Leaving Huainan, Arriving in Rui'an

Before we left Huainan, Mr. Tong (one of the three partners in the Huainan JV) invited us to dinner with some of his closest friends because he couldn’t make it to the dinner we hosted.  I honestly thought he just blew us off because he was mad about Guilford pulling out, but apparently not.  He also gave us a gift: a set of coins bearing the image of King Liu An, one solid gold, one solid silver.  Liu An was king of Huainan 1,800 years ago and he’s the inventor of tofu.  Huainan people are very proud of this and they never let you forget it.  J

 

Then on Sunday we packed and cleaned.  We generated a lot of trash, and the trash bins outside are small so we had to distribute our trash around the neighborhood under the cover of night.  Eight apartments all share this one little bin that gets emptied every day:

 Smudgie stowing away in a suitcase!

He’s really going to miss this curtain.

Take a look at the progress of the construction that has been going on the entire time we’ve been here:

November 2011

September 2012

We seem to have accumulated a lot of stuff.  We moved here with 5 suitcases and now look at all the crap we have:

Well, we were going to take all this stuff in a van but since we decided to bring our mattress and washer/dryer combo, the relocation company brought us a truck.  They only brought a very small car to drive us and Smudgie, so there was only enough room to bring our computer bags.  I was about to pack the toiletry bags but there wasn’t room.  But they said the truck would be arriving a couple hours later than us so I shouldn’t worry. 

Smudgie was worried at first we were going to drop him off at the housekeeper’s and leave him.

But once we hit the highway, he settled down.

The trip took 10 hours and our driver was very efficient.  He only stopped for bathroom breaks/gas and we just ate snacks all day long.  I think he wanted to get there as quickly as we did!  He introduced us to some really awesome snacks and I hope I can find them at the RT-Mart.  One was these little wheat crunchy things that kind of look like little dried maggots.  But they are fantastic

We finally got there and the apartment is awesome, although the kitchen is not very clean.  Take a look at our epic, but really ugly dining room table:

 

And here’s the very large living room:

 

It got to be about 9:00pm so we called Gary to find out when the truck would be arriving.  He gave us the devastating news that it wouldn’t be here until noon the next day.  Apparently the driver got tired because he’d been up since 5:00am (he drove from Nanjing to Huainan in the morning) so he decided to take an unscheduled nighty night break.  This was not supposed to happen.  We didn’t have any clothes, toiletries, or anything with us.  Smudgie has never slept without his crate either so we didn’t know how that was going to go.  Luckily we had a pillow for him in the car so that became his bed last night.  Smudgie surprised me very much on this trip.  He’s grown up so much from a year ago.  He used to whine continuously in the car and puke without fail every time the trip was longer than 10 minutes.  This time, he only whined a little bit at the beginning when he thought we were going to leave him.  But as soon as we hit the highway, he realized he was coming with us and he laid patiently the whole way!  And no puke!  Now last night, without a crate I wondered how he’d behave.  But he was just a little angel and he stayed on his pillow the whole night.  We slept on the couch nearby.

Our stuff finally arrived at 1:00pm today during a brief period of time when it wasn’t raining!  So that’s one good thing about the truck coming late because it was pouring last night.  For lunch we had Do & Me, which is a KFC knockoff chain and it’s really good!

Random stuff:

Just two days before leaving Huainan I saw my very first Chinese frog.  It was a little brown guy.  Now I've been in Rui'an for just over 24 hours and I've already seen 3 frogs/toads.  Yay!!

Our complex has a lot of trees that have this pretty flower: