Returning to China, and All That Comes With It

As of today, we have been in China for two and a half weeks, and man has it been a whirlwind! We arrived at night on August 7th here and stayed at a friends home, because we had no idea what our apartment would look like when we got back. The next morning, our awesome friends came to our house with us to brave what we might find, and helped us clean up.

Thankfully, our apartment was not nearly as bad as we expected it to be. Before leaving I had wiped down our closet and filled it with dehumidifiers and then took everything out of the bathroom that was ours. Therefore, most of our stuff was concentrated in our bedroom. When we arrived, the main things we needed to deal with were washing all the clothing and linens left in the house and deep cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom. While I tackled a stinky fridge and mildewy floor in the kitchen, our friend Renee and her daughter's boyfriend Hunter graciously cleaned the bathroom and closets.

I actually ended up spending a couple of days cleaning the kitchen, because it was in desperate need of a deep cleaning beyond anything we had done before. I was pretty happy with the result, because I feel like it made our house look a lot less dingy and more like home. I also spent a couple of days doing load after load of laundry, due to the fact that I wanted to rid our home of any mold or mildew that might of occurred. Now we are feeling cleaner and looking cleaner too!

I have some beautiful picture of our kitchen to share with you, since it was such a project and accomplishment.

Our appliances looking new

The sink and cabinets scrubbed down

Stove, hood, and counter cleaned

Fridge with magnets and clean cabinets

Kitchen doors you can see through!

Also, we had a great travel experience. Thank you for all of your prayers. Our travels included a few firsts for us. It was out first time flying in a double-decker plane (we were in the absolute back seat!), first time in Japan (for our layover), first time having a layover in another country, and our first time flying on such an empty plane (from Tokyo to Shanghai).

So many empty seats!