There is quite a bit of green, and also (in the form of artificial lakes and pools) blue, between the buildings in our Orient City Garden, and with that come animals.

Not so long ago, keeping pet dogs was uncommon in China, even frowned upon as decadent, but it has recently gained popularity, not in a small part as a status symbol. The resident poodles, chihuahuas and terriers are all well-fed, well-bred, well-groomed, well-trained, and well-behaved. Kai refers to some of them as pandas. The same cannot be said of the scrawny wild cats, who get out of your way as fast as they can, and will only suffer conversation from afar. Thanks to all the standing, open water there are also fish (probably very important for Feng Shui), frogs (never seen, but always heard), and unfortunately a lot of mosquitoes that somehow always make it into the house at night.

South Africa - Mexico. Korea - Greece. Germany - Serbia. Germany - England. Paraguay - Japan. Netherlands - Brazil. Argentina - Germany. All at reasonable times in the evening. But the remaining four matches are all at 2:30 in the morning. Time-shifting is possible, with CCTV-5 showing repeats all through the day, but pointless.

Yesterday we went to the Expo, which is the focus of public attention here in Shanghai these days. The weather was overcast, that being both unfortunate (because the riverfront views that the various pavilions were designed to present turned out to be mostly grey), and good (because it kept the temperature down at a pleasant level).

I'd love to say that after Hanover and Aichi, this makes three in a row, but as the Expo History Exhibition taught us, there was also Zaragoza 2008 (and there will be Yeosu 2012 before Milan 2015).

As could be expected, the major pavilions had prohibitively long lines in front of them. I did not see any of the helpful signs with the three digit minutes you'd have to wait like they had in Aichi, but it seemed like they would not have shown significantly different numbers. That we were able to get into a number of other pavilions was mostly thanks to Kai and the special express queues for wheelchairs and baby cars. The other great advantage of bringing him along was the interest he generated with the Chinese visitors, who at one point even lined up to take pictures with him.

Quick rundown of the pavilions we saw: Pacific Pavilion with all these tiny island states (populations less than 50.000, highest mountain five metres above sea level), African Pavilion (with a drum performance, Kai loves drum performances), the Denmark Pavilion (with Copenhagen harbour's original Little Mermaid on loan inside), the Monaco Pavilion (terrible opening movie, should have taken inspiration from the San Marino Pavilion), the Turkish Pavilion (with at least three attached kebab restaurants), the Czech Pavilion (with everyone's favourite children's animations), the North Korean Pavilion (a Paradise for the People, or so they claim) right next to the Iranian Pavilion, the Belgian Pavilion (which was closed for the day, with someone important given interviews there, but you could still buy waffles, chocolate, and pommes frittes), and a couple others who I have no record of because their stamp for the Expo passport was broken or otherwise missing.

We obviously did not see even close to everything, but since the Expo is still going on through October and really just around the corner from our house, we will probably go a few more times. I am also hoping for a spectacular closing ceremony, as we have missed the opening fireworks (where they made a point being bigger than the one the Beijing Olympic Games had) by just a few weeks.

We went on a scouting exhibition to IKEA today, mostly to see what they have, and also to get a few smaller things. As it turns out, they have a great many wonderful things, and apparently all of Shanghai is of the same opinion: It was terribly crowded. When we visited IKEA in Tokyo, it was similarly packed, but I thought that was due to the Tokyo store having opened only a few weeks before. It seems that maybe this is just what happens with fashionable and affordable European furniture outlets in East Asian metropoleis.

We came back with two huge coffee cups, plastic boxes Samla and Vessla, Komplement storage components, the milk-frother Produkt, Elly tea towels, the blue plastic tray Varsam, the cutlery tray Rationell Variera, IKEA 365+ spice jars (are they running out of names?), and wooden toy Mula (I hope that Kai does not read this before his birthday).

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.

I tried to shoot an underwater video of Kai in the pool today. The plastic box for the camera was not as waterproof as I thought. I am in the market for a camcorder again.

Let me know what you think.

1. Puma
   
2. Maple
   
3. Armani
   
4. Dart
   

And yes, I know that I need a haircut.

Korean drama fever, which has taken Asia by storm during the last decade, has finally caught up with me. I accidentally started watching Cruel Temptation, and I hate it. Premise and plot are completely ridiculous, and all of the main characters are despicable. Yet, I cannot stop watching. Yesterday's was episode forty-nine, which looked very close to a climactic showdown, but I was shocked to find out that there are another eighty episodes to go. We must make sure to not have a TV in Shanghai.

Other shows I am watching these days are the Simpsons, My Name Is Earl, Cougar Town, and the locally produced Phua Chu Kang, all of them comedies.

Part Nine: The Apple Cutter apportions a healthy snack into eight bite-sized chunks.

There are two locks on our mailbox. I have the key to one of them, the mail man can open the other one. This way, it is possible for the Singapore post office to deliver letters even when the slot on the mailbox is closed up, which is what many people do to shut out advertisements. But because Kai greatly enjoys to fish flyers out of our mailbox and dump them into the nearby dust bin, we are open to the world.

I am having Chinese classes on Monday and Wednesday evenings now, and it is tough. Pronunciation is extremely difficult, and that makes everything else challenging as well, from listening comprehension to memorizing vocabulary.

Chinese has more consonants than I am used to, and some of them are very close to each other, making it very hard to tell them apart. Take for example the following three words, which only differ in their consonant (Flash movies taken from the excellent pinyin table over at quickmandarin.com, mouse-over to hear the sound):

Even more tricky are the four tones, a concept that is missing completely in the other languages I know. Depending on how the pitch changes during the syllable, it becomes a different word. Mandarin has four tones, other Chinese dialects have even more (up to nine in Cantonese). Here are the four "ma" again:

Put these two together, and you get twelve very similar syllables with completely different meanings. In fact, since there are so many different sounds, Chinese words are very compact, usually just one or two syllables long. This makes for very short phrases with no redundancy; every syllable counts. In Western languages you can probably skip or mangle half of the sounds and get away with. Not in Chinese.

Part seventeen: The Bates method

I watched The Price is Right over lunch (chicken rice, 2 dollars) today. I had no idea that Drew Carey is hosting the show these days. I also have no idea what stuff costs (especially American cars, of which there were plenty in this episode).

After many years without a television set in Japan, I am slowly getting reacquainted with the medium. Which, of course, is probably not a good thing. But so far, I believe the situation is under control.

In addition to the TV itself (came with the house), we have rented a cable box and subscribed to couple of channels. Cissy wanted to have NHK in order not to forget her Japanese, so we have that (NHK World Premium, to be exact). But you cannot subscribe to just a single channel, you have to have at least three basic groups, which in our case are World News (BBC World News, Bloomberg, CCTV-9, CNBC, CNN), Education (Animal Planet, BBC Knowledge, Discovery Channel, Discovery Travel, HISTORY, National Geographic), and Chinese Entertainment (for Cissy's mother). In addition to those there are about half a dozen free local channels that you can also get over the air, and the complimentary Arirang, Australia Network, Deutsche Welle, KBS World, and TVRI. As a clever marketing ploy, they gave us access to all channels for the first three days, in the hopes that we would get addicted to HBO or the Cricket Channel.

The biggest change from how I remember TV can be summed up in three consonants: DVR. The cable box contains basic hard disk recording functionality, so that rather than watching anything live, you get to pick from this week's programme guide what you would like to see, and it records it for you. This way you can quickly build up quite a library. If you do watch something live, you can pause and replay it. There is also video-on-demand, but the choices are rather limited. So while it does not integrate with YouTube, Hulu or iTunes, this is already quite transformative.

The cable box also provides our Internet connection, which is not as great as it was in Tokyo, but workable (my Skype conference calls and screen sharing sessions with Japan work fine). Streaming video is not much fun, I am not sure if that is a bandwidth cap with the modem, or because of the overseas connection. It could supply a free home phone line as well (free local calls incoming and outgoing), but the activation fee and the price for the telephone itself cannot compete with our mobile phones for a short-term stay.

Part eight: The hard disk toaster accepts both 3.5" and 2.5" SATA drives, creates portable storage and simplifies drive exchanges.

Part sixteen: The photo on a Singapore ID card is biometric (there is a fingerprint on the back, too), and apparently my glasses are too dirty for that...

Our apartment building (The Centris) sits on top of the Jurong Point shopping mall. All three floors (not four, as I wrote before; there is no second floor between the first and the third) are connected to the Centris by an elevator right outside our door. It is kind of cool to be in the middle of a mall, swipe a card key, step into a special elevator next to the regular mall elevators, and be home. Less cool is the relentlessly looping Für Elise (just the opening) in that elevator.

Jurong Point has a post office, branches of five local banks, three educational institutions, seven pharmacies/convenience stores, five supermarkets (one of them 24-hours), five shops for books and stationary, ten for children's goods, one for pets, six for computer accessories, ten for household appliances or furnitures, one hundred and fifty for clothing, fifteen for health and fitness, twenty-four for hobbies, gifts and novelties, thirty-one for watches, jewellery, and eyewear, ten for sportswear, thirty-seven salons and cosmetics stores, a medical centre, and ninety-three restaurants (including a Japanese street)

There is also a Community Hub, which houses among others Kai's daycare centre (My First Skool), and the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (which may or may not have had a hand in naming that skool).

Since Thursday night, we have been staying in our new apartment in Jurong, Singapore, where we will be living for the next half year. The apartment consists of two bed rooms, two bath rooms and one big living-dining room. It is a furnished apartment, so that the bare necessities are here already: beds, cabinets, some chairs and tables, a fridge, microwave, laundry machine, air conditioning (it is hot here!) and even a TV. For everything else we are going Craigslist again, purchasing as much as we can carry from garage sales. We scored a nice snakes-and-ladders carpet yesterday, for example.

One thing that is immediately obvious is that the architects and interior designers for this place are not quite up to the level of their Japanese counterparts, from whom they could learn a thing or two about the placement and layout of closets and drawers.

More interesting than the apartment itself is its location: We are sitting on top of a huge four-storied shopping mall, so that all kinds of stores, restaurants and services are just an elevator ride away. Next to the mall are a bus depot and a train station, so access is also convenient. And directly outside our door, on the same floor is a large swimming pool (it is hot here!) and a gym.

As we have not completed the registration process for our residence (there will be government-issued ID cards), we could not yet apply for broadband Internet or phone plans, so for the time being I got a prepaid mobile phone, and wireless prepaid Internet (18 S$ for three days). The power plugs here are gigantic and three-pronged, none of our Japanese plugs fit. We have but a single adaptor at the moment, and I blew the fuse on that one when I connected a 100 V only device (an external hard disk, which I hope survived that).

We are about to enroll Kai to a day care centre, also located in the same building (and quite a bit more expensive than we expected). One problem is that he will turn 18 (months!) in December, which moves him up one age group, for which there seem to be no vacancies, so that he probably has to stay at home from January. Cissy's parents are planning to fly over and help out.