Our First Week

Well our first week is over here in hot and humid Shanghai.  We arrived on Thursday night last week with mountains of luggage and a $400 excess baggage bill.  The kids travelled really well and the flight went surprisingly quickly.  We had gone to Sydney the night before and it really made a difference not to have to get up at 3.30 in the morning to get that flight to Sydney.  We spent the first few days just relaxing and recovering from the pack up - Greg is lucky I am speaking to him (or maybe unlucky, not sure which).  On Saturday we waited rather impatiently for Maggie to arrive.  She was on the same flight as us and the lovely cabin crew kept calling the captain in flight to make sure she was in a nice comfortable 20 degrees down below.  I am sure the captain was well and truly sick of us by the time we landed in Shanghai.  In theory, Maggie was meant to do a 7 day quarantine here in a facility near the airport which I wasn't too thrilled about and we managed to get around this by paying a special arrangement fee which meant she spent Thursday and Friday night there, had a vet check on the Friday and the pet relocation company delivered her home on Saturday afternoon.  We had been given updates that she had travelled really well and had settled into the quarantine facility and was fine.  She was a bit strange for the first little while and wandered a bit but settled really quickly and now seems like she has always been here (although I think she is struggling with the heat and her Australian winter coat still to shed).  Sunday night we caught up for a great Shanghai dumpling dinner with our dear friend Bruce who was in Guangzhou on business and had decided to come to Shanghai coincidentally the same weekend we arrived to catch up with his friend who is a flight attendant and was here in Shanghai on a 3 day layover.  It was lovely to see a familiar face!!  Monday we spent the day out at the school to get uniforms etc so we got all that out of the way and it meant that the kids could relax for a couple of days before starting school.  The kids had a great day in the pool on Tuesday and stayed there until they were well and truly like prunes.  They swam and swam so much so that Charley was asleep on the couch at 6.00pm.  I reckon they swam kilometres!!  Thursday the kids had an orientation morning at the school, saw their classrooms and met their teachers.  Shay's teacher is a lovely young teacher from Australia so she was really happy about that although the couple of friends she made when we were here in May are in the other class so I think she was bit disappointed.  But she is a trooper so quickly got over it.  There is a decided lack of girls in grade 2 so she is only one of three in her class.  Lucky she doesn't mind being with boys :)  And, apparently the two classes work really closely together so she will get to see them during class time and of course at play.  Charley's teacher is a lovely bright, bubbly girl from America but he would have been happy with either teacher (the other teacher is another Australian - we are well represented at the school, if not in the kid department, certainly with the teachers).  The class sizes are really small - just 13 kids in the class and two teachers (one English speaking and the other Chinese speaking) so we are really lucky.   Friday is the first full day for them and then into full swing next week.