The summers are funny here in Shanghai because literally most of the expat community leaves and goes back to their home country. So it just leaves us here to fin for ourselves! We have been having a nice summer, though, spending most of our time doing school in the mornings and swimming in the afternoons. Since all the friends are gone we do school the month of July and then with 4 weeks of school already done we can take off weeks whenever we want during the year...the beauty of homeschooling!
One other fun thing we have done this summer - we went to the World Expo that is being held here in Shanghai. On the 4th of July, the American pavilion asked American families living here who have children adopted from China if we would want to walk in the USA parade. The girls were very excited to get to walk in the parade and wave to all the people. For John and I, we thought everyone is ALWAYS staring at our family, we might as well go and be in a place where they are supposed to stare at us! :) But, lo and behold, it rained on our parade, literally! We got a very special tour of the inside of the US pavilion (without having to wait in line which was great) and then were getting ready for the parade when an imminent downpour of rain cancelled the parade. The girls were disappointed but since we were already there we just went ahead and enjoyed the rest of the day at the Expo. I have to say that I was a naysayer going into the day, thinking it wouldn’t be much fun and just tons of hot, sweaty people in long lines. Well, that was true for a time but by about 7 o'clock most of those people were heading home so we stayed until almost 10pm and had a great time running into all the different country pavilions seeing what they had to offer. We got to eat authentic Belgium waffles which were great and see lots of interesting pavilions, like Egypt, Chile, Brazil. We plan to go back again and try to hit some of the pavilions of places we might never be able to go to in “real life” – like Cuba, Afghanistan and a whole bunch of those other “Stan” countries. The Expo site is HUGE and has tons and tons of pavilions in it of countries from all over the world. So we plan to go back again one of these weekends! Anyway, the picture above is of the girls when we were getting ready to go for our parade day!
Hope you guys are all enjoying your summer! I always love summer – I just love the feel of loosened schedules and that fun just seems to be in the air a bit more!
1 comment:
Love the picture! Sad you were rained out, but so fun to get to go to the expo!
Post a Comment