As we were walking into the hospital, I really started to worry about Andy because he seemed really “not right.” I don’t really know how to explain it, but I think a person can just sense that. There is an international wing of the Shanghai East Hospital so luckily the nurses and doctor all spoke English. Everything that the doctor (who is from Scotland) did was what my dad had described should happen (culture to test the blood for bacteria; prescribe antibiotics intravenously; etc.) so I felt confident we were in good hands. At this point, his temperature was over 40C (104F).

After walking through the entire top-level of the store, stopping in at the IKEA Cafe for a brief lunch, we continued down to the bottom-level of the store where we quickly ascertained was where all of the items to be purchased actually lived. We found a few of the things on the list and a couple other things we needed but hadn’t seen upstairs. Then, we made it to an area that was more like Home Depot and had all of the large furniture items. At this point, we were tired, and were walking up and down aisles looking for the word VASTERN on tags on the Home Depot-like shelves. We finally found everything but the VASTERN bathroom shelf that we were looking for.

At the grocery store, in the food department, I would say that we recognized about 50-60% of the items. The rest, we have 2.5 years to figure out what they are. We bought some basics: rice, bread, milk, eggs, ham, yogurt, oatmeal, ham, saltines and wine as well as a few non-food items for the apartment (including a wok, power strips, an iron, hangers and other things). The wok that we bought was less than $10 and seems to work pretty dang well. With what “little” we had, we still had ten times more than what others were buying. I prayed that I was going to have enough money (because we realized the ATM in the store would only take Chinese debit cards) as I only had 3000 yuan, and it was almost exactly 1000 ($125). It never ceases to amaze me how cheap things are here.

Beginning to move into our apartment in Shanghai and dealing with the long trip’s jet lag.

Bags are packed and we are ready to move to Shanghai.

That is one song that almost always bring me to tears. If you haven’t figured it out, I am talking about, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by Peter, Paul and Mary, also sung by John Denver and probably many others.