I'll be losing a little weight...

Jackie and I had a very full day today. It started with our health screen. This is a requirement to get our resident permits.

Anyway, to call it a screen is not quite correct. I had:
· A physical exam, with blood pressure
· An eye exam
· An ultrasound
· A chest x-ray
· Bloodwork

The ultrasound person had the only real remark: “a little bit fat”. I guess she was trying to tell me I need to lose a little weight!

This experience is unlike anything in the US. There are a bunch of rooms by function. You go from room to room, but you don’t go down the hall in sequence… instead, you go from one end to the other running in to all the others getting their exams. This is made a bit more complicated by kids in strollers and a hallway that is entirely too narrow for the volume of people plus waiting chairs… needless to say, I seriously hope we don’t have to do that again.

We went for our first Chinese meal. I asked our driver to take us and I figured we would go to a place I had been before. Well, that wasn’t the case. The restaurant had only a Chinese text menu. No pictures (which is common in most restaurants.) So, I handed the menu to the driver and asked him to order.

He did very well, and the boys ate almost everything. Jackie and I were so hungry since we had to fast before the health screen that everything tasted good. I think it was a good place, but very Chinese. There was no bottled water!!! So, Josh got his first taste of green tea. I wish I had a video camera as he sure thought he was big stuff.

After all of this we went to a Carrefour in Qi Bao, which is near to our home. The exact name of the mall is Bali Chutian, which translates to Paris Springtime. We were looking for food for the next two days. As I was perusing the frozen food section, it really hit me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto (to take a line from the Wizard of Oz). There were 3 freezers full of dumplings and other things I didn’t know what they were, while there was only about 1/20 of a freezer with something I recognized – corn on the cob.

We got some corn, chicken, pork, a few veggies, and Danny’s favorite food right now – watermelon. (This watermelon, by the way, had the toughest skin I have ever encountered on a watermelon, and I’ve carved a few… if you were a fly on the wall watching me manhandle, or watching the watermelon manhandle me, it would have been quite interesting.) It looks like I won't have any problem with the ultrasond tech the next time around -- if we keep this up I should be signficantly smaller in diameter...

Jackie also located the coffee in the store. She’ll have her first experience with that in the morning.

Anyway, it’s been a rather long day, and tomorrow will surely be the same. So, good night. We’ll keep updating this thing. There is a lot more to talk about, but we’ll spread it out some.