A little bit of life in China…

It is August 24, 2013 and I have lived in China for two weeks.

Many, many, MANY things have happened already, and I am excited to eventually sit down and write a nice long post about our adventures here in China so far.

However – having just bombarded you all with an extremely long post earlier today, I just wanted to give you all a little sneak peek.  I promise to follow up with a more detailed post about our trip over and settling in, later this week.

Here are a few details worth commenting on…

1.  Our new home in China:  We actually REALLY love our new apartment.  It’s extremely large and comfortable, and is actually decorated fairly nice.  However, there are a few very “special” decorative touches that wouldn’t exactly fall into the category of “my style”….

* The dining room wallpaper:

* The only working clock in our house right now:

* And this.  I can’t even talk about this:

2.  Food in China:  I forgot how difficult it was to adjust to new food, and how much time it takes to familiarize oneself with new grocery stores.  It took us 10 days to find salt because it’s called “Na” instead of “Salt” (duh)… and can only be bought in large bags.  I’m also back to substituting ingredients in recipes to try and make them work.  Tonight I tackled chocolate chip cookies.  Considering I was short on ingredients and had no measuring instruments whatsoever, they turned out ok.

Ingredients and substitutions:

My “oven”.  And if you’re thinking it looks a lot like a microwave oven, you would be correct:

The final product.  Success!!!

3.  The shopping in China:  Ohhh how I love shopping in Asia!  Here are few of my favourite things to shop for overseas.

*Funny and quirky items that have been mis-translated:

*Blinged-Out EVERYTHING:

*Fabulous Knock-Offs:

One another note – little Miss Isla officially celebrated her second birthday here in China on August 19th- I’m pretty sure she has had about four celebrations already for this particular  birthday.  As you can see, she is also already embracing some of local accessorizing options:

Happy 2nd Birthday Princess Kissy!

This is going to be one interesting year!