OUT AND ABOUT . . .

Thanks so much for the birthday wishes. While all of the e-mails have made me a little homesick, they've also made me feel loved, so I guess that's a good thing!

It's kind of hard to communicate right now. We don't have our internet set up yet, so we are using someone else's, and it doesn't always work real well. We are supposed to get the internet and satellite set up sometime this week. Right now every channel we have is in Chinese! Movies here are very cheap, like $2/DVD, so we've bought a lot of movies and we've been watching and will watch those. So far we've bought 17 Again, Land of the Lost, Harry Potter, Escape to Witch Mountain, Pink Panther 2, Angels and Demons, and I Love You Man. It'll be nice to have the TV again though.

Things are pretty okay here so far, although it's definitely going to take some getting used to. We have to walk everywhere, which is definitely going to be good for me, but right now, my feet are KILLING me! It hurts just to walk to around the apartment. I'm sure within a few days I'll start feeling better, but right now, not so much!

The kids' school is about 1 mile away and the grocery is about ½ mile away. We probably walked about 4 or 5 miles the first day, and about the same the next day. For someone as out of shape as me, I'm hurting! Then on Saturday we took a cab to downtown and toured a few buildings and went to the mall. Their mall is HUGE!

Grocery shopping was an experience too. They don't have Diet Coke here. They have Coca-Cola Light, which is SO not the same thing. I'm actually drinking Pepsi Light, because it tastes the most like diet Coke. I've also been drinking a lot of water. The humidity here is crazy. All you do is step outside and you're covered in sweat. Carrefour is the grocery here, it's kind of like a Super Wal-mart, but they don't have canned veggies and fruits, and it's just a totally different experience.

Our apartment is nice. It's 3 bedrooms and 3 baths with a laundry room off the kitchen. We also have a balcony. We are on the 22nd floor, and our apartment surrounds a lake, so we have a great view. I just hope the elevators never go out! The mattress on our bed is hard as a rock! We've only slept on it one night. The boys mattress is pretty hard too. Sarah's is pretty comfy though, so I've been sleeping with her the last couple of nights. There is supposed to be a place close to here where you can get furniture pretty cheap, so we'll go there one day and get mattresses for our beds and also a dresser for her room. Her room doesn't have a dresser OR a closet!