Settling in

Well we've arrived.  Last night actually. Many months of planning, weeks of travelling, and here we are. Beijing.

It's cold, but not unbearable. Maybe in the teens of low 20's (Fahrenheit - but I'm trying to learn to think in Celsius. and meters and hectares and kilos.) Two weeks in Manila are just a warm sandy dream now - it's full out winter gear for the first time since we lived in Wisconsin.

We have an apartment already, thanks to a good friend of Andrew's. It's maybe the size of our Stanford place but configured a bit differently. We have floor to ceiling windows in the living room and a nook just to the side of the bedroom - our view is of many, many, many other tall buildings just like the one we live in.  Haven't snapped any photos yet - we've been busy settling in.

We got Andrew a phone today, and after the New Year, we'll get my old one working here. We bought natural gas and electricity, which consists of taking a little card to a couple of offices, paying and loading cubic meters and kilowatt hours, and then inserting the cards into the respective meters, where everything loads up and now our little meter tells us we have 1266 cubic meters of natural gas to use before we load up again. We haven't been here long enough to know how much we use per day, but green building geeks would know that you get GB points for submetering...

The biggest challenges of Day 1 in China - I can't read anything. Not so bad when there are pictures of food at restaurants, but try buying laundry detergent. Or, rather, what you think is laundry detergent, but could actually be fabric softener, or stain remover, or bleach. Or maybe you want unscented or triple extra strong. Who knows what we just washed our clothes with...

or for that matter, how.  For the first time in our co-history, we have a in-house clothes washer. Except I can't read that either. And yes, Andrew speaks great Chinese. And he is the one who figured out what the buttons mean on the washer (example: one of the buttons is labeled "dehydration"). But this is his first time dealing with some of the setting-up-a-household stuff too...

The air is crackling with fireworks tonight - New Year is just around the corner. Tomorrow we take a train to Northern China with Andrew's friend for the holiday and after a few days, back to figuring out the system here at home...