Last weekend we moved into our new tenth-floor apartment in Shanghai. It has three bed rooms (one converted to house my office and Cissy's exercise machine), two bath rooms, a kitchen, a living-dining room, and an enclosed balcony. It was already fully furnished, mostly with the sort of dark and heavy wooden fittings that seem to be popular here.

The apartment is located in a compound called Orient City Garden, in Pudong, quite close to the Expo site. And while we are no longer living on top of a shopping mall, across the street are a Walmart, a subway station, and a children's hospital.

Before moving in, we stayed with Cissy's parents for about two weeks, where we also reunited with our boxes from Japan and half of our boxes from Singapore (the other half is still on a boat somewhere). My mother-in-law was instrumental in the move, from finding the apartment in the first place, to having a friend with a van help get the boxes over, to giving the house a thorough spring cleaning with the help of another friend, whom she also engaged to come over for three hours six times a week to keep it tidy.

There is also a big kindergarden in the compound, but I want to send Kai to a German or International school, so that I can communicate with the teachers as well. The German school is an hour away, but there is an International kindergarden just one subway stop from here. We hope that we can enroll Kai for the summer school there, starting in July. Before that, he will spend most of the day with his grandmother.