Sunday, December 11, 2011

Morning

Our driver met us out front at 9:00 AM. I was ready for them with the map to the church (the Jin Tai building) on my laptop, and it seemed to work okay (the driver spoke no English). We knew we were at the right place when we found an unusually large flock of Americans moving into the building. We arrived and found out that they were having a special district conference that day, broadcast throughout the entire country. Elder Perkins and Elder Wan were in attendance from the Seventy, and after a first hour of a normal sacrament meeting, the last two hours were called off in favor of a one-hour, district-led meeting. In it, they announce that another new district was being formed, only three and a half years after the last one, because the growth of expats has been so large. Beijing, once the district headquarters for all of China, is now its own district, and Shanghai and China at large are the others. Pretty good timing on our part to be part of this historic day!

Afternoon

We drove back to the hotel, said goodbye to our driver for the day, and grabbed a quick bite at the Italian restaurant downstairs. We were in a hurry, because we needed to change and get back downstairs in 35 minutes to meet our housing agents. The second photo of the day is Tracy’s meal—they did a pretty good job with the pizza, and with my lasagna, but it was pretty expensive. Our agents (Ricky Xu and Jason Du—Jason is more friendly and laid back, but Ricky is a salesman through and through. Both are very good at speaking English, but Ricky sounds exactly like the Geico gecko to me, because he’s spent time in London) took us to see six different apartment areas, with a couple of apartments in each. The apartments are roughly the size of our upstairs, with stark white walls and fairly good views. None are older than 2005, and all have different amenities (gym, pool, restaurants, etc.). Most had great views. The distinguishing factors, we think, will be proximity to work, subway availability, shopping nearby, and parks nearby. But after looking at more than a dozen apartments, and being tired because of the end of the day, we called it quits with the agents, who dropped us back at our hotel.

Our final event for the day was to head over to the branch president’s home. His wife had invited us over when at church, so we could see what their building, the Embassy House, looked like. Our taxi ride over was a bit of an adventure, since he also spoke no English, and our directions are not the greatest. But the ride was only three dollars to get there, and two to get back. Not bad! Their place is on the high end of the scale—very nice. He works for Boeing as a senior pilot, and used to be the branch president of the Gig Harbor YSA branch before coming over here three years ago (Rici Johnson is his name). They’re very nice people, like all the people we met at church, and we’re guessing that we will develop some great relationships, just like we did on Okinawa.