House hunting!

So it begins! 

First, allow ourselves to introduce ourselves: Rebecca and I (Dave) have been married for 11 years and are the proud parents of 3 young boys (Reid, Riley and Rowan).  We have been blessed in many ways, recently by the opportunity to transfer to Suzhou, China for work. 

Thanks to "Daddy Mac" and "Gramma Mac", Rebecca and I traveled to Suzhou last week to house hunt.  We spent the week doing a city tour, getting medical checks, interviewing schools and actually looking at housing options.  We feel like we accomplished a lot at this point and also realized how much more we have to do!  Everyone on the visit was very nice, we were even able to meet a few expats in the area.  The housing compound we liked the most is "Golden Lough", which is located on the East side of Jinji Lake.  While the housing is pretty modern for our tastes, the neighborhood has many of the amenities we were looking for:  a pool, playground and many expats.  The school we settled on (Dulwich College) has about 100 children attending from the neighborhood!  We're still waiting to hear back from the landlord of the first house we liked...

Things were decorated for Christmas already; and I'm pleased to announce that there was not a "Happy Holidays" sign in sight!  We walked around Walmart and heard actual Christmas songs, including Run DMCs Christmas rap.  Yeah, my kind of place!  At the school, we walked in on the pageant practice where they were singing "The Little Drummer Boy".  I guess you have to travel to communist China to get freedom of religion.

Even though I love the food there, since this was my third visit, I decided to branch out and try some of the "foreign" food.  I found things to be a little bit off (the chimichanga had batter on it and the burger had rosemary in it).  Not bad food, but just not how we do it in the states.  I decided for the rest of the trip to stick to the turtle, duck tongue and jellyfish which were all delicious.

I just put the one picture up this time, its from our hotel room.  In it, you can see a construction worker in a blue jacket riding in the bucket of the excavator to get from ground level down to the pit.