Thurs. Aug. 10/06

My blog came up today no problem. It is my second day at work but I'm not really working yet. It is all orientation. Yesterday was a medical, a 2.5 hour presentation that was really difficult to get through - very dry boring details, open a bank account for pay to be deposited. We left home at 7:45 and got home at 6. At 7, 18 of us went out for dinner to a fancy restaurant, The Tang Dynasty. We were all expats half of them returnees and half of us new. It was a great evening. Finally I slept through the night until 5:30 a.m.
Today we have had a tour of the Pudong campus of YCIS - Yew Chung International School. It is fabulous. I am teaching the 3 year olds with my Chinese co-teacher Diana Dai. I haven't met her yet. I think she starts work on Mon. The Seasons Villas is my part of the campus. I will take some pictures but I think I will have to wait til I have my own computer before I can start downloading them. There is a magnificent garden attached to the classrooms area (there are I think 10 groups of children from age 1 - 4. My group can be 20 children with 2 teachers but presently we have 15. The rooms for my group look much like the school rooms during the summer with furniture piled in the middle of the room and cleaning going on so it was a little difficult to get a feel for that. The climber is great just like we have in Canada with lots of areas for a variety of gross motor activities . It is the garden area which is large and beautiful place to play and learn that really adds to this campus. I didn't see the resource and library area for the 3 and 4 year olds. Across the street is the Regency Park campus of Pudong and is basically grade 1 - 7. It is fantastic. I'm sitting in the computer lab along with a group of co-workers all of us busy doing our personal e-mail. The rest of the day we are off and I think some of us are going shopping at Ikea. Talk to you later.