All of us are in China now. Natalie and I had a great flight, considering it is 14 1/2 hours! Natalie didn't sleep until 8 hours into the flight. But she watched the Disney channel and played her L-Max (Leapster). (I highly recommend the L-Max as it is really good at keeping kids busy and I think she is learning from it too!) After she fell asleep, she slept hard until about 45 minutes before landing. I had a hard time waking her up at all! The only bad thing that happened was on the flight from Tampa to Chicago. Natalie spilled a cup of apple juice on her lap. Totally soaked her pants, shirt, and seat! We had to crowd into the bathroom and take her shirt off and put on her sweatshirt. We didn't change her pants as I wanted to save the spare in case something happened that wouldn't just dry! But, that was the worst thing. It was nice to fly in business class, the food and wine were good. Probably not worth the extra $6k, but since we weren't paying...
So we are here now and the first three days have been spent getting rested and getting acclimated to the new country. The compound we live in is really nice. But it is funny that for the first couple of days, I felt invisible. The few people I did see here inside the compound didn't even make eye contact! Surprising as most of them were Americans. You would think that in an area where you are a minority, making contact would be a priority! But then yesterday a few people said "hi". (Natalie was disappointed to discover that were actually NOT invisible!). Natalie has already been swimming! It is heated and she loves it. The only problem is that she was under the impression that was HER clubhouse. She seriously thought that when told her she would HAVE a clubhouse, that it would just be for her! She has argued with us since she got her trying to convince us that we have to tell the other kids that they have to leave her pool area. For an hour on Friday she lectured me on how the pool was closed to swimming lessons and how I needed to tell the other kids that they can't use it until she tells them she can! Other than that, she is adjusting just fine.
We walked (yes, walked) to the supermarket, Carrefour, and picked up some things. Tom had just a few things in the fridge, it was pretty bare. Natalie is not enjoying all of the walking, just a sign of how little we do that in the U.S. It was quite an experience. You have to decide what to buy based on the pictures on the packages. I don't have any of my kitchen items yet (they are in the sea and air shipments) so we just bought simple things like noodles and dumplings. We didn't have any other experiences like Tom had before, though the lines were really slow. We only spent about 430RMB or $45. Pretty cheap for how much we bought. Today we are going out to IKEA and the SuperBrands Mall to pick up a few things for the house.
We will post some pictures on the website once we have a chance to get our home organized. That may take a while! But my goal is to do it next week.
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