Nathaniel and Sheree back in Australia

We decided to stay home today and relax instead of going to church because we only got the kitten yesterday and it was still getting use to the apartment. It was fun playing with the kitten and watching it discover everything for the first time. Sheree is also trying to teach him his new name. We decided to call him Mao which is the Chinese word for cat.

One of the other teachers asked me to help him buy a laptop because he didn’t know a lot about computers. After looking around we decided to go with a Lenovo because it was a local Chinese company that’s really big in China. The laptop came with a bag, mouse, wireless access point, built in wireless and a 3 year warranty at $835. I was quite impressed but I suppose time will tell how good the laptop is. To show his appreciation he shouted us lunch at Pizza Hut which was nice. In China Pizza Hut is still a restaurant and a fairly upper class restaurant at that.

Sheree has been begging for a kitten since we got married and this morning I finally caved in and said she could start looking. She found an adoption agency for cats in Beijing and called them about a kitten on the website that she loved. The kitten had already been adopted out but she told us to come over and have a look at their other cats. So after we had Pizza with Gareth we jumped on the subway and headed over to the subway station where she said she would meet us. She picked us up from the station and took us round to their apartment which was filled with about 20 cats. Sheree liked a gray kitten but I thought it was a bit aggressive. When she was playing with all the cats there was this one kitten that was really lazy. When all the other kittens were jumping all over the place to catch the toy it just watched and try to paw it when it came close. I told Sheree that I liked the lazy orange kitten so she picked it up and put him on her lap and then the kitten started purring and didn’t jump out of her lap like the other kittens had. So the orange kitten won Sheree over as well.We found out that he was called “Only one” (Way-ee) because we was the only one from his litter to survive. Once we’d made our decision we thought we’d have to catch a taxi home but she drove us home and gave us a some kitten food and a toy for our kitten when we arrived. We have been really impressed by the generosity of the Chinese people in Beijing.

Today we went with Shawna into town to pick up her labtop which was being fixed on the north side. We decided to be a bit risk and catch the local buses. Our logic was that even if it didn’t get us there it would get us closer and make that taxi ride cheaper. The bus we got on was the wrong one but someone else on the bus spoke English and told us the correct buses to catch which was really nice. We made it to the electronics district after stopping at a mall on the way and buying Sheree a couple of eeyores. The electronic district was massive. There are three office buildings full of computer equipment and computer companies. Then on top of that there are stores on the street level the sprawl for about a block around the base of the office buildings. It only took about half an hour for them to fix Shawna’s laptop so I didn’t get to have a really good look around. I’ll have to come back another day to get a decent idea of when you can get there. We are on our way home and it started to rain. In our rush to get out of the rain we caught the wrong bus which caused us to miss the express bus home. Traffic was almost at a stand still so we tried to catch a taxi but everyone else had the same idea so we ended up catching a local bus just to get out of the weather. We thought the bus stopped on our street but that was the next bus. The bus stopped one block from our house but because we thought it stopped on our street we stayed on. It then started to head back into the city and we were panicking. No one there spoke English and we were still getting use to China. The bus ended up dropping us off a couple of km away from our house but we didn’t know which way to go. We tried to flag down a taxi without luck and then a really nice chinese couple stopped and offer to give us a lift home. We gave them the address but since they didn’t know the area they got lost and it ended up taking a good 20 minutes to get home. By the time we finally got home it was about 9:30 and we’d never loved being at home quite as we did then.