Finally settled in.

As the title suggests we have finally settled in to the apartment :D. It’s an absolutely lovely two bedroom place on the 11th floor in a district called Jing’An. We are about 15 minutes from the CBD and it is delightful!

The last couple of days have been a wild ride. Let’s start with the day we got into the apartment. We were picked up by some friendly ladies from Claire’s work and a driver who helped us load our ungodly amount of luggage into a van. We then took the roughly twenty minute drive in sweltering heat and finally arrived at an incredibly shabby looking set of apartment blocks. The first thought was…uh oh. What on earth have we gotten ourselves into. I was very much judging the book by its cover. There were cars stacked three deep (yes literally cars parked with absolutely no way they could get out) and there was a little security post. Need less to say when we did locate our building and walk in, the feeling got a lot worse.

We took the elevator up to the 11th floor, found our door and the ladies from Claire’s work opened it up for us. Boy was I shocked when the inside of the apartment actually looked like the photos. Safe to say that we had infact made a great choice with our apartment, I was just a little too quick to judge. We have a FINGER PRINT DOOR HANDLE! The future is here!

Anyway we are now happily in our sexy apartment with a great view! Especially at night.

A fun thing to do was go to IKEA (which is honestly exactly the same as home) and buy everything we needed to stock up our apartment. I always forget exactly how much you need to buy when starting out fresh. All of the things.

In the days before we moved into our apartment we did have a little bit of extra exploration of Shanghai, including the Yuyuan Gardens which was actually pretty awesome. Although again we did this in peak heat which sort of ruined the atmosphere.

We also did some great walking around and shopping, which I have to say…there is a daaaamn lot of shopping you can do in this place. Markets for trinkets sit right next to top boutique items, with food and drink vendors scattered between. It really is such an interesting experience. One of the markets we went to was inside an old temple or something along those lines. Honestly I am not sure! Still very cool though.

Finally, we have just been doing a bit of exploring around our apartment. Nothing too wild as we have a few big days ahead of us. I have to get a medical :D. I guess to make sure I ain’t gonna be no burden on society because I am an unemployed schmuck.

Oh! And Claire found a great Australian pub called The Shed where she can watch all her Rubgy games. Those of you who know me well will be glad that, yes, they do indeed sell chicken schnitties. And boy was it damn good. Plus they sell one of my favourite beers!

Well thats me for now. Enjoy this next photo of one of the dishes we had as a side for our Korean BBQ last night. I didn’t even notice until afterwards.

Talk soon! xx

S.

P.s.

Here’s an action shot I forgot to upload when we were waiting in Hong Kong for our flight over.

Yes I’m pretty sure I am asleep there.