Our First Days in Ningbo

This is the Ningbo Hotel, where we stayed for our first 9 days. Very nice and only $39 a night for the 3 of us, which included a buffet breakfast! (We have discovered that if you pay more you get a few English speaking people at the front desk).

We found some public exercise equipment along the street on one of our walks.  This is quite common, we have discovered.  We really should be holding on to the bars with our hands!   You do a sideways motion with your hips and it swings -- pretty fun!

More of the public exercise equipment.  Even though they look like drums, these are actually  rotating disks to maintain shoulder flexibility.  The Chinese are REALLY into flexibility activities!!!

Scott and Emily escape the extreme heat (95+ degrees) in the shade of a roadside tree.

Emily enjoys holding, counting,  and recounting 17,000 RMB!  (This was how we paid for our first  6 months in the apartment.)  There were one hundred and seventy 100RMB notes! China is a very cash based society.  We know a Chinese couple that own a house (condo).  They paid 220,000 RMB.  After they signed the papers to buy the house they then went in special car to their bank, the car was loaded with 220,000 RMB in cash from their account, then they were driven to the sellers bank where the money was deposited!  Sounds exciting!!!!

Our first dinner in our apartment -- the noodles were splendid!!!

There is also a rack out side the window for hanging cloths to dry when the weather is warm.  The weather IS warm but Kelly seems to believe that the air is cleaner in the room than just outside the single pain window.  Decisions... decisions...  Hang the cloths in or out side.   Ahh.. Life in China!!

The view out our bedroom and kitchen windows.  Some of the playground equipment can be seen at the very bottom of the photo, along with the green canal!

Emily, or Wen Ling as she is know here, meets a new friend on the playground.  The little girl in the picture below doesn't speak any English.  None of the children at this complex speak English.  Well... they can say "Hello" and a few other words.  But that does not stop them from playing together.  Scott helped to break the ice by telling the children, and some of their parents, our family story.  Now most of the children know that Wen Ling does not speak Mandarin and that she is from China but was raised in America by two very funny looking people.

The view out Emily's bedroom window.  This is an old community and street scene that we frequently look out at  -- we call it "watching China TV"!