudong sides of the city, Pudong being the newly developed part of the city in the last 10 years. On the Bund are many beautiful old buildings constructed around 1900 by many countries of the world (Russia, Englad, France, Germany, etc.) They light these buildings up at night and it's a beautiful site. I commented to Joe that it's amazing that 100 years ago all these countries and companies were saying "we've got to be in China" the same way countries and companies are doing that today. Joe pointed out the difference being that 100 years ago everyone was trying to get goods and resources OUT of China, and today everyone is trying to get goods INTO China to be sold to the Chinese people. Anyway, the Bund is a tourist area, but nice none-the-less. So we went to dinner at a restaurant with a great view of the river and the Bund, and great food. Then we went for Chinese foot massages and finally ended up at a bar with a terrace overlooking the river and the Pudong side. It was a great night and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. At last we feel we are starting to be able to get out and see the city a little bit.

The first week of October is a national holiday here, so everyone is off work. We didn't plan far enough ahead to be going anywhere, so we'll be staying here in Shanghai with the 18 million Chinese people also on holiday. We are planning outings for each day so that we take advantage of the city, but we keep hearing from friends that we'll lucky to see or do anything because it'll be so packed. Oh well, I figure that's the authentic experience then, is it not? Hopefully this will be the only holiday we actually spend in Shanghai, I am eager to get out into other parts of China to see some of its beauty, and non-city living. Particularly Beijing since I am in the middle of a fascinating book that is the true story of 3 generations of a family in the last 100 years in China. I have learned more from this book than any Chinese history course I could have taken, it's absolutely captivating.