2014 October 26 -- Fall in Shanghai

Shanghai in October is turning out to be really nice -- the weather has been really nice, with a lot of days in the 70s, and blue sky (low pollution) more often than not.  We try to take advantage of it as much as possible by getting outside, especially on weekends.

The kids have been busy with school and other activities.  Mallory enjoys her after school activities -- gymnastics, piano lessons, and knitting.  Luke is in his last week of rehearsals for the high school play (performances this weekend).  And Grant has been helping teach guitar lessons to elementary school kids on Mondays, as well as studying and preparing for the ACT (which he took on Saturday).


Heidi and I have been busy with all of the things that keep us busy.  We finally had the final few things done on the house to get it looking like we want it to -- curtains installed, two chairs made for the living room, and our round wooden table repaired.  Most of the family likes the house most of the time.  There are still a few things that bug us about it, including the fact that we cannot get mobile phone reception in the house (unless you stand right near one of the windows, and that only works part of the time).  We paid some technician a tidy sum of money to install signal amplifiers in our house on each floor, but it stopped working about 3 weeks ago, so we asked them to come back to fix it.  The story we get from them now is that a part has been ordered, and they are waiting for it to arrive.  We'll see....   The other thing that disturbs the people in our family with a heightened sense of smell (Heidi) is the general smell of the house.  I don't think it disturbs the rest of us, but if you have advanced olfactory ability, apparently the house stinks.  The only solution we have found so far -- a small investment in candles.



Heidi and Mallory have befriended some local, neighborhood stray cats. Because the cats have been surreptitiously fed occasionally and because the girls always look at them, talk to them, etc., the cats often stay on our back or front porches, just waiting to be paid some attention.  Heidi claims they do a great job of keeping the mice / rats away, but I'm not convinced we would have a rodent problem if the cats disappeared.

If you feed one cat, she tells her friends, and then next morning more cats show up on your porch.

Mallory perfected the art of placing coins on your eyelids.

We really enjoy the fact that our little world here in the Jinqiao area of Shanghai has so many things - restaurants, friends, shopping, medical clinic, DVD shop, slushie shop, etc.  It is nice to be able to get around by bike or by scooter to be able to take care of lots of those things on our own, without being dependent on the driver.

Our church had a Halloween party/thing at a park on Saturday morning. The first part was some games and food, and then all the kids went "trunk or treating" from car to car.

Mallory in a reprise of her flapper girl costume from last year.

Because there were only about a dozen cars but lots of candy, most of the kids came by all of the cars 3 or 4 times.  We only had Mallory there with us, because Grant was taking the ACT and Luke was at play rehearsal.  Mallory still had a good time with her friends, though.


We are continuing to find out about more of Shanghai's restaurants - lots of variety, and pretty good, if you know where to look.  We found out about a new Mexican restaurant that is clear on the other side of town (in Puxi), and when we went there last night, we ran in to 4 other couples/families that we know - all from our side (Pudong) of Shanghai.

2014 October 5 - Chinese National Holiday

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.