The kids have had school off this past week for the Chinese National Holiday. The official holiday was Wednesday - Friday, but the kids had the whole week off school. I had to work Monday and Tuesday, but then I have next Monday (tomorrow) and Tuesday off, but the kids go back to school. I'm still not sure why the school and Ford couldn't sync up the same holidays. Oh, and in return for the pleasure of having tomorrow and Tuesday off work, last Sunday (September 28th) and next Saturday (October 11th) are official working days (I'm taking both days off as vacation days).
We didn't get around to making reservations to go anywhere during this week off, but it has been good to have the time off here at home and in Shanghai. We've been able to relax, spend time together, catch up on some things, and to see a bit of the city.
The traffic around the city has been a lot better than normal, and the weather has been beautiful -- days in the upper 70s or low 80s, with clear blue skies many days this week. All very atypical for Shanghai.
It has been interesting to watch the news coverage this week about the protests / demonstrations in Hong Kong. On the second or third day of the protests, CNN mysteriously came up with a black screen on our cable TV service. And one night Heidi was watching TV on the English-language Asian News channel, and as soon as the coverage of the protests in Hong Kong started, the cable feed cut out. Interesting reminders about the country we live in... (No specific problems with internet service, though - so far).
This week we've gone out to dinner or lunch a couple of times, we've gone on bike rides, watched a few movies, the kids have gotten together with friends, and we've caught up on some things that needed to be done at the house. Our driver has been willing to work all week, which has been nice, but we haven't had to use him a lot, because most days we haven't gone too far from home, and we've just gotten around our little Jinqiao neighborhood by bike or scooter.
Grant looked at the map and saw how close we are to the sea (about 17 km), so we decided to ride our bikes out there one day. This is actually the Yangtze river, very near the point where it empties into the East China Sea. The Huangpu river, which runs north through Shanghai and divides it into Puxi and Pudong connects up with the Yangtze river just west of where we were standing.
East Nanjing Lu - a main pedestrian shopping street - is busy on a national holiday.
We went to the M&M store, which sells far fewer M&Ms than other merchandise, but we loaded up on cocoa, chocolate chips, and Twizzlers at the Hershey store, which was near by.
We also successfully found Beard Papa's (the cream-puff chain we knew from Jakarta) in a mall in that area.
Luke is waiting for our driver to pick us up, right in front of Shanghai's version of the Tower of Orthanc from Lord of the Rings (No, we didn't know that is what it was called until we went home and looked it up -- it just looked like one of the towers from Lord of the Rings).
Back at home, enjoying a Beard Papa cream puff.
Mallory wants to learn how to drive the scooter.
On Friday afternoon we went with our friends to a chocolate factory for a tasting tour. We started out by tasting the raw cocoa bean -- quite bitter.
They gave us each a tasting spoon, and were able to try all types of different concoctions of chocolate --
- some in liquid form, and some already made into the bars.
At one of the tasting stations we picked out a bar of melting chocolate, then they gave us a glass of hot milk and we made it into hot chocolate.
After the chocolate tour, we had some time before dinner, so we walked out to the viewing area right along the river.
It didn't take long for a small crowd of tourists with cameras to find us.
Some of the kids were more eager than others to put on a good show for their photographers.
Proof that our son, Grant, does indeed eat salads -- he was hungry enough to finish up the small amount of leftovers right there on the street after leaving someone's house.
