A new addiction...

In my searching I have found that most US companies and websites actually don't ship to China. While they might offer some international shipping China doesn't make the cut.  Thank you to everyone that has offered to ship us items, my in-laws for bringing an extra suitcase and my parents for multiple shipments of goodies!  As many of you have experienced yourself its easier to buy things online and just have them show up at your house, with companies such as Amazon offering Prime 2-days shipping its "Amazing" how quickly and inexpensively you can ship things.  That being said, I am in China now.

There is a website that is a mix of ebay and amazon called Taobao but the challenge is everything is in Chinese and its geared mostly for Chinese citizens to set up a PayPal like account with their Chinese ID number.  The difficulty for foreigners is that you can use Google Chrome to translate the page, then must find items you can pay with your Chinese bank card, and then go to Internet Explorer and make the purchase in Chinese.  While i am glad that there is an option for foreigners it makes browsing for items more difficult.  So my new find and addiction is Amazon.cn. 

I am sure many of you can type this into your browser at home and check it out. If you use Google Chrome, again it has a feature to translate the page.  The search function is pretty crummy compared to websites at home or Amazon.com for that matter.  You basically have to find the category you think you item will be in then try different brand names and terminology to search.  This is much easier than the Taobao.com site.  So I went shopping....bought some Pampers diapers that were cheaper than the store here, Huggies wipes, Decaf tea (wahoo!), snacks from the US including Cherry Dr. Pepper for the Mr. and some DVDs.  The DVDs I have found are Disney Pixar movies, they are in Chinese and English so you can select either one upon playing the movie and they were $2-$4 USD!!!  Unheard of prices at home for a DVD.  So Blake will be soon enjoying Cars, Cars 2, Monsters University, Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and the Incredibles for around $10-$15 when our internet isn't working to stream movies from Amazon or Netflix at home.  I was able to find plastic cups, as many of us especially those with pools in the summer are accustom to drinking from reusable plastic cups they don't seem to be as popular in China in large sizes.  Hopefully they won't be small when they arrive :(  More deliveries are on their way!!!

So we haven't been up to too much this week, i thought i would include some photos from the 3 terraces we have in our apartment so you can see the nice views of the city.  Today we had a little rain but it cleared up so nicely i thought i would take some photos!

You can see a Chinese School in the top left photo.  The garden below our building and a view between the buildings across from us where you can catch a glimpse of the high speed train flying by!

More of the city!

You can see Tianning Temple from one balcony!  Its the tallest Pagoda in the world.