Life here is insane. Somehow I thought that moving closer to the school would free up loads of time (all that toing and froing across the big bridge in Shanghai traffic) but it turns out that time spent sitting reading in the car, or sitting waiting while the children did activities when there wasn’t time to go back, has been replaced by me yomping the 3000 steps between home and school umpteen times a day. I haven’t read a book in weeks and keep falling asleep as soon as I sit down in the evening.
The girls have very kindly been lent bikes and scooters as we are still waiting for our shipment, but my step count is through the roof.
The shipment has made it to China (hooray!) It is sitting in customs (boo!) It shouldn’t be much longer (yay!) But Cameron might have to go and ‘negotiate’ with the customs officer (boo! Also – what?!). And we have been asked to itemise our books and CDs, which is no trivial task given that we last saw them in July. I am hoping a very vague description will do the trick.
November. Short sleeves or bare legs but mostly not both, except for last Tuesday, which was the junior school sports day and roasting at about 27 degrees or so. Tamsin had an excellent day and Jenny too collected a fistful of ribbons – they do a very sensible sort of streaming of events so the children compete with children at a similar level.
The end of October saw Halloween, which we always kept very low-key before but here we live surrounded by expats who go all out. We were still very low-key compared with some of our neighbours – no decorations or anything because I am a bad mother – but the girls went trick or treating and we now have cupboards full of nasty sweets (candy!). A disappointing dearth of fizzy cola bottles and Cadbury’s chocolate.
Some things work incredibly efficiently here. For example, I needed new water today (we are using those big water-cooler things that you get in offices to have moments around – haven’t yet got around to having the tap water filtered or tested; nor have we got air purifiers. Three things they said when we arrived: don’t breathe the air, don’t drink the water and don’t eat the food. They are on the list.) So, I rang the lady – no sooner had I put the phone down, quite literally less than 3 minutes later, there’s a chap at my door with three water bottles. I hand over some cash, he takes away the empties, job done.
Cameron went into the sports shop at the weekend to get some spikes for Tamsin. Was told they had to be ordered and would take 4–5 days … then they turned up less than 12 hours later, to our door.
In fact, one barely has to lift a finger. We have a wide front step that looked very empty and unloved. I messaged a lady in the morning; she came and had a look that afternoon; 24 hours later, we have loads of lovely pots and the front step looks very smart. Turns out Maggie is rubbish at watering pots though. We now have an ayi as well as Tony the Driver, have entirely delegated responsibility for laundry and cleaning, and are quite getting into the swing of the spoilt expat existence.
A few pics around our neighbourhood:
I’ve had two Mandarin lessons in which I have tried to learn to make the new sounds (with little success but at least I am trying). My task this weekend is to learn to count. Wish me luck!