First few days

We are here. It is 1:15 a.m. here, and everyone is awake due to jet lag. The kids, for the past two days that we have been here, have been going down for naps at about 1:00 p.m. and they have slept until midnight. They (and we) then wake up and are up for six hours or so, only then to take their short nap. Hopefully over the next couple days we can get this on a better schedule.

The night before the 6 a.m. flight, Dan began throwing up. We thought we were in trouble. He went to bed and slept through the night, but then threw up again in the airport parking lot. Thankfully, that was the last time he did so, and he did great on the flight and ever since.

On the airplane to Shanghei, the two girls were designated as lap travelers, meaning that they were to be on our laps for the whole trip. Luckily, the plane was not full, and the five of us were given a total of six seats, two rows of three. Overall, everyone traveled pretty well, but there were definitely crying fits during the scope of the trip. We were very happy when the plane touched down.

Oddly, the airport seemed very quiet at noon when we de-planed. The most noticable thing was that everyone was very interested in our kids. A lot of smiling and waving. Another thing that we were happy to see was our driver holding up a sign saying "Otoole". We were glad to see him because, prior to leaving, we were emailing our contact about when we were arriving. But, because of the extreme time difference, it was already the weekend when we last emailed him on Friday. We were glad to see that he got the email and sent a driver, even though the email arrived when he was not at work.

The driver, Lee, spoke very little English. We were able to load all of our bags into the van (a 10 passenger) and then we made the two hour trip to Changzhou. Dan fell asleep immediately, and he did not wake up until twelve hours later when we were in the apartment. Evelyn sat on my lap, and Etain in her car seat. The last few hours in the car ride probably took the longest, because we felt we were so close.

We arrived at our apartment building, but we had to wait to get the keys to get into our place. We put all of our bags on the sidewalk and sat on the curb for 15 minutes until the keys arrived. Dan remained passed out in the van. There were people passing by with kids, and they all smiled and tried to show their kids to us and talk to our kids. It was pretty neat.

We got into our apartment on the fifth floor of the building. It is not directly on campus, and it is not a school building. I think that it is a general apartment complex in which the school rents rooms. There do not seem to be a lot of tenants, and it has been quite quiet since we have been here. Our place had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a living/dining room, an outdoor laundry/utility room and a small kitchen. It has the computer I am writing on and a big TV with no channels. It also had what we thought was a DVD player, but it would not recognize our DVDs that we brought. We found out later that it was a VCD player, whatever that is. Our portable DVD player also was not working because the outlets did not fit. The outlets here look like a bunch of circles shaped like a T, rather than the two-prong or three-prong that we are use to.

Our place was quite dirty when we moved in. There is no oven, and our water tank was nearly out. Our fridge, about a third the size of a regular American fridge, was stocked with white bread and milk for our arrival. Our microwave also did not work very well, taking a couple minute to warm a bottle. On top of this, half way through the first day, Evelyn threw up rice noodles and beans all over me. She seems to have had caught what Dan had. Needless to say, the first day was quite hard, with no good way of entertaining the kids. (Evelyn only thew up twice, and has been doing well as of the time of writing this).

Later that day, Jane went with our contact to go to the grocery store. She bought some milk for Evelyn, as well as some groceries, napkins, soap, etc. After we cleaned the place the second day, the apartment was much more livable. The place is actually decent except for bathrooms and kitchen, which we expected to be the same in all apartments. Earlier today (or yesterday actually), we mentioned some of the apartment's shortcomings. Our contact offered us another place, the apartment directly next door. It is also three bedroom/ two bath, but it is much better laid out and much cleaner. We are going to be moving into that place throughout the day today. Jane also went and bought an AC adapter, which the kids are using now to watch Lady and the Tramp. In addition to moving today, we also plan on making the 8 minute walk to the grocery store to buy more food, and we are going to meet with a nanny agency about interviewing nannys.

Each day gets better and promises more interesting things. That is all for now. Feel free to email specific questions to our emails, otoole.tom02@yahoo.com or janieo2le@yahoo.com.