We had a lovely weekend this weekend, lots of fun socialising with our friends and an extra surprise. The best thing is that the weather is definitely warming up now and it is helping us to feel much perkier. On Friday evening, after the dreadful ayi leaving incident, we had some friends of ours come over for dinner. We were supposed to be going to their house, but clearly the ayi was our only proper babysitter so they came to ours and we had a fantastic take out from the local Turkish kebab house! It is only just outside our compund [View Full Entry]

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I have been wanting to write one of this philosophical blogs for a while and now seems a very pertinent time indeed. When we came back at Christmas everyone said to us how wonderful it sounded having someone who does everything for you around the house, all the cleaning, shopping, cooking etc. And it was.....to start with. I have discussed this extensively with my good friend Suzanne, and tried to gain understanding from some of my Chinese colleagues at school, but there is a point at which you just have to accept you can take no more! It is a difficult [View Full Entry]

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As most of you know, I like to check out the medical facilities of the countries that I visit and so I decided I should check out the medical facilities here in China. I know, I know, Sophie tried them out not long after we got here, but I wanted to see for myself! As part of our medical insurance with school, we are allowed a full check up (from the neck up, as us Thurstons would say!), so during the Chinese New Year Holidays, I went and had one of these. I had been told not to eat before I [View Full Entry]

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We feel a bit like we are in the UK at the moment due to huge amount of rain we have been having. Luckily yesterday was much nicer and we managed to venture off to our favourite Shanghai park, Century Park. We decided we would try our first outing with the roller baldes, so packed them in some strong bags and headed off on the Metro. It takes about an hour to get there as it is on the other side of Shanghai to us, in an area called Pudong. Whenever we go anywhere from home we have to take a [View Full Entry]

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The weather is not only discussed in excessive amounts in UK, as we have found out, but also out here. I guess the main reason being because it affects so much of everyday life. Last week, we were told that Spring had arrived, and the temperatures soared to 26 degrees on Wednesday and Thursday. We all duly got our summer clothing out and went to work on Fridya expecting the best! There was a football tournament opening after school and William got dropped off to join us....and there was free pizza too! By lunchtime however, the weather had changed, the temperature [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday was the big birthday party and it was just the best day ever. It has been a real headache for us trying to decide where to have the party inn the first place. As you have probably read, the parties which are thrown here are usually lavish affairs in the lavish locations with lots of food and so on. Unfortunately we are not on a posh expat package out here so our budget was somewhat smaller than those budgets and we spent ages looking for a suitable location. Parties tended to start at about 2500RMB (£250) and didn't include food [View Full Entry]

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If we thought our little boy was grown up, our little girl has completely outdone him!! We just can't believe how much she has grown up lately....both physically and emotionally. She is so tall she is outgrowing most of her clothes and is very mature, sometimes too mature for her own good! She has her little temper tantrums already...bring on teenagerhood!! We spent another lovely birthday with our children, which again began with present ripping, then progressed to roller blading! Both Sophie and William are getting very good at it, they are both off skating on their own really well and [View Full Entry]

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We started the second week of our holiday with a really early start as we were going to meet some of my Chinese teaching colleagues on the way to Qibao, an old water town only about 10 minutes away from here. In Grade 5, our next unit is Water, so we are going to look at the uses and functions of water there. We had to do a recce this week as taking 100 students to a small town is no mean feat! It was a very good job we did this, as it was quite small with very small busy [View Full Entry]

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Our little boy is all grown up and 5 years old now. He was all excited when he woke up this morning, but not too excited to ignore the presents and ask for his breakfast! He is still keeping up his huge appetite at breakfast times and eating several courses! We did manage to distract him after a few goes and Sophie and him brought his presents into our room to be opened! This year was noticeably different, in that he actually opened the cards first and waited for big sister to help him see who they were from, if he [View Full Entry]

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Ok, so Ian says it all the time, but it appears that I spoke too soon! For those of you avid blog fans, the evening after I wrote the last blog, the fireworks hit again! There was me saying how quiet it is and there are not many fireworks around and BANG!!!!!!....off they started again. At around 11.40pm, just when we were trying to go to sleep, they really kicked off, although they had been building up after I had published the blog strangely enough! William came into us at about 11.55pm wondering which warzone we had been timezoned into and [View Full Entry]

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