Henry's field trip

On March 5th I went with Henry and his class to the Shanghai Museum and the Urban Planning Museum.

More Reasons to Hate Carrefour

I finally braved going back to Carrefour for the first time since Chinese New Year (and even spotted vaseline). I bought some hair spray oil (in lieu of detangler) for the girls and a memory stick for Henry for school. There is one cash register in the cosmetics area where you have to pay for all cosmetic items (including the spray I was buying). I had to wait while these people in front of me bought all of those huge boxes of large size products - 3 carts full (clearly stocking their spa or hair salon). It was unbelievable and very slow!

Lauren's flower arrangements

Since I have not done anything remotely creative in recent years, this is a big accomplishment and quite a luxury for me. Plus, it's really fun! Here I am with my first completed arrangement.

Here it is back in my living room. Oh, can you guess how I brought it home? On the motortrycle, of course!
Here's my second arrangement.

Lauren finally begins flower arranging

Yeah, after talking about it for 6 weeks, I finally started flower arranging this month and have now been to two classes. The woman holding the flowers is laoshi (teacher) and the woman next to her is the Emerald activities director who translates for us. There are usually 4 other students.
Every week we start with this bowl, which I bought along with my tools.

California Pizza Kitchen

Figuring the kids were needing a little California familiarity, we took them to CPK for dinner after the trip to see the Disney School site. It was the same menu as the US, but they used spaghetti noodles instead of penne on the kids meals, and although they passed out bread plates as soon as we sat down, they never brought the bread and when we asked about it, they said they didn't have any bread! It is China after all.....

I got a job!

So, my retirement did not last too long! Unemployed since November when I left my job at LA County Jail after almost 10 years there, I contacted the counseling center at the Expat Community Center shortly after my arrival in Shanghai. I went to have coffee with the clinical coordinator of the Counseling Center, who happens to also live at the Emerald. She is a Dutch psychologist who has been here for 4 years. She informed me that she already had 2 eating disordered patients that she wanted to assign to me and asked me to join the team of (as far as I can tell) 6 clinicians (from Canada, Norway, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the US) working mostly part-time out of two centers. I can make my own hours, work as little or as much as I want, and get paid! I saw my first client today! I am very excited about being able to see individual clients again, and about pursuing my interest in working with clients with eating disorders, as well as hopefully developing some expertise in working with expatriate issues. I'm also really looking forward to the intellectual stimulation I'll get from working with colleagues from all over the world. If you want to read more about the counseling center, the link is:
http://www.communitycenter.cn. Click on programs and then counseling (and you can see my picture and profile). It's also going to be a great way to get hooked into the expat community since the community center runs all kinds of events and the counseling center is right on site.

Wait a Whale

The Mandarin is tough. We are fortunate that there are a lot of businesses and restaurants that cater to Westerners and have some English. On the other hand, daily life is still filled with numerous situations in which we have communication difficulties.

For example, there's China Mobile. Since my cell phone is not billed to a company and since we do not have a Chinese credit card (or bank account), the only way to pay for my cell phone is to prepay for the minutes. You do this in China by buying these refill cards in quantities of 100 RMB. They are carbon paper envelopes that have a pin number sealed inside and you call a phone number from your cell phone to type in the pin number. When my cell phone suddenly stopped working just before Chinese New Year, it occurred to me that I needed to figure out the refill situation. (I have since come to suspect that the inexplicable text messages I get periodically from China Mobile may be a signal that I am about to run out of minutes, but of course, I'm not sure.)

I was quite excited to find that the Super Store sold the refills,but I was so confused about what to do with them once I had paid for them (there were no English instructions on them), that the woman from the superstore said she would take care of making the call and adding the minutes for me. "How easy was that," I thought jubilantly. The second time I bought refills (prior to going to Hong Kong, per Sarah's instructions to pay for international roaming), I was determined to figure out how to do it myself since both Sarah and Lilybeth knew how, and I figured that if I'm going to be here for 2 years I can't be totally dependent on the woman from the superstore.

There were, I was informed, English menus. The English menus, however, have such a bad accent that they are impossible to understand and the words I could understand made no sense! It took me several tries, lots of frustration, and a lot of help from Lilybeth (just press #2) to figure it out, but I persevered and did it. The best part, when you successfully type in the pin, you get a menu that very clearly states, "Now wait a whale!"

Along the same topic of bizarre translations, was this sign in one restroom that had me laughing.


Then, of course, there are the all Chinese directories, which are just as bad!