Housewarming Party

We happily hosted our housewarming party in Shanghai a few weekends ago (sorry for the delayed post!) It was a great turnout with about 20 of our new friends here! Here are some pictures from the party and our new apartment. It's the party we've always wanted to host but never had the space to do so. I think Felipe & I were born to entertain! Our next party will take place on Sat, July 10 when we return to Shanghai from the states!

Our bedroom

Guest room #1

IKEA cubby with pics of all our friends and family to remind of us home :)

Living room

Kitchen - I love it!

Our new oven we bought since there was not one in the apt! The best investment ever (it's a Delonghi!)

Bar setup for party

Guest bathroom

Guest room #3 (sorry no sheets yet!)

Dining room area (chairs were moved for party) with a newly purchased NYC canvas

Nighttime in living room. Patti - note the "House Divided" pic with the NY Mets/NY Yankees logo - our engagement gift from 2 years ago now has a home!!

New friends. Panos (in blue) is owner of two of our favorite restaurants here. He helped cater some of the Greek food for our party.

Cheese is hard to come by here (and VERY expensive) so this was a nice treat!

The spread. I made my own homemade blue cheese sauce and
buffalo wings! YUM. Oh and bought lots of hors d'oeuvre platters, etc because I'm a big dork and I get excited over these types of things ;)

Homemade guacamole.

Friends from Felipe's Chinese class and my workplace.

One of these guys (Kevin) grew up in Princeton and calls me "west windsor" - small world haha!

Post party at Heineken hosted event that took place for a big football (soccer) game. We were invited through our friend Panos!

Out and About

It's been less than two weeks since we moved in and are finally unpacked and settled! We had our big housewarming party last night which was a great success. (Pictures to be posted in the folliwing blog) It's nice having a home to come back to. Below are some pictures of our adventures and new friends we've made in Shanghai!

Felipe's Mandarin class


Dinner at Bella Napoli with friends

Drinks at Cuvee, a cute ltitle wine bar 1 block from our apartment!

Belgian beer at Kaiba (next to Cuvee)

Chinese workers stuffing sand bags in an alley

Antiques market full of some really neat stuff

Nice park in Xintandi (kind of reminds me of a mini central park, execpt no one lies out here!) Expensive expat apartments in the background. Yao Ming has a place in the Lakeville complex!

Partying at M1NT with friends

Random market we found

Not sure what any of this is...

Scary eel type things - EWWWWWW! People eat this?!

Making popcorn on a street corner

The much talked about China Pavilion at World Expo. It's nearly impossible to get in (I did make it inside but hopefully will at some point). Jackie had the opportunity to visit Expo on opening day (May 1) courtesy of complimentary tickets from our joint venture partner in China.

The mascot for Expo - except this is the whole family. So cute!

Soldiers walking in line at Expo. Pictures of various pavilions below - all very unique!

Apparently in the Brazil pavilion, there is a virtual screen/room that lets one simulate the excitement of scoring a goal at a soccer match.

Hilary Clinton was in town this weekend visiting the USA pavilion.

Nepal Pavilion

Qatar Pavilion

I thought this was so cool!

Macau!

Sorry for the LONG delay in posting a new blog entry - we have been completely overwhelmed with trying to find an apartment! We must have looked at 40+ apartments, had one lease fall through and finally we moved into a 3 bedroom/2 bath place yesterday. It's a mess still so we don't have photos yet, but hopefully will post some very soon!

Despite our busy schedule, we made time to go to Macau this past weekend (of course this would be the first place we visit in Asia!) It's about a 2.5 hour flight from Shanghai but so much more hot and humid than Shanghai.


The Venetian has 3000 rooms in Macau!!


Since Macau used to be Portugese colony, they have lots of great Portugese restaurants everywhere!


HUGE Portugese bread to start

Night out in Hong Kong! We took a high speed ferry which took one hour and met up with our Tudor City neighbor, Renee who lives in HK!

Beautiful pool at the Wynn where no one was actually swimming in or laying out at - very strange coming from an American culture!

Lunch at the Wynn - we were looking for a Western food restaurant, but had to settle for more noodles and rice!

Guacamole at another Portugese restaurant - this time served with Doritos instead of tortilla chips!

MGM Casino & Hotel

The Wynn. They have an Encore tower here as well like in Vegas!

The high speed Maglev train from downtown Shanghai to the Pudong Intl Airport. It is SUPER fast - and takes only 7 minutes to travel about 30km.

They show the speed in the cabins. The top speed is 431km/hour!! That's like 287mph I think..

Middle school during morning phyical fitness class. It was incredible to watch the unison in which they moved! They don't mess around in gym class here!

We were lucky enough to see Dabou and Daboumu (my uncle and aunt from my dad's side) in Shanghai. We were treated (nicely enough!!) to an all you can eat and drink Japanese place so we filled up on BBQ, sushi, sashimi, tempura, Asahi beer, etc. YUM!!