Moving In!

On Tuesday the girls went to school and I met our new Ayi (means Auntie in Chinese).  Her name is Xiao Liu and she was recommended to us from some of our friends.  She met me at our house along with the 8 China men moving crew.  They were all very efficient and by 4:00 had all of my belongings in the house and assembled.  Then came the fun part of putting everything away!  (it is Sat. night here and I still don't have everything put away)  This is why I am a little delinquent on getting things posted this week!
All in all it has gone pretty smoothly.  The house is quite lovely and had a few (estimated 50) steps from bottom to top.  I had my first grocery shopping experience. ( I came out with like 5 things and it cost me a ridiculous amount of money)  I also went to the Chinese Walmart with Xiao Liu.  Let me tell you,  that was an experience.  I wish I had my camera in there because it is not your typical Walmart shopping!!  We picked up cleaning supplies and some other things, including some lunch.  Xiao Liu introduced me to some Chinese noodles (that looked pretty inoffensive).  We got them at the counter (equivalent to the US Walmart counter where you buy fried chicken).  This should have been my first red flag!  But what could I say, I was literally starving as I only had 5 things in my refrigerator.  So we got home and I dished out the noodles that had Tofu in them.  My first bite was not bad.  By the time I had my 3rd bite my face went numb from the fire that was raging inside my mouth!!  I am sure that I was sweating profusely.  I swigged down a few bottles of water and was back to unpacking some boxes!  The next morning I walked the kids to school.  (We live close enough to just foot it there.)  When I came back home my stomach was not doing well........(I am sure you can see where this is going)  You know, if I didn't know any better I would have thought that my Ayi was already trying to kill me!!! That Johnny Cash song kept reverberating in my head "I fell into that burning ring of fire....etc"  I knew bad things were a coming and I must have been a site to my poor Ayi as I literally hobbled up all 50 stairs to the master bathroom on the third floor.  When I slowly returned to ground level Xiao Liu just smiled at me and said "how you today?"  "Oh great", I replied smiling.  What I wanted to say is, "Well, I can hardly walk from going up and down all these darn stairs the last 2 days and to top it off I feel like I need to sit on a bucket of ice!"  I just stuck with the "oh great" because she is so nice and I truly don't know what I would have done without her this last week.  I think we are going to get along great! (As long as we steer clear of the Walmart)