Part Twelve: The Reida Eleven Inch Wall Clock with Thermometer and Hygrometer delivers important data points.

This should help me decide if I dislike the Shanghai weather less in winter (too cold) or in summer (too hot). At the moment it shows an indoors temperature of eleven degrees (very consistent over the last few days). Good that I have an extensive collections of sweaters (that can also be combined into multiple layers), not to mention my Bingjie Keeping Warm Trousers.

The hygrometer apparently does not indicate the likelihood of rain fall.

Part Eleven: Science says sitting kills. Standing desk seems smart.

There is quite a bit of green between the buildings in our Orient City Garden, but they are converting some of it (as much as they can?) into parking lots:

Before:

After:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Over the last two weeks, in a somewhat grim and saddening process, and with brutal intensity today, our home for almost five years has emptied. We have sent out ten big boxes, some to Shanghai, some to Singapore, all of them filled to the brim of their allowed weight of 30 kilos. They will travel by sea, and will take at least a month to arrive. We have sold (to friends, neighbours, foreigners on Craigslist, and poor Chinese students via some Chinese mailing list), given away, or trashed all of our furniture. Almost all of our books have been sold to the used book store, or donated to the local library. We have thrown away a lot of clothing, especially shoes.

Because the next tenants will move in Wednesday, we need to vacate the apartment on Tuesday. Our flight to Singapore is on Thursday, so we will stay for two nights in the building's guest room (which is not too bad, as it is, unlike our own rooms now, fully furnished). Cissy's new company has already arranged our apartment there, so we can directly move in after arriving Thursday night.

We are going to rent out our Shinkoiwa apartment from next month. The real estate agent is coming over with an interested couple later today. There is also a page on rent.realestate.yahoo.co.jp (local snapshot).

• Four dining chairs
• Dining table
• L-shaped wooden desk
• Wide and long double bed with mattress
• Sofa bed
• everything else on sayonara sale (ongoing effort)

Last week, Google completed canvassing Tokyo so that you can now see the entrance hall of my house. Many people (and not only those being captured entering love hotels or urinating in the street) are not at all comfortable with this level of privacy invasion. Google may be taking things too far and risk their favourable reputation of doing no evil.

Part Seven: Delicate like a panda, the Golden Bear can only truly shine with European voltage.

Part Six: Finally, a dish washer!

Part Five: Japanese steel and German design combine to form the Porsche Knife.