June 2nd. We are leaving for the airport at about 1pm. It's funny, we fly out of Shanghai at 4 pm on Monday, and land in Chicago at about 4:00pm Monday. A time machine of sorts--of course, we do have to sit in a seat for over 13 hours for the time machine magic to occur. I will keep posting when I get home. I want to capture my entire journey, which includes the prep and goodbyes we all have to go through to come back here in August. This test run was great, but the real deal is for much longer chunks of time. Last night was so great, I have to share a few details. We went to wine time at the hotel--a daily ritual here at Hotel Jia. Who passes up free wine ... read more

Saturday, May 31. We got an early start with Lina and Zoe (the American versions of their names, we later learned). We were hesitant to go out again since we had seen better places the afternoon before. However, we felt like we couldn't really pass up an opportunity to see more places in case one was "it". We have seen many places we like up to this point, but they all have 1 or 2 issues. One bedroom is much smaller, the kitchen is a little funky, there is no bathtub in the apartment. Stuff like that. At the end of the searching, we had settled on 2 places. 1 is very near Mark's office in Jing'An. We saw lots of kids, it had a pool and gym (iinclided in the price). The downside is it ... read more

Thursday, May 29th. Today we talked to the family via Skype. It was great to talk to everyone, but we are getting more and more homesick and can't wait to see the kids in a few days! This adventure will be so much better when the full cast of characters is in Shanghai. More and more, I am certain the kids will have an amazing time here. It's such a vibrant city. There are a lot of comforts from home, but we will also learn so much about a new culture. We were out looking at apartments (together this time) with a new realtor named Vi'an. We had assumed this was a female name. Oops. Not so much. Vi'an showed us less apartments than we saw yesterday, but they were almost entirely superior to those we ... read more

Tuesday, May 27th The first school we saw today was Yew Chung International School (YCIS). We had heard good things about this school, and it has more Chinese as part of the curriculum. They say it's about 30% Chinese, 70% English as far as how the classes are taught. The classes are a bit larger (22-25) but they have a native English speaking teacher and a Chinese speaker in each class. They are a team, and are both qualified teachers, but the math and English lessons are taught by the native English speaking teacher. The Chinese teacher teaches Chinese language, reading and writing as well as Chinese culture. This school spoke much more about providing a cultural education and not just language. We both really liked that. The kids would be at different campuses if we ... read more

Today we had such a better day. We got some solid sleep, which helped. I woke up at 4:30am and spent some time figuring out my blog issues, but later in the day we got a nice, big nap (and I'm not usually a napper!). We started the day walking to Yuyuan Gardens which is really close to our hotel. The doorman told us to walk there via a sketchy alley, but we figured he would not send us into danger, so we went down this alley with little homes, laundry hanging, people sitting outside and eating, and we just meandered by. The thing about being white in China--there's just no way to blend into a crowd. We are like a flashing neon sign. Street peddlers are all over us all the time, and we just ... read more