China - Day 58, Thursday

I have had a quiet two days. I have spent them trying to finish the expense reports for Randy, dating back to April when he started this job. Boring but necessary!

So today I figured I would talk about a few things that I like here. I have told you about how small our refrigerator is, but a feature that I think is useful is that if the refrigerator door is left open it starts to beep. That way you know it is open. I know at home I have found the refrigerator door open just a tiny bit and who knows how long it was open. That doesn't happen here.

In our apartment, each room has a air conditioning/heat control. We only need to turn on the air conditioner in the room we are in, no need to cool the whole place down. It works great and saves a lot of energy.

Many of the escalators will stop running when no one is using them. They start up when someone steps onto them. I think this is very clever and energy efficient.

I am amazed at the number of people they have working on the lawns, bushes and trees. Yesterday, in our complex, I watched two workers reseeding the grass. The squatted down near a bare spot of dirt and slowly placed the seed. Then they would move to the next spot and repeat the process. A lot of work goes into keeping the area nice. They have also started planting, all over the city, flowers for fall. I found it interesting that they are planting Impatients now when we usually plant them in the late spring for the summer.

Now for Frustrations/Cultural Differences 101: (You can always tell which it will be by which word is first. Today it is Frustrations!)  Randy got word last night that my residence's permit is for less than a year (short by 2 weeks). The government requires a residence permit to be at least a year for a shipment. Apparently, Randy and I should have done the paperwork together (no one told us that). Since he is the one with the work permit, my residence permit is dated from when his was issued. Now we need to start the whole process over again. Randy will need to get a new residence permit and so will I. Of course with the national holiday next week, nothing will be done. So we are now looking at maybe getting our stuff by the end of October! Daniel's birthday presents are in the shipment, as is his Halloween costume. Hopefully we get it before then. The biggest problem is that we are starting to run out of things. We only brought so much, figuring we would have our shipment by now. TIC (This is China!). That's what our driver says all the time!