Our Ship has Come In!

Well, technically it's been in for about three weeks, but was only delivered Thursday. Chinese Customs officials needed to examine the contents of 70 boxes of stuff we thought we couldn't live without. Certain items, like electronics and food stuff, will be assigned a certain tax based on their assessed values. (The "their" is the custom officials!). This seemingly random tax was the reason why we hand carried a suitcase full of American treats and did not bring any wine (the tax on wine is 300%!). Being separated from our belongings for 7 weeks (1 week in Portland and 6 in Dalian), has made me reconsider the significance of the contents. Dalian has almost every convenience of home at a fraction of the cost, but opening the boxes was like opening Christmas presents. There are things that we are really enjoying. We got the Easter goods just in time to celebrate our first holiday away from home (that's a blog for the kids). About 10 of the boxes were books, most of which I plan to leave here when we leave. I always have to have a good book, so I went to a used book store before we left and stocked up with 20 novels that I haven't read. The first month and a half, the only novel we had was the last of the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, so Addison and I read it twice! The most used things from our shipment were for the kitchen. You need to be very creative to cook dinner with one pot, one knife and one cutting board, much like camping. The kids are also thankful to have Western silverware! Our apartment looked like it exploded with all the boxes and packing paper, but it is almost all put away now. We've decided that less is more, and if we ever do this again, we will bring less stuff (aka get rid of more stuff). Our mover in Portland kept encouraging us to bring more to Dalian because we only had a small space allotted for storage in the US, but ample space for our shipment.