The journey has begun............. August 7th, TF arrived with daughter via Continental #89. The ride was very uneventful. We arrived on time to the ever present haze of Beijing. We met our new driver, Xudong Chen with our 5 bags and 4 carry-ons.

Shen's English is extremely rough, yet my Mandarin is much more limited to hello, goodbye, and thank you. Fortunately, we have help in the corporate offices and our CCS team with the language and cultural barriers. The JPM offices communicated my itinerary for the the entire week with Shen. The first stop was our apartment in Chongdeng District next to the Salitun Embassy area.

We were met by Raymond, one of the many concierges, upon our arrival to Embassy House. He took us to our 29th floor apartment and introduced us to the kitchen appliances, security phone, telephones, TV, etc. Following this introduction we met Joy the head of housekeeping and then the property manager, Cui. All the people here are very helpful.

We then met Tina our real estate agent who needed our temporary residence permit and passports to file our immigration papers for work permits and permanent residency. The whole immigration process is another story for another time. It will be weeks before our personal belongings are shipped and B arrives in Sept after seeing the college kids off.

Next, Shen took us to Carrefour for some food and house supplies like a toaster. It is strange shopping in a large grocery store and all the brands are in Chinese. It takes awhile to register what you are looking at. We got to the check out counter to pay and to the dismay of the clerk we had put all of our produce in bags but did not have them weighed and price labels created in the produce section. She was kind enough to send a store clerk off to get this taken care of. Oh well, we will remember that the next time.

We then crashed for the day.....