Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 1

Not sure if I can call this week 1, week 2, or week 3 .. I guess it depends on which day you start the week on, and if you count the week I spent in Beijing on business. Anyway, I will just count this as week 1 and we'll leave it as that.

We arrived into Shanghai late on a Thursday night, spent 1 night in a hotel, and then moved into the apartment on Friday. The apartment is well situated 2 blocks south of Tom's office, and fairly convenient for Susan to catch the metro to the office. Purely by the numbers, it is slightly larger than the apartment in Paris although there are a few key differences. It has larger bathrooms but less closet space. It will be interesting once our shipment comes from the US that has more clothes in it, since I'm not yet sure where we will put them all.

Next challenge ... grocery shopping! Not only can we not really read the packages, but we don't have a car. There is a Lotus supermarket about 3 or 4 blocks away that we can shop at, and the prices aren't too bad. They do have some international brands (US, British, German, and Australian). So we can shop there and get meats, some dry goods, fruits and vegetables. We have reusable shopping bags (going Green!) and we just walk back to the apartment. We also try to make a trip every few weeks (goals is once per month) over to a French chain supermarket called Carrefour. This one is not as convenient because the one in PuDong is not on a metro line and the one that is on the metro line over in Puxi is quite a little hike. So for the PuDong Carrefour, we can take the metro, making 1 change, and then it is about a 30 minute walk from there ... or catch a taxi. We always take the taxi home because we'll have a bunch of bags. It is similar to a SuperTarget where they have both the grocery store plus housewares and clothes, so it is convenient to do the more 1-stop shopping. We have been trying to do some "stocking up" of non-perishables there, since it is a little bit cheaper, for like cereal and UHT milk (doesn't require refrigeration). They do have some US-brands but in many cases, they are really expensive, so we have been testing out the German and Australian brands that seem to be more reasonably priced. Right now, we are going a bit more often because we find things that we need in the apartment that is easier to get at a Walmart-like store. We do have to be careful since we don't have a large kitchen nor a big pantry or anything, so we need to be sure we don't over-buy based on where we can put it!

Oh, have I mentioned you can't drink the water?? We have bottled drinking water (the big blue bottles) both in the office and in the house. We use the tap water for some things, like brushing teeth and rinsing things off, but not for drinking or cooking where the water is absorbed (like rice or pasta). It isn't a problem around making you sick (bacteria-wise) but more that supposedly there are alot of metals in the water that isn't too healthy.

Next up ... work. Tom and I work in different buildings, both in the "PuDong" part of Shanghai. Tom works in the JinMao tower, which is an 88-story hi-rise, which is 2 blocks from the apartment, so it is a short walk to the office. I work in the ZhangJiang High Technology Park, which is about 40 minutes commute each way (10 minute walk, 20 minutes on the metro, 10 minute walk). This is a flip from how we were in Paris, where I had no commute and Tom had about 20 or 25 minutes to get to the office using the metro and walking.

What have I been doing? Well, the first week that I was here I was in Beijing on business at the Impact Regional event, as well as working a couple of days in the CDL Beijing office. I met the team there as well as the China Development Lab (CDL) executives. This is why I say I'm on "week 1" because the actual week 1 was spent in Beijing and not Shanghai :-). What I am calling Week 1 is really week 2 (by the calendar) but it was spent purely in Shanghai. Monday I went into the office and started getting settled in. My cube is really a desk in a "cube of 4" .. so one big cube that has 4 desks, one in each corner, so the 4 people sit with their backs to each other. It is mostly pretty quiet in the office but sometimes the others get into conversations (in chinese) which I have started just tuning out, similar to "white noise". I've gotten hooked into the printer and know where the important things are (the bottled drinking water and the bathrooms). I've also already gotten a "lunch group" although it was more they asked if I would like to join them for lunch each day, which was very nice. This is 3 of the guys that share my 4-person cube and 2 from the next cube over. They've kinda "adopted" the poor litle American who can't speak Chinese :-)

Tuesday, the morning was spent over at an Immigration Services building applying for our residence permits. Since that lasted most of the morning, I just worked at home the rest of the day even though Tom popped back into the office. Wednesday and Thursday were "normal" days at work. I get into the office around 9am and leave when my US-based servers go down for maintenance at 3pm. I do a few things around the house, relax, and then cook dinner before starting work again around 8pm for another 2-3 hours for my US-based meetings. Friday was spent at a customer-visit in the Puxi side of Shanghai with the VP of my group, who was visiting China (Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen). We then went back to the office for an All-Hands meeting and then meetings with the various groups in the organization that are based in Shanghai.

Weekends ... well, these so far have been pretty tiring. Saturdays we hit the gym early and then some days, like yesterday, we did the trip over to Carrefour. It was raining so we took a cab both directions. We also stopped to drop off dry cleaning in the basement of Tom's work building and also did some other shopping to pick up a couple ties for Tom and a cover for my iPhone. We did alot of stock-up shopping at Carrefour this week, so our goal will be every 5-6 weeks we will do that kind of stock-up shopping only. We do our weekly shopping at Lotus, which is 3-4 blocks away, to pick up fruits, veggies, and meats for the week, and we normally are doing that on Sunday morning when it is less crowded. Then today (Sunday) for lunch we went out walking a bit, found a tea store to buy some loose tea in, picked up some DVDs at a store, and then had lunch at a fast-food Japanese place before heading home. We then both do a bit of work as well as my blog (hee hee) and anything around the house that we need to do. We'll probably do more venturing into other areas of Shanghai and doing some walking tours once the weather starts cooperating.