The latest in the Hudson's world....

As I sit here in my apartment, already waiting one hour and a half for a refrigerator repairman, I am reminded I am in China.  Organizing these things through third parties drives my control freak personality crazy!!!  This is the second time i am having problems with this refrigerator and I am hoping that the guy has the right part and fixes it before the refrigerator and freezer go out and i lose all the food inside!  Plus, it is snowing today which really happens once or twice a year here so I am sure that isn't helping his transportation in getting here.....ugh.

The view from my window this morning of our garden, it is still snowing!  yay!

But for the real blog update, I spent the weekend in Shanghai and was with no kids, do you believe that!  Some friend and I went for two days and I was able to experience Shanghai a little more than usual.  Here are some of the photos from our adventures!

We went for dinner near the Jing'an temple so you can see it all lit up in Gold at night!  As the photos in the middle right was being taken i couldn't stop laughing, there was a lady literally standing behind us and crunching on a giant rice cake, she could have cared less we were trying to take a photo and then she just walked away!There is some artwork on the side of a building to advertise that i thought was a bit interesting, and the decorations for upcoming Chinese New Year and Spring Festival February 7-13th in China.

This is a mix of things, I will start with the top left, some handmade shoes we saw in a shop.  The second was in a bathroom, instead of the paper toilet seat covers, or the Chinese style cloth toilet seat covers there is now sanitizer to clean the seat before you sit.  The next were some nice paintings we found in a shop, one of the Great Wall.  The bottom left was our dinner menu, someone is having salad with "Rocket" in it.  We actually ordered the salad and I think they were looking for the word arugula and somehow came to use "Rocket" on their list of ingredients.  The last photo is of two women we saw in the train station, not exactly sure what they were dressing for, maybe little house on the prairie fan club?

Ah, the Hong Qiao Flower Market!  This place was wonderful, tons of fresh flowers, beautiful arrangements, greenery, orange trees, orchids, they have it all!  We walked around for about 2 hours inside the little shops and found some nice furniture shops, knick knack stores, ceramics and pottery shops.  It was an interesting experience to see all this in once place.  The second photo on the top are the carnations i brought home on the train with me.

We had a great time, meals and good restaurants, all of us left our children at home with their fathers and we played around a little in the super market with some funny chocolate bars.  :)  We made a stop in Old Navy too at 9:40pm, I am never out this late.  Then we moved on to have drinks in our hotel, the 39th floor had a bar and a nice view.  We also looked around the bar for another interesting view, there were clearly prostitutes in there, trying to attract foreign business men, it worked for a few of them.  What a site to see.

This is my 5kg of Chilean cherries!  I split this with two friends but it was a deal to buy in bulk and they are delicious!

This was Blake and I going to the local fruit market, when you purchase a pineapple they want to know if you want the skin removed, so Blake and I stood there and watched him remove it for the first time.  Usually i just take it home with me, he was super fast and used what appeared to me as a large cheese knife to get the out side off first, then another tool in a spiral move to get the remaining poky things off the pineapple, making it so easy for me to take home in a bag and cut up for the kids, no extra charge!  The red thing, i have no idea what it isbut was in the fruit section.  The next is a black chicken, i did not buy and don't intend to eat.  Yay!  Yoplait in China, finally creamy and rich American yogurt!  Although they advertise it as a French style yogurt and use fresh milk, this is not low-fat, it is delicious!  The last was weird to me, a bucket of watermelon seeds, that seems to be roasted?  I don't know why that would taste good, but they look too big to be watermelon seeds and possibly as mis-written in English, pumpkin seeds maybe?

The kids are both well we keep them busy as you can see,  Blake is out of school for one month for a break so we will be keeping busy with play dates.  Grace is walking all over the place and really trying to talk, "Shoes", "Cookie", "Bye Bye" are he favorite phrases right now.  And for the Chinese New Year we have our friend Sam from the USA visiting, so we will be showing him Nanjing and Shanghai as well as our "little" city!

Until Next Time.....