Catching Up On Our Lives

Hello all! I'll try to catch y'all up on some of our latest happenings. Hope things are going great for all you family and friends. Things are moving along well here. Michael is working hard, as always! But his hours have gotten much better. We have been having such great family time together recently. He took last Friday off and that was a real treat! He and I (the boys stayed home with Chen Ayi) went out for a few hours. Shanghai has 2 huge fabric markets. Basically you can go and buy fabric. Or they have a bunch of sample clothes at each stall. Suits, shirts, skirts, dresses, blouses, pants, etc. So you show them a garment you like, you then pick out the fabric you like from their selection of hundreds, they measure you and voila! In 5 days you have a custom made garment. Michael had a pair of dress slacks made for $20 and I had a pair of linen pants made for $13. Michaels pants turned out great. Mine on the other hand....not so good. When I washed them they shrunk like 2 inches. It ended up being ok though. Chen Ayi is quite a seamstress herself so she is turning them into a pair of crop pants for me. Problem solved!

While we were out on Friday we had the driver take us to the bird and flower market. We wanted to pick up a couple of house plants to liven up our apartment. That place was a blast! It was on an older street close to the Old City. There were stalls along the street but the real action was down off the little side streets. It was a maze of alleys with all kinds of stuff for sale. We saw plants, birds, dogs, and cats. Along with some more interesting stuff like tarantulas, crickets, fish, turtles, lizards, chipmunks, worms, rats, mice, and SO MANY more unknown animals and bugs. I wish I knew what they all were so I could tell y'all. Some of the turtles we saw were the size of coffee tables while others we less than 2 inches. And all of this stuff was for sale....for the right price of course. Here are a few pictures from that adventure.


One of the small side street/alleys. Notice on the left side of the alley the animal/insect containers. On the right side of the alley up top are bird cages.


Another view of a side street/alley.


This was some kind of squirrel thing. As you can see it was taking a nap on it's back in it's food bowl. Nothing amazing about this. It was just funny to see.


It seemed like everywhere we looked there were tables full of these. They are little boxes with a cricket inside. We asked our driver what they were for and he told us "cheap hot blanket." During the winter the locals buy boxes and boxes of these and stuff them in their shirt, pant, and coat pockets to keep warm. Don't think I'll be wearing any crickets this winter. I'll just wear more clothes.


This is me with the owner of the stall we bought some of out plants from. One of my FAVORITE things about being here is the bargening! I love it. Michael hates it. And I hate to brag on myself but....I am really good at it! Our Chinese friends tell us that the local sellers know that the foreigners will pay 3 times as much as locals. So when our Chinese friends ask us how much we paid for something they are always suprised to find out how good of a deal we got. Our driver says that I get a better price on things than he does sometimes. Anyway, I know that I am bragging, sorry. I just love the thrill of a good bargening process.

Well that's enough for now I guess. Again, we hope you all are doing well!