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| Latest Journal Entry: CLICK HERE |
July 2004Well the route to our new apartment is a tale of changes, surprises, and sweat! When I was hired at Wall Street English I was told I'd be working at a particular school location of which there are three currently in Shanghai. So Yanti & I came 'down river' from Nantong 3 weeks ago and started looking. We ended up finding a real cute 2 bedroom place within 2 blocks of the school! We were happy and looked forward to moving in. About two days after we returned to Nantong, we received an email and a phone call from Anna, in HR, who said that something had come up and they needed me to work in the JinMao Tower which holds the Shanghai Grand Hyatt and is the tallest building in China at over 90 stories tall. It's located in Pudong, just across the river from Shanghai, and is about 8 Metro stops (and a change of trains) from here I was going to be working. Plus my 2 block walk to the old location now would be a 45 minute metro trip. Yanti & I talked about it and we decided to try and find something closer to the new location. I searched the internet and found what we thought was a nice place. It was only 5 metro stops away and no train transfers. The owner emailed us some photos and it looked smaller but cute. So we said good-bye to our Nantong hosts (we'll miss so many of them) and the school drove us to Shanghai to our new apartment. (It was about a 3 hour drive). The new place was on the 4th floor of an older building, but was very cute inside. HOWEVER: there was no refrigerator; no bed in the 2nd bedroom; no view of a nice canal like in one of the photos; AND a 15 minute bus ride AND a 40 minute metro trip away from my work! Plus there were no restaurants or shopping in the area :-( We were disappointed! We decided that it didn't really work for us, so began to look again for an apartment. Luckily, Yanti & I had visited all three Indonesian restaurants on previous trips and one of the folks we met (Alvin) was incredibly helpful. He spent the day with us looking and we found our dream apartment:
So we took it! It was a $150/mo more than the previous place, but only $50 more that the 1st place we had found. We're all settle in now after a trip to the local mega-market! AND ready for guests! My new job is really great. There is a lot to get used to at first, but in a few weeks I know I'll be very comfortable there. I taught two classes last week, and this week start a full schedule. I get Saturdays and Thursday off, and Yanti & I miss each other during the day, but soon she'll be busy with a full time Chinese Language class! We're just beginning to discover this incredible city with all the strange sounding street names, but slowly-slowly! More to come......
Later.......
.....Stay tuned! Here is a great link for info about China Visa for anyone thinking about a visit: http://www.asststork.com/pages/consulate.html#n_cal
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