Shanghai favorites

See the guy behind us with his shirt rolled up? This is a typical sight around here when the weather is hot. It is one of my favorite things!

Look alikes

1st day of School

The night before School started we had a "special" dinner (China temporary housing style)...Mac & Cheese and oranges.

Reese on her 1st day of Kindergarten or Year 1 as they call it here!

Beck on his 1st day of Preschool or Kindergarten as they call it here.

Before he goes into school everyday he has to wash his hands and get his throat looked at and/or his temperature taken. So far the kids have been healthy so all the disease control preventions at their schools must be working :)

Temporary Housing

While we were waiting for our container to arrive we stayed for 1 month at the Marriott Executive Apartments. They were super nice and right next to Tanner's office!

Before I realized we had a washer and dryer in our apartment (it was hidden behind a mirrored door)...I sent out our laundry a couple times. This is how it would come back everyday. Even our "unders" were folded and plastic wrapped

One of my favorite photos.
Beck watching the window washer that was literally hanging from a rope.

Reese and Becks room

The Master

We are becoming "native" as Tanner likes to say. Yes we now wear house slippers! And yes we took the Marriott ones and wear them around our apartment!

we made it

The kids did so well on the flight, they loved having their new pillow pets with them.

We had bulk head seats which gave us a large space in front for the kids to lay down, Ford slept right in front of us most of the flight.

We arrived late on a Thursday night and had the weekend to adjust to the time change and check out our new city before reality set in. Thank goodness we did not have jet lag!!


The futuristic looking building in the back is The Pearl Tower.

We walked along the river Sunday night, it was hot and humid but still fun to explore. We live in Pudong and the kids are looking across to The Bund which is in Puxi. The Haungpu River divides the city into 2 sides. We live on the new modern side thus the Jetson's looking buildings. The Bund has buildings dating back to the late 1800's early 1900's. They were once government buildings but now house Gucci, Channel, The Waldorf Astoria...at night they light up and we can see it from our apartment, it is spectacular!
The "bottle opener" looking building is the Shanghai World Financial Tower. The one to the left of it is the Jin Mao building, both are on the worlds tallest building list. We live 2 blocks from them and one block from where the new Shanghai Center will be.

Packing our container

Packing our container was no small task. We took this very serious (Tanner is amazingly thorough) and made sure we packed lots of over the counter meds, first aid, baby and toiletry items and FOOD. We took several trips to Target and Costco knowing certain items would be a little harder to find or super expensive. So far there is nothing I can't buy here but I did pay $36 RMB (about $7 US) for a can of pumpkin and about the same for a box of spice cake mix. Luckily, Tanner is heading back to the US next week so he will be picking more goodies up for me.

How lucky we were to have the help of my mother in law while the chaos was consuming us. Thanks to her and her own expat experience in Singapore years ago, she had the genius idea to wash all our linens and vacuum seal them. Her house was transformed for days into a laundry mat. When our container arrived and we were unpacking we were able to make all our beds, have clean towels and our recently washed and oxi-cleaned white slip covers looking amazing!